Class 3-3

Class 3-3 (9th Grade, Class 3) is one of the classes at Yomiyama North Middle School. It is one of the primary settings of Another.

1972 - The First Year
In class 3-3 during the year 1972, there was a student named Misaki Yomiyama. He was a charming student with good looks, and he excelled in both academics and sports. All the teachers and students alike admired him.

Halfway through the school year, he died in a house fire that took the lives of his whole family. Unable to accept his death, some of his classmates decided to continue acting as if he was still alive (talking with his desk, pretending to go home with him, etc). This behavior caught on, and at graduation, the principal even arranged to have Misaki's seat included in the ceremony. After graduation, when the class photo was taken, they found that Misaki was included, with a pale face but smiling like everyone else.

Over time, the oral history of 1972 became garbled, and people could no longer remember how he died or even whether he was a boy or a girl.

Following these events, the class grew closer to death itself.

1973 - The "Calamity" of Class 3-3 Begins
At the beginning of the school year following Misaki's death, the class found they had an extra student and were one desk short. At first, they thought it was just an error and ignored it. Unbeknownst to them, however, this was a sign that the Calamity of class 3-3 had begun, and six students and ten of the students' family members died over the course of the school year. It wasn't until later that they discovered that one of 3-3's students was a dead person all along, living out the school year as a normal, living person until the year's end.

The 'Dead One' (also referred to as the "Extra") is a former student or faculty member who died while being part of class 3-3, but then in a later year is somehow resurrected and becomes part of class 3-3 once again. Despite being dead, the Extra looks and acts like a normal, living person. There is no known form of physical examination or line of questioning which can distinguish the Extra from the living. The memories of the people around the Extra and the Extra him/herself are altered such that their continued existence and membership in the class seem completely natural, and memories of their death and previous class participation are suppressed. This memory alteration phenomenon also affects written and other physical records, retroactively erasing all evidence of the Extra's death.

Because of the unnatural presence of this dead person walking amongst the living, at least one student from class 3-3 or one of their family members or the teacher of the class dies each month. At the end of the school year, the Extra simply disappears, the Calamity's effects on the class' memories and physical records are reversed, and the survivors forget that the Extra was ever part of the class. The Calamity has run its course, thus marking an end to the deaths, until the next year. The reversal must not be entirely complete, since Chibiki has been able to record the Extra's name most years, after the fact.

1983 - The year the Calamity ended prematurely
By all accounts, the calamity continued to take its toll on class 3-3 unabated every year since the original incident. Exceptionally, however, in 1983, the calamity ended prematurely in August, with only seven recorded deaths that year. That year, the class went on a pilgrimage to Yomiyama shrine, on the return from which two students, Jun Hamaguchi and Yuki Hoshikawa, both lost their lives. The early end of the calamity was thought to coincide with the act of pilgrimage to this shrine, but pilgrimages undertaken by future classes did not produce any effect. What ultimately ended the calamity that year remained a mystery to all except for the student who ended it, Katsumi Matsunaga, who never shared his story with the class. Later that year he left a clue at the school for future students to find, but due to the effects of the calamity, even he forgot what form the clue took and what information it contained.

1988 - The Charm is devised
Over the years, the students of class 3-3 had tried many ways to prevent the calamity, including moving to a different classroom and changing the class name from class 3-3 to 3-C, all without success. Eventually, however, a sort of charm was devised by class 3-3's head of countermeasures (a new student role created at some point) which proved to be successful; they could prevent the calamity for their year by treating one student in the class as if he/she doesn't exist, in order to make up for the presence of the dead person. For a whole year, the class would not acknowledge their presence or speak about them during school hours.

While being the first effective countermeasure against the calamity, to date the charm has only had a success rate of around 50%. In some years when the charm failed the cause of the failure was obvious, but in other years the cause was unclear.

1998 - The Present Day
In 1998, the charm began with the school year in April when Mei Misaki had earlier accepted the nomination to become that year's non-existent student. In the meantime, however, a transfer student named Kouichi Sakakibara was still recovering in hospital from a collapsed lung, so he was not present during Mei's nomination. When he first joined the class on May 6th, the class's head of countermeasures, Izumi Akazawa, was not present, and no one else in the class informed him of the conditions of the charm (possibly for fear of violating the charm themselves). Kouichi and Mei had already met once in a chance encounter at the hospital, and when Kouichi saw Mei at school, he thought nothing of approaching her and starting a conversation. Thus, the conditions of the charm were violated. This later incriminated Mei and Kouichi in the eyes of their classmates. Unbeknownst to the rest of their class, the calamity had already claimed its first victim in April with the death of Mei's twin sister, Misaki Fujioka. Following the 'breaking' of the charm, the calamity proceeded to claim the lives of students and students' family members, proving conclusively to the students that the calamity is real. The class eventually tried strengthening the charm by disavowing Kouichi as well. The graphic suicide of their homeroom teacher soon afterward proved that this measure was ineffective. Eventually, Kouichi and Mei found a lead on a method of reliably ending the calamity even once it's already started. Their investigation ultimately led them to Katsumi Matsunaga and the audio recording he left in the former 3-3 classroom 15 years ago, detailing the events of that fateful night in 1983.

