Why I Created This Place

I change considerably depending on who I am speaking with.

It is not only my tone of voice. How much I reveal, how I respond, what I find interesting, and which emotions I show all shift. By observing the person in front of me, I have learned to create a version of myself that works well in that relationship.

This has also been a useful ability. Even with people whose cultures and ways of thinking differ from mine, I can build a relationship once I begin to understand their particular rules of communication.

At the same time, the more versions of myself I could move between, the less certain I became about something else.

As I kept thinking, another way of seeing it gradually emerged.

There may not be one authentic way of speaking while every other version is false. The forms of expression I discovered through relationships were also parts of me that genuinely existed in those moments.

And beneath those changing forms, something else remained.

Tone and character may change, but these ways of judging and responding may form a contour that changes less easily.

To explore that possibility, I answered short questions one by one, using them as a way to understand myself.

As I answered, I found qualities within me that appeared contradictory yet existed side by side.

Those contradictions were not mistakes. I came to think that the coexistence of things that cannot fit inside one personality type is itself part of a person’s contour.

I built RINKAKU so others could explore the same question for themselves.

RINKAKU means “contour” in Japanese: not a fixed definition of who you are, but an outline that becomes visible through what keeps returning.

This site is not meant to place people into a single category. Nor is it meant to declare, “This is the kind of person you are.”

Through 100 questions, it offers a place to look beyond the expressions that change with people and situations, toward curiosity, ethics, interpersonal distance, and the ways we handle emotion.

If something feels wrong, asking why it feels wrong can also become part of understanding yourself.

I hope this place gives you a chance to slowly trace the parts of your own contour that you have not yet found words for.