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 one is now know as Wadamisaki Point. It was a place where trades were on both land as on sea. Kobe was the capital of Japan for 5 months, almost at the end of the Heian Period. The Emperor Antoku, Tiaras no Kiyomori and the imperial court moved to Fukuhara, what is now known as Kobe.

At the end of the 13th century, they changed the name to Port of Hyogo. The port was growing because the trade with China and other country’s.

In the 17th century , Tokugawa Shogunate, changed his policy to national isolation, 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. 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 is in this days, that a lot of foreigner houses where build in Kobe, Kitano.

During the World war 2, the population of Kobe was dwindled with more then 300.000 people. The city was heavily bombed by more then 300 airplanes, which killed more then 8.000 residents on the 17 march 1945.

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 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.

Kobe was Japans largest port until the great Hanshin Earthquake happened. After that the port of Yokohama to over, but Japan recovered well and is Japans third largest port.

Here you can find some photo's from kobe in the beginning of the 19th century.