By IKKO ISHIDA/ Staff Writer
January 10, 2022 at 07:00 JST
FUKUOKA--Kifun Kim found a new sense of purpose in life when she enrolled at night classes for reading and writing Japanese at the age of 74.
Kim came to Japan from the Korean Peninsula about 80 years ago when it was under Japanese colonial rule to marry her Japan-born Korean husband who was working at a coal mine in Iizuka, Fukuoka Prefecture.
She raised five children while working at a vegetable stand, a clothing shop and as a peddler, among others.
But Kim never had the opportunity to learn how to read and write Japanese. She was unable even to write her own name in the visitors’ list when she went to her children’s schools or took them to hospital.
When Chiyo Junior High School near her home in Fukuoka’s Hakata Ward opened the night classes, Kim was the first student to show up on the first day.
Kim always sat in the center of the front row and became the most famous face in the class. She almost never missed a class in about 20 years.
A collection of jottings by students contains a passage that she wrote: “Studying has always been my dream since my childhood. School is my purpose in life.”
The classes are offered for those who did not have the chance to learn how to read and write Japanese due to various circumstances.
Kim diligently practiced writing Japanese characters in her notebooks. One is tightly filled with words in hiragana script, while another is filled with her repetitive attempts to write kanji characters.
When she learned enough to be able to read a sign along a street where she frequently walked, an overjoyed Kim went there every day to read it over and over again. The sign said, “This road comes to a dead end.”
Her dream was to read newspapers.
“Newspapers are difficult because they are written with (so many) kanji. I’d be asking too much if I want to read newspapers,” she once said with a smile.
Kim’s goal was to live to be 100. But she died in November 2020 at the age of 97.
A private gathering was planned at the time to remember her, but it was called off due to the novel coronavirus pandemic.
It was finally held with about 70 people in attendance on Nov. 3, ahead of the first anniversary of her death, in the classroom where she sat for all those years.
Photos of her smiling and dancing cheerfully, as well as her notebooks filled with Japanese characters, were lined up at the venue.
During the gathering, the attendees were told how Kim had compared her class to a pair of glasses.
“The reading and writing class is a pair of glasses for me,” she wrote. “I couldn’t see things even close to me, but now I can see things so far away.”
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Kifun Kim during a voluntary night class at Chiyo Junior High School in Fukuoka in May 2017 (Ikko Ishida)
