In June of 1992, a 26-year-old Japanese woman named Okuda Miki quit her job
at the publishing house where she had been working as an editor for three years,
using the savings she had amassed to live in Prince Edward Island for fifteen
months, first on a year-long CanadianWorking Holiday visa and then on a three-
month tourist visa. A fan of L. M.Montgomery’s famous series of books, Anne of
Green Gables, Okuda forgoes work, writing that ‘in a place where the unemploy-
ment rate has reached 10 percent, it seemed na€ ıve to think a Japanese woman
could just pop over and get a job, and it wasn’t my intention to become a guide
for Japanese tourists; besides, I hated the idea of work that would interfere with
my free time while I was there’ (Okuda 1995, p. 6). Still, free time or no, she had
to devote herself to mastering English in order to get a Canadian driver’s license,
as a car was indispensable for getting around the Island and the insurance rate
was much higher for someone with only an international license. After all, she
had to live solely on her savings. She was successful in getting her license, but
even so, living alone on the Island throughout a year had its lonelinesses and diffi-
culties: ‘The winter was cold and severe’, she writes:
I had plenty of weak moments when I asked myself if it wouldn’t be okay to
return to Japan even for just a week, or to travel to a warm, southerly destination
for a little while. But I had made my decision to live here for fifteen months, I
reminded myself, and it is only through sticking it out that one discovers what it
really means to live somewhere; thusly, I fortified my resolve and remained. As
Anne says, ‘We pay a price for everything we get or take in this world’.
at the publishing house where she had been working as an editor for three years,
using the savings she had amassed to live in Prince Edward Island for fifteen
months, first on a year-long CanadianWorking Holiday visa and then on a three-
month tourist visa. A fan of L. M.Montgomery’s famous series of books, Anne of
Green Gables, Okuda forgoes work, writing that ‘in a place where the unemploy-
ment rate has reached 10 percent, it seemed na€ ıve to think a Japanese woman
could just pop over and get a job, and it wasn’t my intention to become a guide
for Japanese tourists; besides, I hated the idea of work that would interfere with
my free time while I was there’ (Okuda 1995, p. 6). Still, free time or no, she had
to devote herself to mastering English in order to get a Canadian driver’s license,
as a car was indispensable for getting around the Island and the insurance rate
was much higher for someone with only an international license. After all, she
had to live solely on her savings. She was successful in getting her license, but
even so, living alone on the Island throughout a year had its lonelinesses and diffi-
culties: ‘The winter was cold and severe’, she writes:
I had plenty of weak moments when I asked myself if it wouldn’t be okay to
return to Japan even for just a week, or to travel to a warm, southerly destination
for a little while. But I had made my decision to live here for fifteen months, I
reminded myself, and it is only through sticking it out that one discovers what it
really means to live somewhere; thusly, I fortified my resolve and remained. As
Anne says, ‘We pay a price for everything we get or take in this world’.
