Kimura Foils Prince's Electrocution Experiment

Kimura Foils Prince's Electrocution Experiment is the park confrontation in which Kimura stops the Prince’s classmates from testing a powerful prototype defibrillator on Takeshi, the dog Tomoyasu has loved since childhood. What begins as an attempted rescue becomes a direct contest between Kimura’s physical intervention and the Prince’s command over the students. In the Prince’s later recollection, the episode also marks a limit in that authority: Kimura makes him feel fear, and the Prince’s wish to reverse that humiliation helps explain why he later targets Kimura’s son.

Background and the Students’ Helplessness

The confrontation takes place against a school hierarchy the students have come to regard as unassailable. Kimura recognizes their stunned reaction to the possibility of opposing the Prince: they have not even considered that they might try. He connects their passivity to a past job guarding a kidnapped man who had been left in an unlocked room, untied but unable to make himself leave. A departing guard explained the pattern through learned helplessness: after repeated punishment that could not be avoided, a person might stop trying even when escape becomes possible.

Kimura applies that idea to the students. They have repeatedly seen classmates and adults suffer under the Prince, and the electric shocks used to control them have helped make powerlessness feel inevitable. Their apparent toughness and attention to their standing among peers do not conceal how young and frightened they are. Fear has shaped their expectations so deeply that they can mistake obedience for the only available choice.

At the park, that fear also works against solidarity. As the students prepare the device, one challenges another’s hesitation by threatening to report him to the Prince. Kimura sees how rule by fear turns potential allies into watchers of one another, each more concerned with avoiding punishment than resisting the person who commands them. He compares this atmosphere with what he had heard about Terahara’s organization, where suspicion and the search for someone else to blame eventually set members against one another. The students’ actions are not presented as carefree bullying: they are participating in cruelty, but the scene also shows the pressure that has made them afraid to refuse.

The Prince’s Plan for Tomoyasu and Takeshi

The device is not an ordinary automatic defibrillator. A classmate whose father is a doctor and runs a private clinic has access to a prototype that is stronger than a typical device. It uses electrode pads placed on either side of the heart and can deliver a shock when its readings indicate one is needed. The Prince hears about it and orders the doctor’s child to steal it so the group can test its power. Kimura understands that a device meant to restart a stopped heart could be dangerous if used on a person whose heart is still functioning.

The Prince first selects Tomoyasu as the test subject. Tomoyasu cries and begs him to stop, and the Prince offers to spare him on the condition that he bring Takeshi instead. Tomoyasu has known the dog since childhood and loves him. The substitution therefore turns the experiment into a forced choice that tests Tomoyasu’s attachment and exposes how far fear can push him toward betraying what he values.

The Prince’s later account makes clear that the device’s effects are not his only concern. He knows that a death could throw the students into confusion and leave them looking to him for direction. More immediately, he wants to see what it will do to Tomoyasu to offer up his faithful dog. The episode belongs to a wider pattern in which the Prince undermines his classmates’ sense of worth and then induces them to betray someone important to them. By making Tomoyasu’s relationship with Takeshi the instrument of the threat, he seeks to make the boy’s own choices a source of shame.

Kimura Interrupts the Experiment

Kimura arrives at a neighborhood park he often visits, where a small wood slopes down to a hollow filled with fallen leaves. From behind a tree he sees about ten students binding Tomoyasu and Takeshi together with tape. Tomoyasu tries to calm the dog, while the other students fit the electrode pads to Takeshi. A length of fabric has been wrapped around the dog’s muzzle. Tomoyasu’s pleas for them to stop do not halt the preparations; instead, the group’s anxiety gives way to excitement at his distress.

Kimura steps out and approaches the students. He first removes the pads from Takeshi, then tears away the tape binding the dog to Tomoyasu. The adhesive catches in the dog’s fur, but Kimura manages to free them both. His focus is immediate and practical: he wants the experiment stopped and the dog released. He also deliberately challenges the students to act, pointing out that the Prince will be angry if they let him interfere. That taunt turns the Prince’s system of command back on the group, forcing them to choose between confronting Kimura and risking the Prince’s displeasure.

The Prince appears and throws a rock at Kimura, knocking him down. The classmates then hold Kimura while the Prince asks whether anyone wants to punch him. At the Prince’s instruction, the students attack in turn. Kimura tells them they do not have to obey, but the Prince’s threat of future punishment is enough to bring them back under his control. When he proposes using the defibrillator on Kimura, the rescue itself seems about to be converted into another demonstration of the Prince’s power.

Reversal and Aftermath

Kimura responds to the restraint with a feint: he pretends to be concerned about a blemish on his lip, drawing one student close, then spits at him and uses the moment of distraction to break free. He strikes and kicks the students holding him, then deals with the rest of the group, including two who have knives. Though he is unsteady by the end, he reaches the Prince and tears open the boy’s uniform, preparing to put the electrode pads on him. No shock is described as being delivered. The experiment has been interrupted; the Prince is now the one facing the device and the threat he had intended for others.

For the Prince, the reversal is more consequential than a failed demonstration. He later recognizes that Kimura’s uncontrolled physical force frightened him. Accustomed to relying on study and command, he is shaken by an encounter that makes his authority and composure feel inadequate. He runs, telling himself at the time that he is going after Tomoyasu and Takeshi. Once the fear passes, he dismisses Kimura as a man who resorts to violence without considering consequences, but he cannot forget the moment of confusion and terror.

The memory, revisited months later aboard the Shinkansen, reveals the grievance beneath the Prince’s subsequent actions: he wants to make Kimura suffer in return and bring him to his knees. He treats that revenge as a test of his own abilities, as though restoring his dominance would prove that his power has no limit. The park incident thus foreshadows the Prince’s retaliation against Kimura’s son, while showing that the Prince’s control is not seamless. The students’ learned helplessness sustains his rule, but Kimura’s intervention briefly disrupts it—and leaves the Prince with a humiliation he continues to pursue.