Travel to Kobe

Kobe,  the sixth largest city in the Maps of Japan

Kobe, is the sixth largest city in the Maps of Japan and the capital of the Hyogo Prefecture. It’s located in the Southside of the main island, Honshu; 589 km west from Tokyo, 75 km from Kyoto and 39 km west from Osaka. With over 1.5 million of habitants, it’s, along Kyoto and Osaka, part of the Metropolitan area of Keihanshin, and is widely known for its hot spring resorts, Arima Onsen.

Tips for traveling to Kobe

If you want to travel to Kobe, you have to consider going to the synagogues and visit the Chinatown that marks this city as the spot where foreigners first established themselves in Japan. This city has a unique atmosphere, not for naught. Foreigners consider it the best place to live in this country. It’s filled with a mixture of modernity and international cuisine.

You can encounter Japanese and western style houses inside; some of them are now restaurants and boutiques that are open to the public. The Sake breweries from the 19th century are now important museums. Half of its habitants are known as “gaijin” or foreigners, most of them are Korean and Chinese.

The Nihon Shoki

The earliest records of the region of Kobe are kept in the second oldest book of Japan history (the Nihon Shoki, also known as the Chronicles of Japan). They describe the establishment of the Ikuta Shrine by the Empress Jingu in 201; the shrine is now among the oldest of Shintoism, the indigenous spirituality of Japan. Kobe has almost never been a single political entity, not even when the Tokugawa Shogunate controlled the port, during the Tokugawa Period.

Kanbe

The city, as we know it, was founded in 1889. Its name derives from the word “kanbe”, which defines the supporters of the Ikuta Shrine in the city. Kobe surpassed 500,000 habitants in 1956, becoming by law, one of Japan’s 17 designated cities. On January 17, 1995 at 5:46 in the morning, an earthquake of 7.3 on the Richter scale hit the city, killing 6,433 people and making another 300,000s homeless. It destroyed a large part of the port’s facilities and the city.

The quake is recorded as one of the most costly natural disasters of modern history. Because of how it destroyed the Hanshin Expressway, the Japanese remember this incident as the Hanshin-Awaji Earthquake (or the Great Hanshin Earthquake).

Kobe, a cosmopolitan port city

Kobe has been a cosmopolitan port city since the policy of seclusion finished in 1868 (when Japan ended its isolation from the world). It’s now Japan’s fourth busiest port despite the wane it suffered during the 1995 Great Hanshin Earthquake, before the quake it was the busiest port of the Asia Map. Over a hundred international corporations besides very important companies of Japan, have their headquarters in Kobe including Procter & Gamble, Boehringer-Ingelheim and Nestlé.