The Origin of KaradaNaoru (2) — Kyoto, Arashiyama, and the Man Who Was My Father

Name: KaradaNaoru
Location: Meguro salon

Admin
May 25
3 min read

Yuki Matsuoka, founder of KaradaNaoru, here.

In the previous article,“‘He Has a Selfless Heart’ — The Beginning of KaradaNaoru (1),”I wrote about the intense bodywork teacher I encountered in my twenties.

This time, I would like to continue the story by writing about my family — especially my father.

Born in Arashiyama, Kyoto

Whenever people ask where I’m from and I answer,“Arashiyama, Kyoto,”they usually react with envy.

But in reality, Kyoto is a basin.

The summers are humid,and the winters cut deep into your bones.

It is not necessarily the easiest place to live.

Today Arashiyama is known worldwide as a tourist destination,but when I was born there around fifty years ago,it was still truly rural.

My Mother, Raised in Tokyo, Hated Kyoto

My mother, who had grown up comfortably in Tokyo, absolutely despised Kyoto.

“The water tastes bad.”

“The restaurants aren’t good.”

“People in Kyoto are so blunt and intrusive.”

I heard those complaints constantly while growing up.

Still, personally, I have always liked Kyoto.

My mother had been raised in a wealthy family in Eifukucho, Tokyo — very much an “ojousama” upbringing.

So moving to Kyoto after marriage was something she never truly accepted.

I lived in Kyoto until I was fourteen.

Then, when my older sister entered high school,my mother, sister, and I moved to Tokyo,leaving my father behind in Kyoto.

After that, my mother never returned to Kyoto again.

Not once.

Even during the sixteen years she and my father lived separately,she never went back.

Her dislike of Kyoto was very real.

My Father, Called “A Selfless Man”

Strangely enough, the harsh bodywork teacher I wrote about previously once described my father as:

“A man with a selfless heart.”

At the time, I found that difficult to understand.

But looking back now, perhaps she was right.

My father constantly repeated the same phrases:

“For the employees.”

“For my older brother.”

My father’s older brother had married into a Kyoto department store family through an arranged marriage.

Because of that connection, my father was brought into the company as well.

He belonged completely to the Showa generation.

Work came before everything.

As a child, I rarely saw him at home.

In my life, he felt more like a rare character who occasionally appeared and disappeared.

And yet, whenever he spoke, there was always an undertone of:

“I raised you.”

Naturally, I found him difficult to like.

Forty Years Devoted to His Brother

Apparently, my father had once dreamed of starting his own business.

But somehow, he kept postponing it.

In the end, he stayed at the company until retirement.

I later heard that he and his brother eventually became estranged,though I never learned the full story.

His brother, however, seemed to have been an extraordinary character.

After marrying into the department store family,he quickly became Managing Director, then President.

Yet according to what I heard, he barely worked.

During Japan’s bubble era,he purchased buildings in Los Angeles and Sydney,creating roughly six billion yen in bad debt and nearly destroying the company.

I also heard rumors that he handed much of the company’s power to a mistress, throwing the organization into chaos.

How much of this is true, I cannot say.

But my father devoted nearly forty years of his life to that brother.

He worked endlessly,for a fraction of his brother’s salary,rarely taking days off.

A Life Spent Serving Everyone Except Family

Looking at it calmly now,I can understand why someone described my father as “selfless.”

The strange thing was:

he devoted himself to others,but neglected his own family.

“For my brother.”

“For the employees.”

He said those things often.

But I almost never heard him say:

“For my family.”

Perhaps that, too, was part of the Showa generation.

Sometimes I think that if someone pointed at a person and told my father,“Dedicate your life to him,”he really might have spent forty years doing exactly that.

Even from the outside, watching someone devote an entire lifetime to such a deeply flawed older brother was extraordinary.

Honestly, it also explains why that intense and somewhat unstable bodywork teacher became so interested in him.

She had an uncanny ability to sense the nature of people.

To be continued in Part 3.

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