Ji Young was 13 when she moved from Seoul to a small village in Yamagata in 1999. Her mother had arrived from Korea a few months earlier to marry a Japanese man.
Entering the local high school, she struggled at first with the language, cultural differences, and relations with friends, though quickly picked up spoken Japanese. Ji Young's mother's case was a fairly common example of a non-Japanese woman marrying a Japanese man who brings (or is later joined by -- "yobiyose") a child or children ("tsureko") from a first marriage.
And Yamagata Prefecture is a fairly typical destination for such children.