Three days in Kobe: a foreign port under a mountain, with Himeji Castle down the line

Two nights in one hotel: the merchants' houses on the hillside on arrival, a day trip west to the white castle at Himeji, and the harbour on the last morning.

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Length
3 days, 2 nights
Where you stay
Kobe
Places
7 across 3 days
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Kobe has about a kilometre of flat ground to work with. Mount Rokko comes down almost to the water, and the whole city of one and a half million people is squeezed into the strip between the two, which is why every walk here is either along the shore or straight up a hill.

It became a treaty port in 1868, nine years after Nagasaki and Yokohama, and foreigners settled on the slope above the harbour because it was cooler and the views were better. Their houses are still there. So is the Chinatown their neighbours built, and Japan's first mosque, and a synagogue, and a Sikh temple, none of which is a normal set of things to find in a Japanese city.

In 1995 an earthquake struck at ten to six in the morning and killed 6,433 people here. The city rebuilt so thoroughly that a visitor sees no trace of it except where a memorial has deliberately left some, and knowing that changes how the waterfront reads.

Three days works because the second one leaves town. Himeji, forty minutes west, has the finest surviving castle in Japan, and it is the single best thing you can do from a Kobe base.

Highlights

  • The Ijinkan, timber and brick merchants' houses on the Kitano slope
  • Himeji Castle, white, enormous, and never destroyed
  • Buta-man eaten standing up in Nankinmachi
  • The harbour front at dusk, with the quay the earthquake wrecked left as it fell

Where to stay

Kobe, two nights

One base for all three days, including the day out at Himeji, which is a train ride rather than a move.

The centre is compact and the gradient does the navigating for you: the foreign houses are at the top, the port is at the bottom, and Sannomiya sits in the middle of both.

Day by day

Day 1 in Kobe

The Kitano houses and a city garden

The first afternoon goes uphill. Kitano is the slope above the centre where Kobe's nineteenth century foreign traders built, and a couple of dozen of their houses survive as the Ijinkan, several of them open to walk through. It is a steep, pretty, slightly unreal quarter of verandas and weathervanes with a Japanese city stacked below it.

Come back down by a different street and finish in the garden below the government offices, which is flat, quiet and full of pine.

  1. 14:30

    Kitano Ijinkan

    Other

    The Ijinkan are the houses foreign merchants built on this hillside after the port opened, mostly in the last decades of the nineteenth century, in whatever style they had grown up with. Some are museums with an entry fee, some are cafes, some are still lived in. Buy a combined ticket if you want three or more; otherwise pick two and spend the rest of the time on the lanes, which are the better half of the visit.

  2. 16:15

    Weathercock House

    Other

    The one everybody photographs, built for a German trader and faced in brick, which none of its neighbours are, with a copper weathercock on its turret that has become the symbol of the district. The interior is furnished in period and takes twenty minutes. The little square in front of it is where the coach parties stop, so it is calmer late in the day.

  3. 17:15

    Sōraku-en Garden

    Visit

    A proper Japanese garden fifteen minutes downhill, walled off from the traffic and almost always half empty. Cheap to enter, twenty minutes to walk around, and a good place to sit down after the Kitano gradient.

  4. 19:00

    Kobe beef for dinner

    Eat

    Book a teppanyaki counter in the Sannomiya or Kitano-zaka area a day or two ahead. The good ones are small and fill up.

With more time: The Nunobiki Falls are twenty minutes on foot from Shin-Kobe station, four cascades on the Ikuta River with the top one dropping 43 metres, and hardly anybody walks up to them. The ropeway from the same station carries on above to the Nunobiki Herb Garden, which is worth it as much for the view back down over the port as for the herbs.

Day 2 in Kobe

Himeji Castle and the walled gardens beside it

About a dozen Japanese castles still have their original keep rather than a postwar concrete rebuild, and Himeji is the biggest and the best of them by some distance. It went up in its present form in 1609 and came through the civil wars, the 1945 firebombing that flattened the town around it and the 1995 earthquake without losing a beam. What you climb is the real thing.

Take an early train, do the castle first while the queue is short, and keep the afternoon for the gardens next door and lunch. You are back in Kobe by late afternoon with the evening free.

  1. 09:30

    Himeji Castle

    Historic

    White plastered walls, curved gables and a keep that still towers over the town, which is why it is called the White Egret. A national treasure since 1931 and on the UNESCO list since 1993. Inside it is almost empty: bare wooden floors, arrow slots, and six storeys of ladder-steep stairs you climb in your socks. Allow two hours, more if the entry to the keep is being rationed.

  2. 12:30

    Lunch below the castle

    Eat

    The avenue back towards the station has the restaurants. Himeji's own dish is anago, sea eel, grilled and served over rice.

  3. 13:45

    Kōkoen Garden

    Nature

    Nine walled gardens laid out in 1992 on the plot where the castle's samurai residences once stood, keeping the old street plan and the gates but filling the enclosures with ponds, pines and waterfalls instead of houses. There is a tea house in the middle. An hour here is the right way down from two hours of castle stairs.

With more time: Engyo-ji, a mountain temple founded in 966, sits in the cedar forest above the town at the top of a cable car and is a completely different Himeji from the castle. Hollywood filmed part of The Last Samurai in its halls. Add it and the day runs to about seven, so it is a swap for the gardens rather than an extra.

