Where It Began
From a Family Blog to a Global Community
In the spring of 2014, Keiko and Hiroshi Tanaka closed the door to their apartment in Kichijoji, Tokyo, enrolled their two young children in the school of life, and boarded a one-way flight to Portugal. What began as a year-long experiment quickly stretched into three extraordinary years — years that would change not only their family, but eventually thousands of others around the world.
Keiko, a former elementary school teacher, started chronicling their adventures in a modest blog called "Manabi no Tabi" — learning journey in Japanese. She wrote honestly about the challenges: the loneliness of arriving somewhere new with no community, the guilt of deviating from a traditional educational path, and the very practical difficulty of finding a math curriculum that works in a moving vehicle. But she also wrote about the magic: her daughter spontaneously learning conversational Spanish while befriending children at a market in Seville, her son's fascination with Roman aqueducts inspiring a months-long study of engineering and ancient history.
The blog resonated with a global audience of families quietly dreaming of doing the same. Emails flooded in. A Facebook group formed. Then another. By 2016, Keiko and her growing team of educator collaborators began publishing their first structured country guides — documents born of real experience, written by families who had actually been there with children in tow.