The real way to stop the calamity permanently, or at least until the next school year, is to 'send the dead back to death'. As soon as the dead person dies, she/he will disappear and be forgotten by everyone. The ones personally involved with the dead person's second death will remember them for a while, but even they will eventually forget details about the incident.

The viewer is shown very little of what happens to the class in the remainder of the 1998 school year. The viewer can only speculate who takes over as teacher of the class; a leading candidate would be Mr. Chibiki. And the viewer can only wonder how the class copes with the death of half of their classmates, and with the resulting Post-Traumatic-Stress-Disorder.

1972

 * Misaki Yomiyama (Restructuring in 1972)
 * Ritsuko Sakakibara (Restructuring in 1983)
 * Ritsuko's and Reiko's parents

1983

 * Reiko Mikami (Restructuring in 1996)
 * Katsumi Matsunaga
 * Hoshikawa Yuki (Restructuring in 1983)
 * Hamaguchi Jun (Restructuring in 1983)
 * Ryoko Akiyama (manga- Restructuring in 1983)
 * Tamie Mikami
 * Ryouhei Mikami
 * Kurita-kun (manga)

1996

 * Kazuma Akazawa (Restructuring in 1996)

1997

 * Sakuma (manga, Restructuring in 1997)
 * Tachibana

1998

 * Kouichi Sakakibara
 * Tamie Mikami
 * Ryouhei Mikami
 * Mei Misaki
 * Misaki Fujioka (Restructuring)
 * Mitsuyo Fujioka
 * Amane
 * Izumi Akazawa ( Restructuring )
 * Tomohiko Kazami (Restructuring)
 * Yukari Sakuragi ( Restructuring )
 * Mieko Sakuragi (Restructuring)
 * Naoya Teshigawara
 * Yuuya Mochizuki
 * Tomoka Inose
 * Ikuo Takabayashi ( Restructuring )
 * Keiko Numata ( Restructuring )
 * Kensaku Numata ( Restructuring )
 * Takako Sugiura ( Restructuring )
 * Takeru Mizuno
 * Sanae Mizuno (Restructuring)
 * Manabu Maeshima
 * Junta Nakao ( Restructuring )
 * Noboru Saruta
 * Daisuke Wakui
 * Kenzou Kawahori ( Restructuring )Images (10).jpg
 * Shigeki Yonemura
 * Aya Ayano ( Restructuring )
 * Yumi Ogura ( Restructuring )
 * Atsushi Ogura ( Restructuring )
 * Makoto Ouji ( Restructuring )
 * Sachiko Nakajima
 * Sayuri Kakinuma
 * Kyouko Kaneki ( Restructuring )
 * Haruka Etou
 * Aki Matsui ( Restructuring )
 * Yukito Tsujii
 * San Watanabe
 * Megumi Tatara
 * Matsuko Arita
 * Kazue Satou
 * Naomi Fujimaki

Staff

 * Tatsuji Chibiki (Homeroom teacher in 1972)
 * Mr. Koga (Homeroom teacher in 1983)
 * Kubodera-Sensei (Homeroom teacher in 1998- deceased in 1998)
 * Mikami-Sensei (Homeroom teacher in 1996, deceased the same year. Revived in 1998 as Vice-homeroom teacher, later homeroom teacher, deceased again in 1998)

1983

 * Yuki Hoshikawa


 * Jun Hamaguchi


 * Ryoko Akiyama (manga)


 * Ritsuko Sakakibara (as Reiko's sister)
 * Kurita-kun (manga)
 * Unknown female student (manga)

1996

 * Kazuma Akazawa
 * Reiko Mikami

1997

 * Sakuma (manga)

1998

 * Misaki Fujioka
 * Mieko Sakuragi
 * Yukari Sakuragi
 * Sanae Mizuno
 * Ikuo Takabayashi
 * Kubodera-Sensei's Mother
 * Kubodera-Sensei
 * Junta Nakao
 * Atsushi Ogura
 * Aya Ayano
 * Aya Ayano's Parents
 * Kensaku Numata
 * Yumi Ogura
 * Makoto Ouji
 * Takako Sugiura
 * Kyouko Kaneki
 * Kenzou Kawahori
 * Keiko Numata
 * Aki Matsui
 * Tomohiko Kazami
 * Izumi Akazawa