With an MBA in finance, Nivedita Sharma had been a team leader at a bank in India. She quit her job three months after her arranged marriage, when her husband's firm decided to transfer him to Tokyo.
"After moving to Japan I searched a lot, but I couldn't find a job in my field that didn't require native-level Japanese," Sharma says. "I did have options for teaching in Indian schools or eikaiwa (English conversation schools), but truly speaking, I didn't want to change my career from finance.
"We decided to plan a family. Now I'm a mother of two. I also tried learning the Japanese language but, trust me, it isn't a very easy task. I wonder how even the Japanese learn Japanese," she says. "I can speak Japanese for survival, but with professional-level Japanese there's still a long way to go."