郷里
きょうり · kyouri · JLPT N1 · noun
home town
🏡 郷 (village) + 里 (village, hometown) = two village characters stacked: the village you come from
Both characters mean village. Stacked, they stress the place where you were born and raised. 郷里 is close to 故郷 (furusato), another word for home town.
里 — 田 (field) + 土 (earth)
Originally a pictograph combining 田 (field) and 土 (earth), depicting cultivated land where people lived. It came to mean 'village' or 'hometown,' and by extension a unit of distance (about 500 meters). The 'inside' meaning is borrowed; that sense was traditionally written 裏 or 裡.