February 26, 2025
TOKYO – Three years have passed since Russia began its aggression in Ukraine. As of January, 2,747 people had fled from Ukraine to Japan, and 1,982 were still taking refuge there. With the war situation still unpredictable and their lives in this foreign country going on, the refugees are now seeking their own paths. Should they stay in Japan or return to Ukraine?
“I feel like I’ve been standing still for three years. I’ve got to move on now,” Maiia Kryachko said, sounding as if she were talking to herself.
Kryachko, 47, was in a room of the public housing complex in Tokyo’s Shinjuku Ward where she now resides, having evacuated from the town of Kamianske, near Dnipro in eastern Ukraine.
Two of her children, daughter Rehina, 9, and son Matvii, 7, who were drawing pictures and doing their elementary school homework, looked up and gazed into their mother’s face with worried expressions.
When the aggression began in February 2022, the town where they lived was flooded with people who were trying to head west to put whatever distance they could between themselves and the Russian border. Kryachko and the children would run to the basement every time they heard an air-raid siren.
The following month, they fled to Warsaw, about 1,000 kilometers away, by train and car, before coming to Japan to depend on her eldest daughter, who was married to a Japanese man.
“The war will end soon. We’ll be able to go home in a month,” Kryachko thought. But they are now approaching their fourth spring of living as refugees.
Her brother, 60, who has an intellectual disability, and her 81-year-old mother-in-law, who looks after him, are still living in Kamianske. The Nippon Foundation provides ¥1 million a year per person to refugees from Ukraine, but this support is set to end in March. So Kryachko has decided to return to Ukraine.
Her children, who, when they first arrived in Japan, begged to go back to Ukraine, are now immersing themselves in dancing and playing soccer with their Japanese friends. They have even gotten good at speaking Japanese. However, Kryachko feels that they are losing out on opportunities to learn about the history and culture of their home country.
Her hometown, where industrial areas and farms spread out on either side of the mighty Dnipro River, has become wrapped up in the war. Missiles fly back and forth through the sky, and blackouts are incessant. Multiple incidents have occurred in which residents have been gunned down by former soldiers suffering from PTSD.
Kryachko worries constantly, wavering back and forth over whether she is making the right choice, wondering if ceasefire negotiations led by U.S. President Donald Trump will ever really come to pass.
Even so, Kryachko says, “As a Ukrainian, I want to build an independent life in my homeland and give my children an education.”
When she returns, Kryachko plans to go back to work at the steel mill where she was previously employed.