A Modern History of Slacking

She was looking at me again, this time for certain. I could barely make out the features on her face at this distance, but I could tell. Was she stuck in the middle of a boring lecture too?

“And so, following the 1947 Partition Agreement…”

Mr. Matsui was going on as usual.

It wasn’t that he was a boring lecturer; if he had been speaking in front of passionate students of modern history, they would have found his oratory thrilling. Unfortunately for Matsui-sensei, almost nobody at Akiba North attended his 6th period modern history elective to actually study history. There was an unspoken agreement between him and the students who came here to zone out: we wouldn’t disrupt his class, and he would pass us with the lowest passing grade for exerting the bare minimum of effort. It’s not like anything covered in the elective was actually on a college entrance exam, and what might be on the exam would be covered again in the 3rd year general history course.

I didn’t pick this course specifically to zone out, mind you. 1st year academic requirements required me to pick an elective or join a club, and nothing else aside from a few sports clubs that met in the late afternoon fit well with my existing schedule. A last minute reorganization of the schedule to fit honors-track math, the only subject I really excelled at, screwed me out of a chance to slack off in Computer Science. Sure, it was pretty much the same as what I was doing now, but slacking off with a computer beats slacking off without a computer every time. Matsui-sensei had few rules, but whipping out a smartphone to watch cat videos on the internet was apparently enough to count as “disrupting the class.”

I was watching something a bit more interesting now, though. The girl in the 3rd floor window across the room was standing up now and speaking towards- well, I couldn’t see through the closed curtains in the next window, but I imagined it must have been the front of the class where the teacher was standing. Her jet black hair draped down just below her shoulders. She stood with her back straight, almost as if she had been called to attention by a drill sergeant. She was the model of a prim and proper student. And now, she sat back down, leaning towards the window, turning her eyes again toward-

A splotch of drab khaki blocked my line of sight, slowly crossing my field of view. Damn. The guard who usually patrolled this section was energetically goose-stepping from the nearby watch tower to one further off in the distance, maybe 50 meters or so down the length of the wall. What had gotten into him? He patrolled this section of the wall every day, but his patrols usually consisted of leaning against the nearby watchtower while smoking, and maybe once every 15 minutes or so plodding down to the next tower. His eyes would sweep across the length of our old school building, but he never made direct eye contact with anyone. Today something had gotten him worked up enough to block my view of the beauty in the 3rd floor window.

The wall had been there a lot longer than the five weeks I had been taking Mr. Matsui’s class. It had been there when my parents were in school, though they hadn’t gone to Akiba North. Once upon a time, Akiba North Branch High School had inconveniently fallen smack dab in the middle of a line some important politicians had arbitrarily scribbled through the middle of the Kanto region. That line ran down to Fukugawa by the bay and up north past Saitama until it met the Tone river, then up along the river into the mountains. Anything south or west of that line was part of the republic. Anything north belonged to the commies. Between us and them was a 5 meter high concrete wall, featureless save for a few guard towers and the bleeding trails of rust from exposed steel rebar.

She must have been a commie too, if that word even meant anything anymore. It was a favorite rhetorical trick of my parents (and probably every other parent in the south, too): “Study hard, or your college slot/job/wife will get taken by a northerner.” If you believed my parents, the commies were all industrious bug-men who would soon overtake the west if we failed at all in exerting the greatest possible effort towards all our endeavors- while simultaneously being lazy slobs who had let the north of the country go to technologically-backward ruin while asking for endless handouts from their Soviet benefactors. They were the perfect foil; their example could be praised or lambasted depending only on what the circumstances of the scolding needed.

Mostly, she was just really pretty. I couldn’t see her that well across the 20 meters or so that separated the old red brick building from our old annex, but I could tell well enough that she was not the stereotypical model of the frumpy Northern girl with a shabby bob cut and clothes sewn out of fabrics older than she was. She was tall for a northerner. If she had lived in the South, she could have been a model or idol with a cute name like Sayu Midorikawa, or maybe-

“Hey, Freshman.”

