Shin and Kumiko start off with nothing but a passing interest for each other - well, in Shin’s case, it’s a bit more obsessive than passing, especially in the animanga.

The crowd parts for Shin.

Kumiko realizes straight off that Sawada Shin is the leader of his class. In the drama, a crowd of students that had been heckling her part to let him pass when he enters the scene late. In the animanga, he tells his friends to chill out when they were harassing her, and they stop right away. “I see. They listen to HIM,” she thinks to herself.

The animanga starts to take a more serious tone with Shin’s outlook towards Kumiko than the drama (in which it just seems that he starts to respect her little by little). After one incident he comes to the conclusion that she was the one who beats up a bunch of thugs and becomes obsessed with the idea of fighting her. In order to get her to accept, he tells his classmates to skip out on her teacher evaluation and they all head up to the roof. When Kumiko goes up there to get them, he tells her he’ll tell them to go down on one condition: she has to fight him one on one.

Face off!

When she meets him for the fight later on, he tells her he wanted to fight her to see for himself how she beat up those guys. She proceeds to tell him that he pisses her off because he “mobilized his crew for no good reason”. She tells him he can never do that for his own selfish reasons. He is, of course, confused, because she has slipped into yakuza mode on him. She is basically comparing him to a yakuza leader who has a crew, only his crew is the student body. This sort of comparison shows that she has a bit of respect for Shin - though probably nothing more than that at this point.