Where is your hometown?

A hometown, where you consider your hometown to be, is really important. I have lived in many places, and some for longer than I have lived in the place that I consider my hometown.

Some people have moved around a lot more than I have, and so saying where their hometowns are might be difficult. Basically people choose their hometown based on a few factors. Where did they live during their youth? Where do most of their family live now? How do they feel about those places?

What is a hometown? A place where one has spend his/her formative years making friends, having conflicts, successes, failures, romances, traumas, and maturing toward adulthood. It would be a place where people lived in their childhood or adolescence. It may not have been an entirely happy experience, and some may even come to hate or resent their hometown. Whatever the relationship turned out to be in the end, our connections with our hometowns are principally emotional.

It's not just the people, either. Part of a hometown is the physical parts, the schools we attended, the parks where we played, the place we had our first kiss. Those are all part of the experiences that make a hometown what it is.

Towns change for the better and change for the worse. That park where we played might get paved over for a new road. That house where we lived may be run down and vacant.

Towns change for the better, too. The dirty, abandoned factories down by the river might be changed into a park with biking and walking paths. A new hospital with all the best facilities could be built, saving many lives in a growing community.

When we tell people about hour hometowns, what do people want to know? First, if they are not familiar with the place, they may want to know where it is. We can start big and zoom in on the place as we explain. for example, my hometown is Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. If someone didn't know where that was, as people in Japan often don't, I would explain that it is in the Eastern US, in the state of Pennsylvania, in the southwest corner of the state.

People often want to know what your hometown's weather is. Pittsburgh's weather is similar to weather here in Japan. It is hot and humid in summer and cold in the winter. It is a little less humid in Pittsburgh than in Japan, but it's similar otherwise.

People often ask if it is a big city. The population there is 303,000 people. It is almost the same as Yokkaichi, which has 310,000 people. Aside from the population, though, it has a big city feeling. It is culturally diverse with thriving Jewish, Polish, and Italian populations. It has two very good universities, University of Pittsburgh, and Carnegie Mellon University. It also has a big downtown area, several professional sports teams, and lots of manufacturing in the city.

No matter how big or small, well-known or hidden among the mountains and woods, your hometown is where you grew up. Everyone has strong feelings about those places. I think most often the feelings are bitter-sweet. I haven't been back to my hometown for many years, and I might never go back there again. There are parts of it that make me angry when I think about them. There are also places, experiences, and people that fill me with longing and nostalgia.