Oh, great. It was Ootake, the 4th year student sitting behind the empty row of chairs that separated the people who cared about modern history from the people who didn’t. If that sounds weird, it’s because it is. Let’s run through a brief recap of how someone can possibly be a fourth-year student at Akiba North.

It started sometime in the 80s with a poorly thought-out educational reform program that the government at the time had started to make schools more like the American system. There was some sort of scare going on that the North was educating its students better than the South in math and science, and the government’s best answer was to cut one year off of middle school and add one year to high school. Of course, this didn’t have any of the positive effects they were looking for. Even if you cut up half of a 10,000 yen bill and stitch it together with another, you haven’t got more than 20,000 yen out of the deal. And you’ve defaced currency, which is supposedly a crime. People hated the new system. You probably would too if you had to make your high school debut right in the middle of your awkward years. The changes were quickly overturned, and people went back to doing middle school and high school in 3 years each. That is, all of them did, except the ones at a few oddball schools which held on to the 4th year program long past the point where it had made any sense.

If you were a 4th year at Akiba North, you were either doing your best not to let anybody else know while you studied to retake the entrance exams you had failed as a 3rd year, or you were a shameless and overt slacker. There were a few exceptions- Tanezaki at the front of the class had kept on going for another year to attend college at the same time as her younger and more academically gifted boyfriend - but as a whole this rule held. Ootake belonged to the “shameless and overt” category.

“What is it now?” I asked. It was unusual for Ootake to single me out, especially sitting as far forward as I did.

“Got a sec?”

“For what?” I was a little annoyed.

“Jun’s got a little proposition for you.” he gestured his thumb further back, to where Junichi Kanamaru was sitting. The 4th year had something of a reputation as a schemer and a con artist, but had never involved me directly in his schemes before.

“Not interested.”

“You will be. When you hear how much we’ve got to offer, that is.”

Great, Another “primo moneymaking opportunity” from the master, and he’s gotten Ootake to pitch for him now. Kanamaru was sitting in the back row, goofing off with Hosoya, another 4th year student who seemed to be in the running for the position of his right hand man.

“I’m not interested.”

Ootake didn’t want to take no for an answer.

“Not interested in the chance to make, oh, about 270,000 Yen?”

That was a big number. It’d probably match what I’d make working a part time job all summer unless I really started laying on the shifts.

“Fine. I’m a little interested. What’s this about?”

Knowing Kanamaru’s previous schemes, it either involved a lot of manual labor, or he was lying about how much it would make. Kanamaru was rarely involved in anything too sketchy, but someone like that could always get dragged into something a lot worse.

“Nothing dangerous. Just a little low-hanging fruit.”

The girl was gone from the window now. The guard on the wall was now being dressed down by a sharply dressed officer in a broad peaked cap, black aviator sunglasses, and drab uniform. No wonder he had been marching so vigorously earlier.

“That’s it? Is that what Kanamaru told you? And you believe him?”

If Kanamaru had told anyone that it was specifically “nothing dangerous,” then he was lying to them. Ootake was just the right sort of gullible to believe him enough to repeat his claims verbatim.

“Look, I swear this is all legit. No drugs. If you’re interested, meet us upstairs after this-”

He waved his arms in the general direction of Matsui-sensei, who was busy saying something poignant about the consequences of the Berlin Airlift.

“- is finally over.”

The sound of bell chimes reverberated across the room. Not our bells, unfortunately- they were the ones of the school building on the other side of the wall. On the first day of class, Mr. Matsui had identified the tune they played as the opening bars of The Internationale, a famous communist anthem. It was the signal for the rest of the students up front to tune him out while they waited the remaining 12 minutes for our bells to start ringing.

The guard was still outside, still being practically cashiered by the officer. From the commands he was barking, I guessed that the guard had not been showing proper discipline in his wall patrol. The officer was now following him around as he marched, smacking him in the spine with a small swagger stick whenever he let his back curve too much. For some reason,I was reminded of something my father had once told me in one of his lectures: “There are no layabouts in the north.”

 Well, it looks like there was at least one.

Kanamaru was probably lying through his teeth about this so-called opportunity, but…wouldn’t the reasonable thing be to hear him out? It’s not like he was a great liar, and I could just walk away if something seemed too fishy.