The south: third stop Kobe

Stop, yes i have stopped writing for a while. I apologize but i was in Seville and now we have visitors. You may think this is an excuse... but i do not really find time for writing!

I will continue telling you about our trip to the south of Japan after the big earthquake. As i wrote at the end of the previous post, we decided to go to Hiroshima. We had to take the shinkansen in Kobe, so we used the opportunity for visiting the city.

Kobe is the sixth biggest city of Japan with a population of about one and a half million inhabitants. It was one of the first places which started the trade with western countries after the commercial and cultural isolation period of the country (Sakoku, from ~1640 to 1853) finished. The port is still one of most important ones of the region. Kobe is also famous because of the earthquake which destroyed the city in 1995, depressed the economy and took the life of more than 6000 people. The general mood was some kind of sad, so we decided to do "sad tourism" and we went to visit the disaster city...

It was sunny and a bit warmer than the previous days (at last), so we started at the port, one of the most affected parts by the tremor. In the picture you can have an overview, it is almost completely reconstructed and it looks modern and fancy.

It is noticeable the port tower with its hyperboloid structure and its shiny red color. Close to this one, there is a memorial park, the Meriken park, to the victims of the earthquake. There, you can find among others: a maritime museum (with a reproduction of the Nao Santa Maria), sculptures like the ones you can see in the picture below, and an exposition explaining what happened and the reconstruction methods.

As a reminder, the left a part of the pier as is was after the disaster, completely destroyed (take a look to the streetlamps!).

But the life continues, the city is reconstructed and follows the beat.

Kobe has this multicultural feeling of big harbours, with giraffes on the streets...
a China Town...
a quarter with European style buildings of the beginning of the XIXth century (of the former traders), and other houses as peculiar as the one you can see below.

For finishing our visit, we went up to the top of the city hall and made some photos of the city from above.

From there is easy to understand the distribution: on one side the mountains, on the other the sea, and in the middle Kobe, like a child with new shoes and a long life in front.