One day, a postcard arrived at my flat inviting me to a party hosted by an old boys’ and girls’ association of the high school, to be held on 27 April this year in Takarazuka. I had never seen such a party with my high school classmates before, since the commencement ceremony 21 years before. I wanted to see how the people had changed their faces and figures from what they had been in high school, so I replied to the sender that I was going to attend and booked airline tickets.

As the plane from Narita Airport to Osaka was scheduled to depart at 6.25 in the morning, and there were no trains to Narita from where I live that would have let me catch the plane, I drove to the airport at midnight. I parked it in the car park to sleep until the terminal building opened.

I didn’t miss the plane 🙂

I arrived at the venue just one hour before the party began. Some people were always there. Some teachers were invited as well. Almost all of them had retired from their jobs and looked quite different from what they had been 21 years earlier.

The man giving a speech on the stage is Kenkichi Hagiwara, an information-processing teacher and coach at the track & field club. He brought up two Olympic athletes, Naoko Sakamoto and Yurika Nakamura. Sakamoto ran in the women’s marathon in the 2004 Athens Olympics, and Nakamura in the 2008 Beijing Olympics.

They were good old friends of mine. I talked with a lot of classmates whom I hadn’t seen in 21 years. Some looked almost the same as they had when they were high school students, and others looked quite different. The same went with the women who had been schoolgirls. One thing I could say was that many of the ladies who were still attractive-looking didn’t look happy with their lives. For example, some of these women divorced with their children. In many cases, those who were happy with their lives looked old 🙂

We had a perfect time with it. After the party, some of them went out to a restaurant and an izakaya until midnight. I didn’t do it because I had to take a return flight that evening.

I’ve got a set for this on Flickr.