202 Chapter six, 2016, three schools: 8 (1/2)
'And that's the real beauty of it,' Ulf thought as he waited for Christina to finish her explanation.
How to expand your market shares in a shrinking market. Just force a competitor out of that market. It was brilliant. Irishima High and Himekaizen aimed at stealing some 350 students from Red Rose. That was effectively the same as shutting the school down. Especially as a few middle schools stood waiting in the shadows ready to gobble up students from grade seven through nine, among them Christina's old school.
'Christina and Kyoko's,' Ulf reminded himself. 'She's the most important person in the world for Yukio.'
Ulf took a deep breath before he continued. He still got winded quickly and it would take until the second half of November before he could start rebuilding the stamina he had always taken pride in for real.
”Anyway,” Ulf said. ”as you can see one of the classrooms is this very room, so come April we'll be without a clubroom.”
There were quite a few shouts of outrage, and Ulf waited for them to quiet down.
”In return,” he continued when the room was silent enough for him to be heard again, ”we've been given special dispensation to use the inner room at the café as our clubroom. It's cleared with the management there as well.” 'Which means James was behind the entire idea from the beginning, but I can't tell them why,' Ulf thought. It made sense though. This way James got into closer contact with both arrivals as well as the Himekaizen part of whatever shadowy organisation it was that took care of the arrivals over the years.
Ulf shot Christina a worried look before he continued. Nakagawa's words from just after their evening meeting at the café played in his thoughts. Maybe it hadn't been such a good idea to refuse running for the student council after all. Without Nakagawa to cover their backs they'd be forced to gamble on how the new principal would play his cards, because here in Japan it was bound to be a 'he'.
”Given these circumstances I've decided that the theme for our walking talking sessions will be corporate competition.”
”Corporate competition?” Sakura asked and reminded Ulf that she wasn't anywhere nearly as silent and withdrawn as she had been in the beginning. ”What about our school subjects?”
”It's the theme,” Ulf said. ”Apart from classic Japanese we'll use the theme as the core for all subjects. For example we'll use examples from economic calculus for math, discuss real cases in English and Japanese and look at older cases from modern Japanese history.”
When he received blank stares in return Ulf palmed his face. 'This is going to take a while to explain.'