About 100 schoolchildren and their parents were taking part in what appeared to be a clean-up outing at the elementary school in this small fishing and farming town in Abu, Yamaguchi Prefecture, when an alarm warned of an impending missile attack, causing them to evacuate to the school's gymnasium.
The siren "rang all of a sudden while we were picking grass, so that scared me," said Taison Ito, a 10-year-old who is in the fifth grade.
"It's something close to our daily lives," said Kanako Ono, one of the parents, adding that news about North Korea and missile tests is always in newspapers and on TV.