While discussing health-related issues is never easy, mental health is particularly challenging. A big part of it seems to be simply considering who your audience is, as what works for one person or group won’t always work for another. So, when it comes to discussing a topic that involves everything from domestic violence to positive behavior modification, knowing your audience is a huge factor.

Fortunately, Akihabara’s Yuu Mental Clinic has a handle on knowing their audience with a series on mental health in manga form, complete with wacky hijinks and impossible science fiction scenarios. They also managed to turn a simple pun into two glorious pages detailing the most absurd day-dream ever by a fictional junior high-age boy. How many of his “20 school rules” can you guess (hint: Swimsuits are definitely involved)?

It’s probably fair to say that junior high school students have a somewhat…distorted view of the world. That’s not really their fault, of course — their brains are caught in that weird world between childhood and adulthood where Saturday morning cartoons are as important as impressing the cute boy or girl who sits next to you in class. Basically college, but with parents.

As such, it actually makes a lot of sense for a junior high-aged character to mistake 二重拘束 (“nijuu kousoku,” or “double bind”) for 二十校則 (also pronounced “nijuu kousoku,” but this time meaning “twenty school rules”). What makes the play on words so glorious is that the creator of this manga, Yuu Yuuki, a psychiatrist who also happens to be the founder of Yuu Mental Clinic and Yuu Skin Clinic as well as a manga artist, took a tiny misunderstanding and blew it up to two full pages of the weirdest “school rules” you’ve ever seen! It also helps to bear in that this is from a comic explaining “double bind” and how it relates to people staying in abusive relationships.

▼ We’ve added the English translations below.

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The Twenty School Rules…?!

1. Girl’s skirts shall go down no more than 1 centimeter below the crotch.

2. All instances of 生 (“sei”) shall be written as 性 (“sei”). [Translator’s note: 生 has many different meanings, depending on usage, but is part of 学生, which means student. 性, also, has a few different meanings, but “sex” (as in male/female) would probably be the intended use here.]

3. Physicals shall be co-ed.

4. The summer uniforms shall be the school swimsuits.

5. All pool classes will be chicken fights in the water.

6. All socks shall be limited to fishnet stockings.

7. Toilet usage shall be clearly declared. (The girl in the picture is saying, “I have to p-pee.”)

8. All sentences shall end with “nyan.” [Nyan, as you probably know, is the cute onomatopoeia associated with cat meows.]

9. Recorders shall be shared.

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10. All bows must be 90 degrees.

11. Girls’ seats shall be boys.

12. 90 percent of all classes shall be health and physical education.

13. All school trip destinations shall have mixed bathing.

14. Floors shall be as shiny as mirrors.

15. Instead of girls receiving buttons at graduation, boys shall receive “boin” (the onomatopoeia for “bouncing breasts”). [Japan has a tradition in which girls ask boys they have crushes on for the second-from-the-top button from their uniforms at graduation.]

16. Boys shall be referred to by girls as “onichan.” [While “onichan” literally means “older brother,” it has certain connotations in terms of “imoto-moe,” or a “sister complex.”]

17. Gym uniforms shall have their owners’ email address printed on them.

18. Reasons for tardiness shall be given via “shiri-moji.” [Shiri-moji is basically writing in the air with your butt, like this.]

19. School lunches shall be eaten doing “ninin-baori,” or “helping hands.” [Ninin-baori is when two people share one haori (a coat for formal kimono), with the person in the back putting their arms through the sleeves to feed the other. Here’s one public example filmed in Nagoya Station.]

20. Only “H” place names will be studied in geography class. [Translator’s note: “H” sounds like “echi” in Japanese, which means “sex,” as in the NSFW kind. Thus, “H” is commonly used to mean “erotic,” so “‘H’ place names” are cities, counties, etc. that have names related to sex. For example, the teacher is referring to “eromanga-shima,” which sounds like “Erotic Manga Island” in Japanese but is actually Erromango, an island in Vanuatu.]

The final panel shows a bespectacled man shouting, “No, that’s completely wrong! A school like that would be shut down immediately!”

To help clarify some of the context, the young man in the hat on the first page is the junior high-aged boy in question, but he actually used to be an adult who was somehow de-aged and turned into a zygote before being put into a rapid-aging device, which broke part way through the process. The man with the glasses is a psychiatrist who, in the comic, is explaining to the boy’s (man’s?) wife and daughter what a double bind is. Also, there’s a speaking baby who fixes the rapid-aging device while they’re talking, so the boy can be returned to his adult age at the end of the comic.

To say there’s a lot going on in a few pages would be an understatement…

There’s also a great gag about the boy studying circles in geometry and turning “pi” into “pai,” an abbreviated form of “oppai,” or breasts.

▼ We think the image speaks for itself, whether you can read Japanese or not.

Yuu Mental Clinic

In case you haven’t heard of “double bind” before, it’s basically when someone is told two contradictory things, which causes stress for them. According to the comic, it’s often found in abusive relationships but can also be used to get someone to make positive changes.

Obviously, we’re not really qualified to talk about mental health, but we can definitely say we wouldn’t want to go to that school! That whole chair things is just a bit too freaky for us.

Sources: Yuu Mental Clinic, Twitter (@sinrinet), Jin115

Images: Twitter (@sinrinet)