Kiyoha Kiriki made her debut as a “maiko” at the age of 16. A child who was obsessed with Japanese dance. The woman who appeared before us, Ms. Kiyoha, was neatly dressed in a kimono. She is now 23 years old. She looks like a child, but she is an independent woman with both a lively expression and a calm aura. She decided to become a maiko because she wanted to continue her love of Japanese dance and improve her art. She says, “Ever since I was a child, I never received much praise for anything I did, but I did receive compliments on my Japanese dancing, which I learned from a friend. I am petite, so it was difficult to make my body look big in dance, but in Nihon buyo, I can express my feelings that come from inside my body. I could create my own world through my own interpretation and have the audience empathize with it. I enjoyed it. When I saw my master’s dance for the first time, it looked as if the floor was moving, not that he was moving. It was beautiful. From there, I fell in love with the world of dance.” Her parents were remarried, and she lived with her older sister, whom she had with her mother’s previous husband. She was born in Yamaguchi Prefecture and lived in Wakayama and other places. He lived in Osaka for the longest time. “After that, my parents divorced because each of them fell in love with someone else. My mother has been married several times since then. It would be premature to assume that she grew up in a complicated family.” Despite the divorce, their family is still close, and they have barbecues with their parents’ second marriages and their children. “My mother always lived happily ever after. She would do what she wanted to do. I wanted to be that kind of adult. But I was bullied in class in elementary school, so I read self-help books in the second grade to boost my self-esteem (laughs). I also liked romance novels. I may have been quite precocious on the inside.” She was bullied not only by her friends but also by her homeroom teacher. In the fourth grade, the teacher had the whole class write down what they disliked about her, and then took a picture of it on the board and handed it to her. The teacher told her, “You should be more like a child.” But she has her own personality. You can’t force her to be like that. Her parents, worried about her, sent her to a different school several times. “I don’t like going to school much, so I used to go to my mother’s work and read magazines and books,” she said. “The models in the fashion magazines looked radiant. I told her I liked them, and my mother applied for a talent agency.” She passed the audition, joined the agency, and began appearing as a child in musicals and on stage. It was around this time that she began to enjoy expressing herself. However, during a job in Tokyo, she was suddenly attacked in a hallway by a member of the entertainment industry she was working for. She was cornered against a wall, kissed, and had his tongue darted in. She was eleven years old when she escaped by taking the fire escape. She reported the attack and her assailant, who she said was a habitual offender, was later arrested.   Although she was shocked, she continued her performing career. Her older sister was active as an underground idol, so she performed as a back-up dancer on stage and became an underground idol herself. She even appeared in a local hero show. However, “even though I took voice training, my singing was not very good, and I was too small to be a good dancer.” She was unable to find a place to express herself.