Every year the high school students get together to decide where their group will go for a field trip. This year group five decided to go by train to Tokyo's Kichijoji district. Kichijoji is well-known for its huge park that has a beautiful pond and also for a bustling shopping area nearby. The day the kids went this year, though, the weather was bad, and they weren't able to venture outside. Rather than giving up, though, they enjoyed the day going around the shopping center inside Kichijoji Station, where they passed the time by eating out and shopping together. The students have few opportunities to ride a train into town with their friends, so this trip together as a group was a great deal of fun for them, and they made many interesting discoveries.

Yukio Nakamura
When we went to the shopping center in Kichijoji, I bought a book and a CD. Kichijoji is a very exciting place, and many people go there from other parts of the city. I bought a CD that had a song I liked on it, so that made me happy, but what made me even happier was that I went there with my friends from school.

Tomoyuki Abe
We were supposed to go to the park today, but it's been raining since morning. Our teacher told us that we would go to the shopping center inside the station instead. We left the school at 9:30 in the morning and arrived in Kichijoji about an hour later. There, we met for the first time Yukari Kaneko, who studies at home. I was a little surprised, because she had a manicure of red, strawberry-shaped designs on her fingernails. My friends and I then walked around the shopping center, looking at CDs and books. We ate tonkatsu (pork cutlet). It was all-you-can-eat, so we just kept on eating. It was incredible.

Yukari Kaneko
When I first saw all of my friends from group five in person, I thought that they all looked the same as their picture. My teachers had already told me about all of them before, so it didn't feel like we were meeting for the first time. A group of us girls went shopping together, and it was fun. But what I bought is a secret! I want to talk to everyone a little more when we meet again next time.

Shinya Ishizuka
I learned that operating an electric wheelchair outside of school is literally a matter of life or death. As soon as we left school, my fingers felt like they were going to freeze. I bumped into a lot of things on the way to the station, and I felt disgusted with myself. I wonder how many people know how unstable it is to navigate an electric wheelchair with one finger on a bumpy road. Even though workers at the train station stopped the escalator and helped me, I had to go up lying on my back. It was terrifying. If you use an electric wheelchair, you will learn how scary it really is.