Ask John: Why Do Anime Students Always Sit in the Same Spots?

Question:
In anime with a predominantly school setting, in the majority of instances, the main protagonist often occupies a window seat in class – according to TV Tropes, “the second seat from the back, along the side with the windows (which is always the left-hand side of the classroom) seems to be extremely popular.” By chance do you have any idea as to why this convention became so?

Answer:
I’ve never encountered a formal explanation for the seating arrangement in typical school anime, but I can venture a guess. I suspect that the frequency of anime students sitting in the second seat from the rear, on the window side of the classroom, is as much a practical convention as a symbolic one. Anime is traditionally cheap animation. Japanese animators have literally made an art form of cutting corners and discovering creative and artistic ways to depict a lot with limited budgets and limited animation. The rear left (when facing the front) of a classroom may be the easiest and fastest portion of a classroom to draw. Depicting a student at the front of the room requires frequently drawing the rest of the classroom and its students surrounding the protagonist. Placing the student at the rear right may necessitate enhancing the walls behind the student in order to create a sense of realism and location. Drawing the rear left corner requires only two seats, a window, and the open sky as background.

The next-to-last left seat may also have some subtle symbolism. The front row is reserved for the teacher’s pet or most brainy characters. Particularly a seat at or near the front row classroom entrance is traditionally reserved for especially studious or attentive characters, like Nichijou’s Nano Shinonome. The back row is reserved for the bullies and delinquent characters. Seats almost anywhere else in the classroom are nondescript, making the protagonist anonymous and ordinary. Seating the character next to the window in a distinctive location symbolizes the character’s distinction from the crowd and, moreover, looking out of the window symbolizes the student’s ambition, even when that ambition, for example, in the case of Hyouka’s Hotaro Oreki who sits in the last row next to the window, is to have no ambition. The window represents the distant horizon, freedom, limitless potential outside the “box” of the classroom setting. Placing a protagonist near that window represents the character’s proximity and personality relative to that sense of potential and possibility.