The port that opened

The port opened on 1 January 1868, one of the last of the treaty ports and by far the most consequential. Two days later the Restoration was proclaimed in Kyoto; within the month the Boshin War had begun, and the country the foreigners had just been admitted to ceased to exist. Kobe grew up in the confusion that followed, and the confusion suited it.

The old port town of Hyogo had traded for centuries; the new harbour was built beside the fishing village of Kobe, about three kilometres east, and within a generation it became the place where Japan met the world commercially: shipping agents, banks, insurance houses, and a foreign settlement running east from the port that was administered — unusually — by its own residents.

Kitano, and the houses on the hill

The merchants built above the town, on the slope called Kitano, where the sea breeze reached and the summer was survivable. Around twenty of their houses survive, the ijinkan, and walking between them is the closest thing Japan has to a preserved treaty-port neighbourhood.

The Weathercock House of 1909, built for a German trader, is the emblem — brick, half-timbered, with a copper cockerel on the spire. The Moegi House next door was the American consul's. They are not grand by European standards. Their interest is that they are here at all, and that Japanese visitors come to look at them as exotica in exactly the way Europeans come to look at temples.

It is the reverse gaze, and Kobe has been comfortable with it for 150 years.

What the port did to the city

Foreign trade left specific residues. Japan's first golf course, first cinema screening, first jazz — all claimed by Kobe, some more defensibly than others. What is not disputed is the food: this is where Japan learned European pastry, where beef became respectable after twelve centuries of near-prohibition, and where a Chinese quarter grew into the country's most compact Chinatown.

The Kobe accent is famously relaxed; the city's self-image is stylish, slightly Western, faintly amused by Osaka. When people call it Japan's most cosmopolitan city, they mean this, and they are largely right.

And what the earthquake did

At 5:45 on 17 January 1995, the Great Hanshin earthquake killed more than 6,400 people, most of them here, and destroyed roughly 100,000 buildings. The port — then one of the world's busiest — was wrecked, and never regained its global ranking.

The rebuild was fast and the city talks about it plainly. A preserved section of collapsed quay is kept at Meriken Park exactly as the earthquake left it, buckled lamp posts included, a few minutes from where your ship ties up. It is small, unsentimental and worth five minutes.