Ms Samejima ran a little school for kids who found they couldn’t keep up and were starting to drop out of school, all for a low monthly fee. She urged Akiko to visit it, but Akiko refused, thinking the old lady was a busybody.

But Ms Samejima didn’t give up so easily. She took Akiko to the school she’d dropped out of and convinced the teachers to let Akiko repeat the year. ‘Let her study hard for one more year,’ Ms Samejima said, ‘and then she can decide if she wants to go on to high school, or what it is she wants to do. I’ll supervise her all the way.’

And with that, the deed was done. She would repeat her final year.

But still Akiko could only see her as a busybody middle-aged woman butting in where she wasn’t wanted. She was sure that even if she repeated the year, it would all end up as it had before. She had zero desire to go back to school.

At least that was her attitude until April, when her extra year of school began.

As she was about to start her second time around in ninth grade, she finally decided to allow Ms Samejima to help her.

She knew she was in trouble. She couldn’t keep up with schoolwork. She didn’t even know what it was she didn’t know. And she simply felt that this was the time to ask for help.

And she started to want to study again.

She’d thought there was no one who could help her, but now she saw that there was Ms Samejima, offering a hand. It came as a sudden realization.

That was when she started to feel a sharp pain running down her forearm.

It felt as if someone was pulling her arm hard.

SO AKIKO GRADUATED FROM JUNIOR high one year late, moved on to high school, and during that year her long-held wish came true: to enter the education department of a university. Ms Samejima got in touch with her, with the news that she was starting an NPO. She planned to rent a larger building than her little juku had been using, and to create an alternative Free School where children who couldn’t – or wouldn’t – attend regular public school could go.

The Free School was named Kokoro no kyoshitsu, Classroom for the Heart.

She invited Akiko to help out.

‘I’d be happy to,’ Akiko replied. She was overjoyed that Ms Samejima needed her, and since she planned to be a teacher herself, the experience she might gain there would certainly come in useful.

She first met Dr Kitajima in 1998, a couple of years after she began to assist at the school. Akiko was a junior in college by then.