Walking Kobe: The Settlement Line, Mountain Water, Nada Sake

The port of Kobe (神戸) did not open under that name. The city's official history of the harbour gives the date as 1 January 1868 — the 7th day of the 12th month of Keiō 3 in the Japanese calendar — and the name as Hyōgo; an imperial order renamed it Kobe Port in 1892. What ships came for, besides cargo, was water. The Nunobiki (布引) streams of the Rokko (六甲) mountains carry little of the organic matter that makes water go bad, and foreign crews prized it as water that would not spoil even after crossing the equator, calling it Water of God. The quays still carry 701 faucets for ships.

Inland, the streets run up into a grove. Hyōgo Prefecture's tourism site introduces Ikuta Shrine (生田神社), in the central district of Sannomiya (三宮), as a shrine of roughly 1,800 years' standing, and ties the place name Kobe to it. Its chief deity is given as Wakahirume-no-Mikoto, the gentle spirit of Amaterasu Ōmikami. A jinja, a Shinto shrine, is usually entered through a gate called a torii; this one opens straight off the busiest streets in the city.

Number Fifteen and the Line Through Town

The foreign settlement laid out after the opening was sold off in numbered plots. Cultural Heritage Online's commentary states that at the first auction, in 1868, the plot called Number Fifteen went to a French buyer, who put a hotel on it, and that the two-storey timber-and-brick building standing there now is thought to date from around the 14th year of Meiji. Its sea-facing south side once carried an open veranda on the upper floor, with pediments at either end, later taken into the rooms. The Kobe City Museum has a comparable second life: the museum dates its building to 1935, designed by Kotarō Sakurai (桜井小太郎) as the Kobe branch of the Yokohama Specie Bank (横浜正金銀行), and registered as a cultural property in 1998.

Not everyone was allowed inside the settlement. The Nankinmachi Shopping Street Promotion Association's official account explains that Qing China had concluded no treaty with Japan, so Chinese residents could not live in the foreign quarter; they took the land immediately west of it, today's Nankinmachi (南京町), and opened general-goods shops, pork butchers and eating houses. The district measures about 270 metres east to west and about 110 metres north to south. Walking it, the thing to look for is the seam where it meets the old settlement.

Kobe's confectioners keep their own founding stories. Morozoff (モロゾフ) says of itself that it began in 1931 as a chocolate shop on Tor Road (トアロード), and that its founder, told by an American friend that people in the West give presents to those they love on 14 February, introduced the practice of giving chocolate on Valentine's Day in 1932; the first products were Sweetheart and Bouquet d'Amour, and a Valentine advertisement ran in an English-language newspaper in February 1935. The maker of Kobe Pudding (神戸プリン) describes a slower start: three years of trial and error before the 1993 launch, egg, dairy and sugar lifted by a citrus liqueur, and a recipe unchanged since.

A Quay Left Standing as It Fell

Meriken Park (メリケンパーク) runs out along the water, and one corner of it has been left alone. The City of Kobe's account of the Kobe Port Earthquake Memorial Park says it preserves about 60 metres of the quay at Meriken Pier as the Great Hanshin-Awaji Earthquake left it. The park opened in July 1997 and reopened after renovation in January 2025, with multilingual displays and an augmented-reality Time Scope. The broken stretch needs no caption to be read.

Two company histories begin on this waterfront. Kawasaki Heavy Industries' official history has it that the founder, Shōzō Kawasaki (川崎正蔵), opened a shipyard in Tsukiji, Tokyo, in 1878, and that the Kobe thread starts in March 1881 with the Kawasaki Hyōgo Shipyard at Higashidechō (東出町); a leased government yard was merged in in 1886, Kawasaki Shipyard Co., Ltd. was established in Kobe in 1896, and the present name came in 1939. Kobe Steel dates itself to 1905, when the partnership Suzuki Shoten (鈴木商店) bought the steel works run by Seiichirō Kobayashi in Wakihama (脇浜) and renamed it; in 1911 it split off and was incorporated at Wakihama-chō.

