On the Road – Kobe Walk

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Summary

Travel is an act for human beings to visit new places and experience different cultures and histories. Through travel, people can actually feel historical events and people’s lives by visiting historical places and cultural heritage sites, and can gain a deeper understanding of history and broaden their own perspectives. In this section, we will discuss the historical background of the trip and the places visited based on Ryotaro Shiba’s “Kaido yuku” (On the Road) about this journey and history.

Kaidou wo yuku Vol 21 Kobe sanpo.

In the previous article I wrote about the Miura Peninsula. This time, I would like to describe a walk in Kobe.

Kobe Walk

This time, I would like to describe a walk in Kobe City, Hyogo Prefecture. As the title suggests, this is a small-scale “walking” trip around the coast of Kobe City. The trip starts from Kobe Portopia Hotel at the southern end of Port Island, a man-made island in the Port of Kobe, and takes the Portliner to the Ikuta River at the Trade Center. The tour continues to Nunobiki Waterfall behind Shin-Kobe Station, the Old Foreign Settlement in downtown Kobe, and the Kobe Overseas Chinese History Museum.

Kobe, along with Yokohama, is an exception among Japan’s major cities in that it does not have the tradition of a castle town from the Edo period. The port was opened on January 1, 1868 AD (renamed Meiji in October 1968) and urbanized. At first, even the port’s harbor master was a foreigner, a British god in the employ of a foreigner. Furthermore, a foreign settlement was established on the sands of the coast, and eventually, a mixed residential area was established in the mountainside, forming the original form of the city.

In this respect, the ancestors were almost as if they were created by foreigners. In the beginning, aside from prefectural ordinances and prefectural officials, many Japanese who came to this new city to work were either masters of foreigners or received food and clothing from the profits of their trade landings and shipping operations, and were easily influenced by foreign customs and culture. In this respect, compared to Yokohama, which opened its ports to foreigners in the old shogunate era, no matter how much Kobe tried to imitate foreigners, it was not scolded by the old shogunate, which was based on the principle of national seclusion, nor did it have to worry about being beaten to death by the exclusionist ronin.

The Kobe settlement (which legally ended in 1897) was originally a low marshy area of mud and sand near the mouth of the Ikuta River that was reclaimed, filled in, and divided into five sections, numbered 1, 2, and so on, where buildings were built one after the other.

In 1970, two years after the settlement was established, the Hongkong and Shanghai Banking Corporation (HSBC: back of the figure below) and the Oriental Hotel (front of the figure below) were built on this site.

In addition to Kobe, HSBC has been established in Yokohama, Nagasaki, and Osaka.

The Oriental Hotel had been in business from 1870 to 1995, but the 1995 Great Hanshin-Awaji Earthquake, while not destroying the hotel, severely damaged the building, making it difficult to operate as a hotel, and it closed for a while before going out of business. In 2008, Mitsui Fudosan Co., Ltd. was appointed as the project manager and opened a new hotel under the name of “Oriental Hotel Kobe.

The original prosperous port of Kobe was located a few kilometers west of the city at Owadamari (east of present-day Wadamisaki), where the Sung Dynasty trade increased the city’s wealth. The area known as the “settlement” was further east, near the current Sannomiya Station, and it was Kaishu Katsu who built a port there and used it as a naval training center. There is a cylindrical gun emplacement designed by Katsu Kaishu at Cape Wada, which remains as a historical site in the premises of Mitsubishi Heavy Industries, Ltd.

When one hears the word “water in Kobe,” one thinks of the water of Rokko.

Kobe has long been famous for its delicious water, and it is said that the delight of foreign ships calling at Kobe is to empty their water tanks and load them to overflowing with Kobe water. One of the most famous places where water from the Rokko Mountains gushes forth is Nunobiki Falls, a 15-minute walk from Shin-Kobe Station on the Shinkansen bullet train line.

Nunobiki’s water is said to be good because it has passed through the aging granite layers of Rokko and contains just the right amount of minerals, and it is also said that its flavor does not change even when ships cross the equator. Thanks to such natural blessings, Kobe’s water supply lagged behind that of other cities until the middle of the Meiji period (1868-1912), and water dealers even existed in the city.

Kobe has an artificial island called Port Island, which can be reached by monorail from Sannomiya, the center of Kobe. There is also Kobe Airport at the end of the island. Ryotaro Shiba and his friends stopped at a hotel there.

The name of the hotel is not revealed, but it is assumed to be the “Kobe Portopia Hotel” based on the description in Kaido Yuku. Port Island itself was opened in 1981, so when Ryotaro Shiba and others stayed there, the town had just been established and the hotel was probably new.

The night view from the Portopia Hotel, also known as the million dollar night view, was said to be spectacular.

Kobe is also famous for its Chinatown as well as Yokohama and Nagasaki. Ryotaro Shiba and others met two friends with the surname Chen who lived in Kobe. One is Chen De-ren and the other is Chen Sun-sin. Chen Sun-sin is an Edogawa Rampo Award-winning author who has written novels related to Chinese history, including “Kare Kusa no Root,” “Opium War,” “Taiping Heaven,” “Secret Book of Three Kingdoms,” and “Shosetsu Juhachi Shikaku. I can still recall reading “New Journey to the West” as a child.

The trip will conclude with the Aoqiu Library. Kobe Nagata-ku, where the life-size Giant Robot is located, is known as an area with many Korean and Korean residents.

The late Mr. Han皙曦, a Korean businessman and scholar who made his fortune making chemical shoes in Japan, established the Cheongok Bunko, which was one of the leading libraries specializing in Korean history in Japan and abroad. It is said to have been one of the leading libraries specializing in Korean history in Japan and abroad.

One of the world’s first products born in Nagata-ku was the flip-flop. The flip-flop was born just after the end of the war, when an American industrial designer named Ray Bastin came to Japan as part of the reconstruction project promoted by the GHQ, and was amazed at the simple and rational shape of the zori. The company teamed up with “Naigai Rubber” in Nagata-ku, Tokyo, which developed “Independent Bubble Sponge Rubber,” a high-performance material that does not allow water to penetrate, to make a wooden pattern to fit even foreigners who are not familiar with nasogumi footwear, and after repeated research, the pattern was completed with a thinner nasogumi and a slope from toe to heel.

The beesan subsequently enjoyed an explosive boom (the number of beesans exported from 190,000 pairs in January 1957 to nearly 1.2 million pairs in July, and over 10 million pairs in December 1959). Bisan are called “sponge sandals” or “flip-flops” in Japan, but in English they must be called “flip-flops” to be understood as a truly global footwear item.

In the next article, I will discuss the Geibi way.