Yashimayama Basic Principles

The North Yomi fundamentals are the school’s layered code of conduct for confronting the Yomiyama phenomenon. What begins as a set of half-joking superstitions becomes, in practice, an emergency constitution for Yomiyama North Middle School’s Third-Year Class 3: it determines who may be acknowledged, how classmates must behave, and which ordinary relationships must be divided or suppressed. Its decisive power lies in converting fear and uncertainty into collective discipline, even though the rules remain incomplete and cannot guarantee that the calamity will be stopped.

Origins and Function

The fundamentals are presented to Koichi Sakakibara by Reiko Mikami before his first day at the new school. The First and Second are initially treated as school superstitions, but the Third is more consequential: it requires everyone to obey, at all costs, whatever the class decides. Only later does Koichi understand that this apparently broad instruction is a crucial rule concerning the extra person. The fundamentals therefore operate less as abstract folklore than as a framework that gives the class authority to suspend ordinary judgment and impose a common response.

Their importance becomes clearer when the class adopts the “Not There” Strategy. Every person in the class, including the teachers, treats Mei Misaki and Koichi as though they do not exist, while Mei and Koichi respond by treating everyone else as absent. The arrangement is emotionally twisted and unnatural, but its clarity makes it easier to endure than the earlier uncertainty about what was happening and why. The fundamentals thus create a harsh kind of stability: they do not make the situation normal, but they make the expected conduct legible.

The Third Fundamental

The Third Fundamental places the individual beneath the class decision. Mr. Kubodera explicitly tells the students that everyone must respect the class’s decision, and he notes that even Ms. Mikami, who occupies a particularly difficult position, has promised to do whatever is possible. The rule binds not only students but also teachers, making the classroom a disciplinary community whose members are expected to enforce the chosen measure together.

This principle gives the class a form of collective authority that can override ordinary personal loyalties. It also makes responsibility diffuse. No single student has to invent the policy or bear its entire moral burden; each person can claim to be following what the class has decided. At the same time, every member becomes an agent of the rule. The “Not There” Strategy works precisely because recognition itself is regulated: classmates must monitor their own speech, attention, and physical interaction, while teachers model the same restraint.

The Fourth Fundamental and Divided Identity

The Fourth Fundamental commands strict separation between public and private life. Reiko tells Koichi not to call her “Reiko” at school, even by accident, and instructs him to address her as Ms. Mikami. At home she is his aunt, Reiko Mikami; at school she is the assistant head teacher of his class, while he is merely Sakakibara, the transfer student. They both maintain the distinction so faithfully that their behavior toward one another becomes more reserved than necessary.

The rule is especially severe because it governs a real blood relationship rather than a merely social one. Koichi’s mother, Ritsuko Sakakibara, had died fifteen years earlier, and Reiko, his mother’s younger sister, lived in the same domestic orbit while teaching his class. The Fourth Fundamental requires them to divide one relationship into two officially incompatible identities. Its purpose is not simply etiquette: concealing the connection prevents the class from treating Koichi as specially protected or treating Reiko’s judgment as compromised.

The concealed relationship also explains why the class already knows more than Koichi realizes. Mr. Kubodera and most of the students are aware that Ms. Mikami is his aunt. When the class discusses treating Mei and Koichi as “not there,” Mr. Kubodera refers to Ms. Mikami’s difficult position because she must ignore her nephew at school even though she shares a house with him after school. The Fourth Fundamental therefore extends the class’s regime of selective visibility into the home, creating a contradiction that the characters must perform twice: intimacy in private, official distance in public.

Regulations, Spaces, and Surveillance

The fundamentals are reinforced by practical regulations whose boundaries are difficult to interpret. Mr. Chibiki explains that the “Not There” Strategy allows the selected person to be treated as absent at school while still permitting interaction outside school, but that the exception does not apply during school activities outside the campus. These guidelines are numerous, yet none is absolute. When the strategy fails, no one can be certain which breach triggered the failure.

That uncertainty intensifies the disciplinary effect of the rules. Because the class cannot identify every forbidden act with confidence, its members must behave cautiously across changing contexts. The school’s spaces become part of this system of controlled visibility. The Secondary Library is empty when Koichi and Mei arrive for fifth period, and Mr. Chibiki is absent; the art club room occupies a partitioned former classroom on the first floor of Building Zero; and the old Third-Year Class 3 classroom on the second floor is reached only after the students slip beneath ropes marked “Do Not Enter.” The rules do not merely regulate speech or belief. They organize movement, access, concealment, and the conditions under which information may be obtained.

The class-list binder kept by Mr. Chibiki gives this informal code an archival dimension. It contains twenty-seven years of Third-Year Class 3 lists, from 1972 through 1998, arranged with the newest records on top. Names, teachers, and years become evidence through which the class attempts to identify the extra person. Knowledge is therefore both necessary and dangerous: the same institutional records that make the pattern visible also sustain the information taboo surrounding it.

Limits and Consequences

The fundamentals cannot be treated as a reliable technical solution. Mr. Chibiki rejects the simple idea that the calamity is a curse caused by the angry spirit or grudge of the original dead student, and he emphasizes that the casualty does not consciously kill anyone. The rules are an effort to respond to a supernatural natural phenomenon, not a mechanism whose operation the adults fully understand. Their failures are consequently difficult to diagnose and impossible to assign confidently to one violation.

Even so, the fundamentals shape the lives of the students with extraordinary force. They authorize the exclusion of Mei and Koichi, require Reiko to deny her family relationship at school, and encourage classmates to discuss secrets only cautiously. When Koichi suggests telling Mr. Chibiki about the tape, Mei supports the idea, while Yuya Mochizuki remains silent and Naoya Teshigawara resists committing himself. The scene shows how the code governs not only visible conduct but also the circulation of testimony: revealing information becomes a collective decision with possible consequences.

The North Yomi fundamentals are therefore both protective and oppressive. They offer a vocabulary for survival, yet they also reproduce the silence and social pressure that make the situation so difficult to challenge. Their deepest irony is that obedience may preserve order without producing safety. The class can follow the rules, patrol its own behavior, and restrict access to dangerous places, but the uncertainty at the center of the system remains. The fundamentals endure as a disciplined response to disaster precisely because they cannot fully master the disaster they were created to contain.