A professor of Vietnamese at Osaka University in Japan has sent Tuoi Tre (Youth) newspaper the touching story of one of her students, a 60-year-old Japanese mother, who is learning Vietnamese in honor of her deceased son.

Nakajima Hiroko was already retired when she applied for the Vietnamese undergraduate program at Osaka University late last year.

Prior to her application, she had already spent many years participating in cultural and linguistic activities at the ‘Vietnamist Club’ hosted by retired Professor Tomita Kenji, while finishing a two-year Vietnamese program in college.

Once completed, Hiroko applied for the Accreditation Program at Osaka University’s Vietnamese Department, which meant that she could begin in the third year of the full-time program.

In her cover letter, Hiroko attributed her decision to the death of her 18-year-old son, who had expressed a wish to re-visit Vietnam before he passed away.

After he died during twelfth grade in 2001, Hiroko even wrote a book entitled ‘Memoirs of an Old Lady Who Studied in Vietnam.’

In the book, she talks of her son’s death as the motivating factor behind her decision to abandon her job in 2005 and visit Vietnam, a place she had never been to and where she had no acquaintance or relative, in order to study Vietnamese.

Hiroko described her son as a kind-hearted and optimistic boy who had a lot of friends.

During high school, she wrote, her son had taken an interest in local volunteer activities and had loved studying foreign languages. He had also visited many places, including a study tour to Vietnam.

In his report written after his trip to Vietnam, he wrote about his experiences volunteering in the Southeast Asian country, as well as his wish to return to that nation in the future.

Those words planted the idea in Hiroko’s mind to take up Vietnamese so that she could understand more about the country her son had found so captivating, and that he had wanted so much to come back to.

In the epilogue of her memoir, Hiroko writes, “To lose your most beloved child is like losing your own future. I feel more vividly now than ever before, how happy it is as a parent to have your children safe and sound by your side."

“It was through the death of my son that I had learnt the significance of fate, and what it means to empathize with others,” she said in the book.

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