The Complex Logic of Shoe Removal.

Enter a Japanese school and you will be asked to remove your shoes. This in itself is not so surprising, many Japanese buildings require shoe removal, including some restaurants and athletic areas. What seem like straightforward rules though, "Come to school, change into indoor slippers when you enter" quickly become more complicated. For example: in practice, it is possible to not remove your shoes, provided you arrive in slippers and enter through the back. In a hand-wavy sense, the vector field which describes the social pressure to remove shoes is not conservative. Two paths are not always equal when it comes to removing shoes.

Furthermore, as gyms are usually a separate building from the high school, attending assemblies and sporting events requires one to walk outside through the dust, yet one is not required to change back into outdoor shoes to do this. Perhaps we should admit certain outside areas to what we consider "inside the school". After all, there are certainly architectural features that suggest the notion that we are still in the "school" during these transition periods. There is clearly a lot of intuition required to understand the exact times when one must remove one's shoes. It was be interesting to create a map that showed the topography of shoe removal, just as one might use different colors do indicate different ecosystems in a given area.