A kindergarten teacher is helping teens with troubled backgrounds complete high school through free lessons in the main hall of a Buddhist temple in Nagoya.
Many teens with difficult family circumstances give up on education and join the workforce after the third year of junior high school, said Daiyu Hironaka, 34, who launched the program in 2007.
The project accepts teens from orphanages as well as from single-parent families with an annual income below ¥2 million (about $16,800). They study with volunteer teachers every Thursday and Sunday afternoon in the main hall of Shokoin Temple, on the eighth floor of a building in Chikusa Ward.