When I moved up to junior high, I left a town on the west side of Tokyo and moved to Kyoto. What struck me most was that everyone—teachers and students alike—spoke like comedians on TV. "Hey, why are you speaking in Tokyo dialect?" a friend once asked me. I'd always assumed the intonation I spoke with was standard Japanese, but within Kyoto's particular worldview, it turned out to be nothing more than tōkyō-ben—a Tokyo accent, and a marked one at that. It hit me like the world map had suddenly flipped upside down. In the community I found myself in—Kyoto's "ee toko no ko", kids from "good families," old Kyoto stock—being born and raised in Kyoto was simply assumed. The longer your family line had been Kyoto people, the more standing you had. The closer your house was to the Imperial Palace, the more standing you had.
I somehow survived my school years in Kyoto as "the Tokyo kid," then went to Tokyo and finished university as one of the "kids from the provinces." And then, strangely enough, I found myself packing my bags to move back to Kyoto.
Life in Tokyo wasn't bad. I had plenty of friends, and I met my partner there too. I met all kinds of adults. I even went to parties on the top floors of high-rises, the kind where beauty pageant contestants and young entrepreneurs mingled. In Tokyo, all sorts of people struck up conversation with me. "How much funding have you raised?" "There's someone who's interested in meeting you—let me introduce you." "Wouldn't it be great if we did something 'interesting' together someday!"...
At some point, I started missing life in Kyoto. A city where you could get anywhere by bike. A city where nobody was particularly interested in me. A city where I could keep my feet on the ground and face the things I actually needed to do. So when I graduated, I moved back to Kyoto, rented a small apartment, and started working out of it as my office.
Even now, whenever someone asks about my background in Kyoto, at places like the restaurant Kiyama on Marutamachi, the restaurant Matsucho near Oike, or the bar Gion Sekumeto, I feel my body tense up. I'm neither a "Kyoto person," nor simply "a student" passing through, nor a "tourist"—just some suspended, in-between set of facts about myself. "I live in the Shimogyo area, and I run a small hotel business..." I explain myself almost apologetically, even though there's nothing to be ashamed of. But I've come to think that's not such a bad thing. The gaze and the question—so who exactly are you?—and the fact that I get to keep facing that question myself: that, I think, is what Kyoto is, for me.