Kitano Ijinkan-gai — Kobe

photo by 伊部リコ · CC BY 3.0

photo by そらみみ · CC BY-SA 3.0

Of the nearly 1,000 foreign villas of the past, about thirty remain, almost all of them here.

When the port of Kobe opened in 1867, foreign merchants settled on this hill with its views, and between the 1880s and the Second World War more than 200 Western-style residences were built there: ijinkan, literally ‘houses of different people’. The city had almost a thousand of them; today about thirty remain, concentrated in the Kitano-Yamamoto-dori district, designated a preservation district in 1980. The most photographed is the Weathercock House (風見鶏の館, 1909), the only one in exposed brick among the wooden villas, recognisable by the weathercock on its turret; it is a national Important Cultural Property.

Hillside neighbourhood in the central district of Kobe, above Tor Road; it preserves the largest concentration of late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century foreign residences left in Japan.

ℹ️ The streets are always open and free to walk. The individual villas open as paid museums with their own hours: the Weathercock House (Kazamidori-no-Yakata) is open 9:00–17:00 (last entry 16:45), 500 yen, closed on the 3rd Tuesday of the month.

🚉 Sannomiya · 12 min walk

Sources: kobeijinkan.com · city.kobe.lg.jp · bunka.go.jp

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