The harbour also holds an island the city made. The Kobe City Archives' chronology says work on Port Island (ポートアイランド) began in fiscal 1966 under the aim of a maritime cultural city of the 21st century, that the reclamation was finished in fiscal 1980, and that Portopia '81 was held to mark it, drawing crowds unheard of for a regional exposition. A coffee museum stands on the island, and UCC Ueshima Coffee's own product history tells where its drink came from: a founder who boarded a train leaving a bottled coffee unfinished, a can launched in April 1969 to little enthusiasm, hard selling into the Osaka Expo, and sudden success once the 1970 expo opened.

Reading the Slopes of Kitano

Kitano (北野) is read house by house rather than as a set. Its ijinkan, the former residences of foreign merchants and officials, include the Weathercock House (風見鶏の館), which gives its own date as around the 42nd year of Meiji, the German architect Georg de Lalande as designer, and the German trading merchant Gottfried Thomas as the client who built it to live in. It was later designated a National Important Cultural Property. The name means weathercock; look up at it first, then go in and walk through rooms that were somebody's home.

Two more on the same slopes repay a slow look. The Kitano ijinkan district's site derives the name of Uroko-no-Ie (うろこの家), the Scale House, from the natural stone slates covering its walls, whose shape resembles the scales of a fish; by the same telling the house went up in a foreign settlement in the late Meiji period and was moved here after the Taishō era began. Facing Kitanochō Square (北野町広場), the City of Kobe's note on it gives Moegi-no-Yakata (萌黄の館) as a two-storey wooden house built in 1903 for Hunter Sharp (ハンター・シャープ), American consul general in Kobe, who lived in the city from his arrival in Japan in 1886 until 1908. Moegi is a soft yellow-green, and the walls wear it.

In the middle of the city, a Japanese garden keeps a stable. Sōraku-en (相楽園) takes its name, by its own telling, from a phrase in the Chinese classic the Yijing — wa shite yorokobi ai tanoshimu, sharing harmony and joy — and dates construction from around the 18th year of Meiji, as the garden of the main residence of the businessman Taijirō Kodera (小寺泰次郎); it passed to the City of Kobe after the 16th year of Shōwa. Inside stands the former Kodera family stable (旧小寺家厩舎): brick, two storeys, late Meiji, carriage garage and horse stalls below, rooms for stable hands and coachmen above, with a stair-tower at one corner. Cultural Heritage Online, which attributes it to Kōzō Kawai (河合浩蔵), notes how few stables of the kind survive; it was designated an Important Cultural Property in 1970.

Water Held Back, Water Coming Up Hot

Behind the city, the path past Nunobiki Falls climbs to a dam. Kobe had no large river and drew its drinking water from wells, and population growth and cholera forced the question that the reservoir answered. The City of Kobe presents Nunobiki Gohonmatsu Dam (布引五本松堰堤), known as Nunobiki Dam, as Japan's first gravity concrete dam built solely for water supply, fed by the Nunobiki valley stream of the Ikuta river system, completed in 1900 and designated a National Important Cultural Property in 2006 among the Nunobiki water-source facilities.

Higher again is the ridge. Kobe's tourism site introduces the Rokko Cable (六甲ケーブル) as a historic cable railway opened in 1932, climbing about 1.7 kilometres from Rokko Cable Shita Station to Rokko Sanjō Station in about 10 minutes, with the Tenrandai (天覧台) viewpoint at the top. The phrase million-dollar night view is traced to Kobe seen from Mount Rokko: by one telling, people connected with the power company looked down from the summit and put the monthly electricity bill for the lights below at about one million dollars. Kikuseidai (掬星台) on Mount Maya is the other place to test the arithmetic.

