History
The History of Kobe started with the beginning of the port. In the 8th century there was a place called the Owada Anchorage, which is now know as Wadamisaki Point. It was a place where trading took place on both land as on sea. When the 81st emperor Antoku, and the imperial court moved to Fukuharu (Kobe) at the end of the Heian period, the city became the capital of Japan. This was only for a short period, because they moved back to Kyoto 5 months later.
At the end of the 13th century, they changed the name to Port of Hyogo. The port was growing fast due to the trade with China and other country’s.
In the 17th century , Tokugawa Shogunate changed his policy to national isolation. With this he ended nearly all contact with other nations, despite this big change for the country, Kobe kept growing, and played an important part of the country it own transport.
With the ending of the national isolation policy, the port of Hyogo reopened for international trade in 1886. 3 years later in 1889 the City of Kobe was founded. In those days Kobe had a populations of around 130.000 , which grew up to 1 million by 1939. It was during this period , that a lot of foreigner houses where build in Kobe. These houses were build in areas such as Kitano, and James Yama (west of the city).
Kobe after being bombed (2)
During the World war 2, the population of Kobe was dwindled with more than 300.000 people. The city was heavily bombed by more than 300 airplanes, which killed more then 8.000 residents on the 17 march 1945. After this bombing there were 6 other bombings, 5 of them were precision attacks on Kobe's industry, and on military targets
Kobe was determined to grow again , as the citizens and the leaders of the city, made ceaseless effort to build the city up to his top again. In 1956 Kobe’s population was higher then a million and economic grow came. Nowadays the city has more then 1.5 million citizens and is the 6th largest city of Japan.
On the 17th of January , 1995 an earthquake of 7.2 on the Richter scale, killed 6,433 people, and made around 1 fifth of the Kobe population (300.000) homeless. The earthquake destroyed large parts of the city’s port, and big fire’s spread over the city. The earthquake is one of the mostly costly natural disasters in today’s history, the earthquake is know as The Great Hanshin Earthquake or the Hanshin-Awaji earthquake.
The harbor was heavily destroyed (120 of the 150 quays were destroyed), and it took the city a long time to recover as largest domestic harbor. On December 2007 the Osaka, Kobe and Sakai-Senboku Amagasaki-Nishinomiya-Ashiya merged into Hanshin port, making it Japan's busiest and largest container port, ahead of Tokyo, Yokohama and Nagoya.(
Here you can find some great photo's from kobe in the beginning of the 19th century.
(1) Kobe 1890s • Ikuta Jinja Matsuri, courtesy of Old Photos of Japan
(2) Kobe after being bombed from Showa History of 100 million people: Occupation of Japan Vol.2" published by Mainichi Newspapers Company, used under the Creative Commons License