The Prince's school gang

The Prince's school gang is an informal group of students organized around the Prince's authority. Its importance lies not in any shared loyalty but in the way fear makes classmates police one another and carry out his demands, even when they do not want to participate.

Identity and Structure

The gang consists of the Prince's classmates, including students who assist him in targeting other pupils and in actions intended to protect his position. The group is not presented as a body with stable rules or freely chosen allegiance: the Prince issues orders, while the students anticipate punishment if they refuse. A group of four boys confirms to Kimura that they acted as the Prince directed, including in a sexual-misconduct case used against a student's father who was investigating him. They also report that three teachers have been forced out or otherwise removed from the school, though the evidence does not establish that the students carried out those incidents. These disclosures show how the Prince's influence reaches beyond immediate confrontations with classmates, making the gang part of a broader system of intimidation.

Learned Helplessness and Mutual Surveillance

Kimura understands the students’ submission through an earlier job guarding a kidnapped man. The man was not tied up and the door was unlocked, yet he remained in the room, unable to act as though escape were possible. A fellow guard explained the pattern as learned helplessness: after an animal has repeatedly experienced shocks it cannot avoid, it may stop trying even when a later situation offers a way out. Kimura applies that explanation to the schoolchildren. They have seen classmates and adults suffer under the Prince often enough to conclude that resistance is futile; the electrical shocks are part of that conditioning, though Kimura does not know precisely how they are administered or what orders accompany them.

The students’ response to the possibility of opposing the Prince makes the depth of that paralysis visible. When Kimura raises the idea of toppling him, they react as if the suggestion itself is beyond comprehension. Their submission is not simply agreement with the Prince: in Kimura’s reading, repeated punishment has taught them to experience themselves as powerless. They are young, and their efforts to appear tough do not conceal how frightened they are. Their standing among classmates feels to them like a matter of survival, so avoiding punishment takes precedence over challenging the system that threatens them.

The gang’s discipline works laterally as well as from the top down. During preparations to use a prototype defibrillator, one student accuses another of having shown sympathy for Tomoyasu and threatens to report him to the Prince. Kimura sees that fear has broken trust among the students: instead of joining against the person who controls them, they monitor one another and redirect resentment toward potential allies. The prototype, introduced as a device for restarting a stopped heart and stronger than an ordinary defibrillator, becomes part of the Prince’s experiment in obedience. His interest shifts from the machine’s effects to what forcing Tomoyasu to betray a beloved dog might do to the boy’s sense of self.

Kimura connects this pattern to what he heard about Terahara’s criminal organization. Its members, fearing the leader’s wrath, tried to avoid mistakes by ensuring that someone else would bear the blame; suspicion eventually turned them against one another. The school gang follows a comparable logic on a smaller scale. The Prince weakens students’ self-worth by exposing private desires or shaming them through information about their parents, then presses them to betray someone important to them. As Kimura sees it, these methods make each student less able to trust himself or others, while the threat of further punishment keeps the group from acting collectively.

The Attempted Test and Kimura’s Intervention

The gang’s coercion becomes a concrete operation when students prepare a prototype defibrillator for use during Prince’s test of their obedience. The device had come to their attention through a classmate whose father was a doctor with a private clinic. Although designed like an automated external defibrillator, it was a stronger prototype; the students placed its electrode pads on Tomoyasu as they prepared to use it. Tomoyasu’s dog, Takeshi, was restrained with him, and another student’s hesitation was met with an accusation that he had shown sympathy and a threat to report him to Prince.

Prince’s purpose had shifted from testing the machine to testing Tomoyasu. He wanted to see what the boy would do when made to accept suffering for the dog he had raised and loved. In this way, the gang’s obedience was meant to be demonstrated through a betrayal of attachment, not merely compliance with an order. Kimura arrived before the students administered the shock, interrupting the planned test and turning the group’s attention toward him.

Kimura challenged Prince and began freeing Tomoyasu and Takeshi. When four students restrained him, he fought his way clear; Prince then ordered the remaining students to deal with Kimura and told them not to fear hurting him. The order exposes the gang’s double bind: students were expected to enact Prince’s violence, while the threat of punishment extended to their siblings and parents if they failed. The scene shows how his authority converts classmates into enforcers, but Kimura’s intervention also disrupts the expectation that his commands will go unanswered.

Reach Beyond the Classroom

The students also describe the Prince’s influence extending to teachers: they say one became depressed and quit, another was caught groping a student, and a third had an accident. Their account presents these outcomes as part of the Prince’s record of removing adults, but it does not establish that the gang itself caused them. That distinction places the students less as an independent organization than as participants in a school environment where the Prince’s reach appears to exceed their own direct actions.