Day 3 in Kobe

The harbour, the tower and Chinatown

The last morning stays on the flat by the water, which is where Kobe keeps its own history rather than everyone else's. Everything below sits within about half a kilometre of everything else, so this is a slow walk rather than a schedule.

Finish in Nankinmachi with something eaten standing up, then take the subway back to Shin-Kobe for an afternoon train.

  1. 09:15

    Meriken Park

    Leisure

    The park on the waterfront, and the reason to come is at its eastern end: a stretch of the old quay left exactly as the 1995 earthquake left it, lamp posts leaning, concrete split, with the rebuilt port behind it. There are photographs and a short explanation alongside. Ten minutes of it tells you more about modern Kobe than any museum.

  2. 10:15

    Kobe Port Tower

    Architecture

    The red lattice tower next to the park, 108 metres tall, hourglass shaped, and the first observation tower in the world built as a pipe structure when it went up in the early 1960s. Recently refurbished, with several levels of viewing deck and a walkway on the roof. Go up for the geography lesson: mountain, city strip, port, sea, all in one turn.

  3. 11:30

    Chinatown

    Eat

    Ten minutes inland, a compact grid of red gates and food hatches that started as the quarter where Chinese merchants settled after the port opened. Lunch is buta-man, a fat steamed pork bun, bought from a window and eaten on your feet, followed by whatever else has a queue in front of it.

With more time: The Kobe Maritime Museum is on the same square as the tower and covers the port's history from the treaty ships onward. Inside it, Kawasaki World is a company museum with a bullet train nose, a helicopter and a motorcycle simulator, included in the same ticket and much more entertaining than that sounds.

Before you go

Where to stay

Sannomiya is the middle of Kobe and the place to stay: three separate railway lines meet there, the harbour is twenty minutes downhill and Kitano ten minutes up.

Shin-Kobe, the bullet train station, is a stop away on the subway and sits at the foot of the mountain. It is convenient if you are arriving and leaving by shinkansen and dull to sleep next to otherwise.

Kobe is close enough to Osaka and Kyoto that people treat it as a day trip. The reward for staying is the harbour at night, which is the best thing the city does and empties out by eight.

Getting in and around

Shinkansen trains stop at Shin-Kobe. From Kansai International, the airport limousine bus to Sannomiya takes a little over an hour; there is also a fast ferry to Kobe's own small airport, which is on a light rail line eighteen minutes from Sannomiya.

Three railways run east to west across the city, JR, Hankyu and Hanshin, all meeting around Sannomiya. JR's special rapid trains are the fast ones, and they are what you want for Himeji in one direction and Osaka and Kyoto in the other. An IC card saves fiddling with any of it.

Everything in the centre is walkable, but remember which way the ground goes. North is uphill towards the mountain, south is downhill towards the sea, and locals give directions that way rather than by left and right.

Himeji, and when to go

Himeji is about forty minutes from Sannomiya on a JR special rapid, or fifteen from Shin-Kobe on the shinkansen. The castle is straight up the avenue from the station, visible the moment you walk out, about a fifteen minute walk.

Entry to the main keep is capped when it gets busy, and on peak weekends you can queue to climb the tower. The castle publishes a congestion forecast, so look at it the night before and go at opening if it is red.

The keep is six storeys of steep wooden stairs in stockinged feet, and there are no exhibits inside, just the structure. That is the point of it, but it is worth knowing before you climb.

Eating and drinking

Kobe beef is the real thing here and it is regulated: certified Tajima cattle raised in Hyogo prefecture, graded, numbered. A teppanyaki counter where a chef cooks it in front of you is the standard experience, it costs what you would expect, and lunch sets are a fraction of the dinner price for the same meat.

Nankinmachi, the Chinatown, is for eating in the street: pork buns, dumplings and skewers from hatches along one short pedestrian lane. It is touristy and the buns are still good.

Nada, the district east of the centre, produces more sake than anywhere else in Japan, and several of the breweries there keep free museums with a tasting at the end.

Kobe is a city of about a kilometre's width and it uses it well: foreign houses at the top of the hill, sake and beef in the middle, a working port at the bottom, and the best castle in Japan a short ride west.

Walk downhill, eat standing up, and take the early train to Himeji.

Make it your trip

Every stop, day and place here lands in your account as an editable trip. Move the days around, swap a city, add your own bookings and costs, and share it with whoever is coming.

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Common questions

Is Kobe worth staying in, or should I visit from Osaka?
Osaka is half an hour away and plenty of people day trip. Staying buys you the harbour in the evening and an early start for Himeji, which is the difference between seeing the castle and queueing for it.
Can I do Himeji and Kobe in one day?
You can see the castle and be back for dinner, which is what the second day here does. Trying to add the gardens, Engyo-ji and a Kobe afternoon to the same day is where it stops being a holiday.
How expensive is Kobe beef?
Dinner at a teppanyaki counter runs into serious money. A lunch set at the same restaurant uses the same certified meat for a fraction of it, and is the sensible way to try it.
What is left of the 1995 earthquake?
Almost nothing by accident and one thing on purpose. The preserved section of quay in Meriken Park is the piece the city deliberately left as it fell.
Can I change the days around?
Copy the trip and shuffle it; only Himeji really wants to be a full day with an early start.