3. Why don't you go abroad with your children?

Korean mom My Korean-mom friend

The mom friend who suggested that I go abroad with my four children was a Korean mother living near my home.

It had been 12 years before when we met first in a neighborhood park. I was letting my son play there, and so was she for her daughter. We became friends really quick. In those days I was on a second maternity leave with enough time. I asked her to teach me Korean to have a lesson once a week.

She was really good at teaching as she used to be an elementary school teacher before coming to Japan to marry. She never used Japanese during the lessons even when I visited her for the first time.

Learning Korean by porny videos?

It was in the beginning of the 1990's which was long before the Korean-culture boom came to Japan. Nowadays you can have tons of materials for learning Korean including movies and dramas. But back in the 1990's  there were very few. I had no option but renting the videos, Mulberry, Mulberry 2, and Mulberry 3 directed by Lee Doo-yong, which had so many porny seans and had me learn a lot of expressions which I would never use in my life!  Anyway, a couple of years later, I was able to speak Korean which was enough to read easy newspaper articles or to go shopping in Seoul with no translation. However, now, I totally forgot. Although Japanese and Korean are similar in grammar, you quickly forget unless you use them very consciously...

How about studying abroad?

"How about studying abroad, Yoko-san?" she said and continued "Canada should be the best, I think".

That was the word I had never expected to hear. I didn't even imagine going abroad by myself. Furthermore, studying abroad with four children is something unheard-of at least around me. However, she was quite serious. It was one of her natural options to go to a foreign country to change her life in a big way, and in fact she did it herself. Of course she was single with no kids when she came to Japan, but still, it was not unusual for her to see many relatives to migrate to Canada, Australia, or the USA for children's education.  That was a totally different environment from mine with a quite average Japanese lifestyle.