History Headscratchers / BattleRoyale

* When the contest ends, what happens to the bodies of the students who died?

** I was under the impression that Kiriyama had taken a pole through the brain (this actually happened to a dude in reality, by the way - he lived, but turned from an honest hard-working guy into a lying, cheating prick) and that Noriko's shot went straight through the resultant gap/hole, actually missing his ''brain''.

** Well, it seems like someone didn't do their homework. It's possible to be shot in the head and not die. In fact, there are quite a couple of reports in the news of people who get severely brain-damaged by being shot in the head, and some people are sent into shock, but otherwise would recover after a while. I must admit, though, the ending was pretty sappy.

** The manga depiction of Shuya was just a sappy tear-fest, from beginning to end.

* As much as I loved the manga, the ultimate showdown with Kiriyama was teeth-grindingly frustrating. Noriko's shot should have killed him, how does a person maintain functionality with a bullet through their brain? And then the climactic and gripping finale turns into Dragonball Z when ''four issues'' pass between the time Shuya starts acting and the time he finally just shoots the bastard. All the while having yet another sappy tear fest about all of the people who have died and how he's ending it now.

** The Greater East Asia Republic is extremely isolationist, like a few real-world countries. We don't know what the hell is going on inside North Korea.

**** Or the student's host family lies and said the student disappeared.

*** Which makes little sense when applied to the manga, since a French foreign exchange student ends up in Shogo's game and gets killed. It only makes sense if the government of Greater East Asia lies and portrays it as an accident of some kind.

** I've always wondered what's stopped someone from being issued a gun or grenades, opening the bag right outside the door, and just shooting the director and the soldiers right then and there. It's not like there's any guards or even lights in the hallway, at least not in the manga.

* Why is the rest of the world letting "East asia" get away with this? Also how did Japan win WW2?
** In the novels, it's outright stated that the rest of the world doesn't know anything about Japan's inner mechanisms because of its policy of isolation i.e. no-one knows what goes on inside Japan just that the stuff they make is high quality.

* Why is the rest of the world letting Japan get away with this? Even if we assume that all of Japan is experiencing synchronized insanity the U.N would be all over this. Hell, Japan doesn't even have the capacity to stop people from stopping them.

* ThisTroper would love to know what kind of relations there were between the students before they ended up in the Battle Royale Program. For example, what was Shuya's impression of Shogo before? What was the relation between Mitsuko's "delinquents" and Kiriyama's?

* ThisTroper loves ''Battle Royale'' (the novel and manga more than the movie) but would love to know how someone like the director can survive. After every iteration of the Program, you'd probably have heartbroken parents with nothing left to live for looking for him...and Japan isn't ''that'' big. Particularly since he mentions, in the manga at least, that even high-ranking officials and ''yakuza'' leaders can have their kids taken...those guys can probably trace his real name and address.

*** For that matter, the collars have microphones and such in them; how is it that the Program directors didn't catch on to Shinji's plan when they should have easily heard him outright telling Yutaka what he was going to do?
*** There's probably only so many they can listen in on at a time. If, say, Mitsuko's doing something interesting, and Kiriyama's being followed avidly, they might not be tuned in to Shinji. Also, Shinji and Yutaka were communicating by written notes.