Nankinmachi

When the port opened in 1868, Chinese merchants came with the Western trading houses — but they were not covered by the treaties, so they could not live in the foreign settlement. They settled immediately west of it instead, and that accident of exclusion produced Nankinmachi.

It is small: essentially one east-west street and a short crossing, with a square in the middle. Yokohama's Chinatown is far larger and Nagasaki's is older. Kobe's is the one people actually eat their way along, because everything is street food and everything is within sixty seconds of everything else.

The one thing to queue for

Roushouki has been making one item since 1915: butaman, pork buns, small enough that three is a normal order. There is a queue at almost any hour and it moves fast, because nobody is choosing — you hold up fingers and pay.

The bun is not a meal and is not meant to be. It is the opening move. After it: chimaki, sticky rice steamed in bamboo leaf; grilled scallops on skewers; ebi-chiri prawns in chilli sauce eaten standing; and the sesame-coated fried dumplings sold by weight.

Do not sit down. The restaurants here are fine and the street is better.

When it becomes something else

For roughly two weeks around Chinese New Year — late January or February — the quarter runs the Shunsetsusai, a spring festival with lion dances, dragon processions and Chinese opera in the square. The lanterns triple, the crowd becomes serious, and the whole thing spills into the surrounding streets.

If your call lands in that window it is the best two hours in Kobe, and no plan should be defended against it.

How it fits a port day

Nankinmachi sits between the waterfront and Sannomiya station, which means it is on the way to everything — ten minutes from Naka Pier, five from the old foreign settlement, fifteen downhill from Kitano. That geography is why our plans keep putting it in as a filler: it absorbs twenty minutes or ninety with equal grace, and it feeds you either way.