Kobe's other water comes up hot. The City of Kobe sets the two baths of Arima Onsen (有馬温泉) side by side. Kin-sen, the gold spring, is brown, an iron-bearing sodium-chloride strong saline hot spring, with sources such as Tenjin at 99.4°C and Uwanari at 100.5°C. Gin-sen, the silver spring, is colourless and clear, a carbonated iron-bearing simple cold mineral spring whose carbonated source sits at 18.3°C, understood as carbonated water mixed with radium water rising from deep in the mountains. Bathe in both and the contrast stops being a matter of description.

The town's cracker is made of the same water. A Hyōgo tourism site explains that tansan senbei (炭酸せんべい) is wheat flour, potato starch, sugar and salt kneaded with Arima's carbonated spring water and baked — no egg, no butter, nothing added — each one hand-baked to about one millimetre thick. Crisp, faintly sweet, and best eaten freshly baked rather than carried home.

Nada's Sake Districts and a Ward That Wanted Another Name

Nada is sake country. Nada Gogo (灘五郷), the five districts of Nada, are Saigō, Mikagegō, Uozakigō, Nishinomiyagō and Imazugō, and of these Saigō, Mikagegō and Uozakigō lie inside Kobe. Hyōgo brews more sake than any other prefecture, and Nada Gogo counts as its first-ranked producing area. The breweries sit through Higashinada and Nada wards, close enough together that an afternoon can take in more than one and compare what each pours.

One of those district names turned into a word for stone. The Kobe Shimbun traces granite quarried at Mikage (御影) being loaded onto ships at Mikage beach and carried around the country, until the place name came to stand for the rock itself: mikage-ishi, granite. Stonecutters lived in numbers along the Ishiyagawa (石屋川), the river whose name holds the trade, and quarrying and dressing at the quarries upstream on the Sumiyoshi river was the local industry. Rokko granite, graded apart as hon-mikage, has not been quarried since 1956, and scarcity has pushed the price of top grades up.

The ward names here were argued over. Higashinada Ward's official history records that when Mikage, Sumiyoshi and Uozaki — 3 towns and villages — were taken into Kobe in 1950, residents wanted the name Nada Ward, holding that this was the real centre of Nada. Kobe already had a Nada Ward to the west. Nishinada and Honnada were floated; the decision was left to the mayor, who settled on Higashinada, east of Nada. The map still shows who lost the argument.

From Minatogawa to the Griddles of Nagata

At Minatogawa a shrine keeps a defeat. Minatogawa Shrine (湊川神社) relates that Masashige Kusunoki (楠木正成) took his own life here in 1336, in the battle fought on this ground against the Ashikaga army, and that Mitsukuni Tokugawa (徳川光圀), who revered him, raised his tomb during the Edo period; the shrine itself was founded in the 5th year of Meiji, 1872, by order of the Emperor Meiji. The stone cut with Mitsukuni's own words for the loyal retainer's tomb is a nationally designated Important Cultural Property. Visitors took home kawara-senbei (瓦せんべい), stamped with Kusunoki in armour and the kikusui crest.

That cracker is a port product. The Kobe Senbei Association's account has it appearing after the opening of 1868, when eggs, milk, beef and wheat arrived in a city where they had been hard to get. Made with wheat flour, eggs and sugar instead of rice flour, it was nicknamed the luxury senbei and the haikara — high-collar, meaning fashionably Western — senbei. It is squared off in imitation of a roof tile, and it breaks crisply, with a restrained sweetness.

The district beside it sits in a riverbed. Kobe's Hyōgo Ward explains that Shinkaichi (新開地) came into being in the late Meiji period, when the Minatogawa was rerouted and the old channel was built over; it served as a kitchen for the city and became a centre of popular entertainment and performance, enough that people set it against Tokyo's own theatre quarter — Asakusa in the east, Shinkaichi in the west. Walk it for what an entertainment district leaves behind.

