Walking through the city where I was born and raised, Kobe from Maruyama, Nagata Ward to Hiyodorigoeshi (1)
For the first time in about 30 years, I walked through the neighborhood where I grew up.
Maruyama — a small district tucked into the northernmost part of Nagata Ward, Kobe. I lived here until I was 18. I've been in Tokyo for nearly 15 years now, and I've never stayed in the same neighborhood for more than a decade, which means this place still holds the record as the longest I've ever lived anywhere.
I call it a neighborhood, though that might be generous. It's really just a cluster of houses, a co-op, and a handful of small shops — barely enough to qualify as a town. Nagata is known for its old working-class atmosphere, and while Maruyama sits to the north of it up in the hills, the "uptown" label is misleading. Geographically it clings to a narrow valley, and the feeling is very much the same as the flatlands below.
What's striking is how much the Showa-era atmosphere survives here. The Great Hanshin Earthquake forced Nagata to rebuild itself almost from scratch, but Maruyama was spared comparatively, and that time capsule quality shows. Growing up here around 40 years ago, I'd visit a friend's house and find his mother or grandmother doing piecework — sewing shoes at the kitchen table. You'd glance through a neighbor's front door and see rows of half-finished shoes lined up on the floor.
It was a rough area by reputation. The running joke — half urban legend by the time I was in junior high — was that not a day went by at school without someone bleeding. Quite a few classmates went straight to work after finishing junior high, and stories of kids dropping out of not-so-reputable high schools weren't exactly rare.
Climbing the hills with all of that flooding back, I was breathing hard within minutes.
"The hills of Kobe" sounds picturesque, but what it really means is that everything is a slope. After 15 years of walking the flat streets of Tokyo, these inclines are brutal. I honestly can't imagine how I ran around here as a kid. And where the terrain is too steep even for a slope, the only option is stairs — steep, narrow stairs that I suspect must be genuinely difficult for the older residents who still live here.
The staircase in this photo has barely changed in 40 years, which genuinely surprised me. As a child I always thought it looked like someone had thrown it together without much care — and here it is, still standing, still in use.
It's not just this staircase. Almost everywhere I looked, the details I'd absorbed as a child — through my feet, my hands, my whole body — were exactly as I remembered them. Part of me wonders if nothing changing is really okay. But then again, maybe that's just what happens when you spend a long time in Tokyo, where everything, down to the smallest corner, seems to be in constant flux.
To be continued.
