Inou-Battle wa Nichijou-kei no Naka de - Volume 10 - Chapter SS4

Chapter 2

? ...are you on Team Chocolate Mushroom or Team Chocolate Bamboo Shoot?

The best way I can describe the ongoing mushroom-versus-bamboo-shoot debate is that it’s something of a cultural meme. Both the chocolate mushroom and the chocolate bamboo shoot are made by Meiji, a Japanese chocolate company that I would characterize as similar to Hershey’s in terms of cultural presence (only unlike Hershey’s, Meiji chocolate does not taste distinctly of bile). They’re extremely similar products, both involving a chocolate component and a cookie component—in fact, the only real difference is that one’s shaped like a mushroom, the other is shaped like a bamboo shoot, and their respective cookie portions have slightly different textures.

The distinction, in other words, is almost entirely aesthetic, which makes it easy to sympathize with Andou’s assertion that dividing up into teams over the issue is more than a little silly. Unsurprisingly, that doesn’t stop people from taking it all too seriously, and Meiji even conducted a survey of people’s preferences in 2020, the results of which were compiled into an exhaustive 162-page statistical analysis that you can read for yourself to this day, if you really have nothing better to do with your time. I swear to god I am not making this up, and I’m also not telling you which won, because the collective nation of Japan got it wrong and I’m bitter that the correct answer lost.

? ...Kudou had apparently already been accepted into a college by recommendation.

If you’ve made it to volume 10 of this series, you’ve probably also consumed enough Japanese media to know that college entrance exams in Japan are really serious business. It typically involves multiple rounds of testing, and getting admitted to any school isn’t a given, much less your top choice. Less well-known, however, is the fact that a surprisingly large number of students are admitted to college based on a recommendation from their high school, thus circumventing the whole exam process. It’s not necessarily that easy, to be clear—getting a recommendation sometimes just means taking a different exam—but the point that I’m getting at is that there are many paths to college in Japan, and the exam hell so often portrayed in media is just one of them, with Kudou’s path being another equally real option.

? As far as actual literature goes, I’ve just read Akutagawa Ryunosuke and Miyazawa Kenji’s stuff since I thought it’d help me write better.

Akutagawa Ryunosuke and Miyazawa Kenji are both extremely influential Japanese authors who were both born toward the end of the nineteenth century and who both died before the age of forty. Their works, and the many adaptations of said works, are widely read and viewed to this day, with Akutagawa having written Rashomon, The Spider’s Thread, and The Nose, among many others, and Miyazawa having most famously written Night on the Galactic Railroad.

? Well, when you put it that way, I guess I’ve read Shakespeare and Goethe’s stuff!

Shakespeare needs no introduction—certainly not after volume 8, anyway—but Johann Wolfgang von Goethe is maybe slightly more worthy of description! Goethe was born in what is now Germany in the mid-eighteenth century, and he was an author, scientist, and something to the tune of half a dozen other things all at once. His works were prolific and highly influential, and many of them fell under the umbrella of the Sturm und Drang literary movement, which Andou happened to reference back in volume 6.