Nagata (長田) cooks on iron. Sobameshi (そばめし) is sauce-fried noodles and rice chopped fine and turned together on the griddle, finished with a mildly sweet house-blended sauce, topped with pork, seafood or kimchi, and adjusted at the table with doro sauce, a thick dark one, or chilli powder; it does duty as lunch and as a mid-afternoon snack. Sujiyaki (すじ焼き) is the other local plate: sujikon, beef tendon and konjac — a firm jelly made from a root — simmered sweet and salty with soy sauce and mirin, heaped over batter and cabbage and finished with sauce. The same topping is called bokkake here, and shops name the dish differently.

The beef that carries the city's name is handled plainly in the official recipe. The agriculture ministry's account of Kobe beef steak begins with garlic sautéed in oil on the griddle; the sirloin goes on after, cooked over low to medium heat on both faces and along the edges, seasoned with salt and pepper. Sauce, mustard, ponzu, salt or garlic sauce are added to taste at the end, with mushrooms, spinach, onion and carrot alongside. There is no ceremony anywhere in the instructions.

Spring here has a smell. The agriculture ministry's note on ikanago no kugini (いかなごのくぎ煮) sets out young sand lance, two to four centimetres long, simmered down with soy sauce, sugar and ginger, sometimes with green sanshō pepper, dried chilli or yuzu; the name comes from the cooked fish looking like rusted, bent nails. The season opens from the end of February into early March, and households buy the young fish by the kilo, cook it the same day and send it to friends and relatives living away. Knock something over while they are at it and you may hear becchonai, Banshū dialect for no harm done, the local form of betsujō nai.

West Along the Shore to the Strait

At Suma (須磨) the ground belongs to the war between the Minamoto and Taira clans. Suma-dera (須磨寺) stands near the setting of the Battle of Ichinotani, and the temple describes itself as a place of prayer that watched both houses rise and fall. Among its treasures is a flute called Aoba, handed down with the story of Taira no Atsumori; the grounds also hold a pond said to be where Atsumori's head was washed, a pine where legend seats Yoshitsune, and Atsumori's head mound. They are small and scattered, and better found one at a time.

In Tarumi Ward the place names are made of water and salt. Tarumi (垂水) means dripping water, that is, a waterfall, and the ward's own notes on its names point to four falls that once stood along the north side of the road from Higashitarumi to Shioya: Komasute, Biwa, Onji and Shirataki. The name is old enough to appear in the Man'yōshū, Japan's earliest poetry anthology, and in the Engishiki of 927. Shioya (塩屋) was once called Sanrihama; salt was made along this coast from ancient times, and the word for the hut where it was boiled is said to have settled into the name of the place.

One hill above the shore worked as a telegraph before there was one. From the middle of the Edo period until 1897, flags about the size of a tatami mat were waved on Hatafuri-yama (旗振山) to pass the Dōjima rice prices from Osaka westward to Akashi, Kakogawa and Okayama. Clear sightlines east and west were what made the relay work, and it was abolished when the telegraph opened. The summit still invites you to judge how far you could have been seen.

The last stretch is pines. Maiko (舞子) was known from the Edo period for shirasuna seishō, white sand and green pines, and the Kobe Shimbun reports that when it became a prefectural park in 1900 the grove ran 1.7 kilometres east to west in a strip only 40 metres deep — pine as far as the eye went. The high-growth years thinned it, a 1969 survey finding only about 200 trees thicker than 20 centimetres, and 5,400 pines have been planted since.

Above the beach stand the towers. The Akashi Kaikyō Bridge (明石海峡大橋) is a suspension bridge 3,911 metres long, with a main span of 1,991 metres between its towers; it opened in 1998 and was the longest suspension bridge in the world until Turkey's Çanakkale 1915 Bridge, at 2,023 metres, was completed in 2022. From the Kobe shore the span reads as one line drawn across the water, with the replanted pines at your back as the older measure of the same view. Wait there as the light goes; the strait is the last thing the city hands you.