“I don’t like ceiling lights that brighten the entire room. I prefer reading under a lamp. That hasn’t changed since I lived in Ukraine,” says Solomiia Honcharenko, 18. She fled Sumy in northeastern Ukraine to Chiba, Japan, in 2022 following Russia’s full-scale invasion. Four years later, reading remains her source of comfort. After studying for one year at a Japanese junior high school, she graduated online from her high school in Sumy last summer and will enter a university in Tokyo this April. Like Honcharenko, hundreds of Ukrainian evacuees in Japan remain uncertain about their future.
