Kobe Harborland about 60 years ago and today

History of Kobe Harborland

Leave the ticket gates of Kobe Station and walk south, and the smell of the sea reaches you in about five minutes. For a long time this long, narrow strip, squeezed between the station and the water's edge, was not a place for people to enjoy themselves but a workplace where ships and freight cars handed cargo to each other. If you follow the aerial photographs from the oldest, the process in which the rows of transit sheds that clung to the shore disappear one by one and plazas and large buildings are placed instead remains just as it was, as one picture after another.

The joint between port and railway

People began putting earth into this shore far earlier than the railway. The area at the lower left of the frame was an old port called Hyogo-no-Tsu, and it is said that at the end of the Heian period an artificial island was built to protect Owada-no-Tomari from wind and waves. This means the work of altering the sea to make a place for ships to anchor has continued in this inlet for about a thousand years. In the Edo period Hyogo-no-Tsu was a key point of the western sea route, and when the port opened in 1868, the foreign settlement was placed on the land to its east, toward the sandy beach.

In 1874 Kobe Station opened as the terminus of the railway extended from Osaka. It later became the station that is both the terminus of the Tokaido Main Line and the starting point of the Sanyo Main Line, and the tracks split south of the station and went down toward the sea. Cotton and general goods that arrived by ship were reloaded into freight cars and sent inland. This is land where quays, sidings and warehouses were designed as one for that handover.

The Minato River, which flowed down west of the station, was diverted westward from the foot of the mountains within the Meiji era, and the low land around the river mouth was prepared as port land. The name of the freight station came from the river. The name Minatogawa was used for the freight station placed on the sea side, and that name, which can no longer be found on the map, captures how this area came to be.

The shore lined with freight cars

In the 1945-50 photograph, slightly above the middle of the frame, the port's domain begins beyond where the city area breaks off. Several long, narrow transit sheds line up in parallel along the shore, behind them the tracks spread out like a fan, and black dots that look like freight cars stand in rows. From the sea side of the transit sheds short jetties stick out over the water, with small boats drawn up to them. On the city side whitish vacant lots are mixed in patches, and you can read that the traces of war damage have not yet been completely filled. In the middle at the bottom of the frame there are two finger-shaped jetties extending thinly over the water, with long, narrow transit sheds on them as well. You can see that, to make the surface for handling cargo as long as possible, the form of extending the land thinly into the sea was chosen.

By 1961-69 the buildings in the same place are a size larger and their roofs show darker. North of the row of transit sheds a squarely enclosed dark water surface remains, which looks like a boat basin or water for storing timber. Large hulls lie alongside the jetties lined up at the upper right of the frame, and offshore anchored ships float here and there. In the city area on the left half the roofs are packed without gaps, and only the diagonal band of the railway stands out as an open space.

The height of cargo handling and the turn of the tide

The 1974-78 photograph is in color, and you can see that the roofs of the transit sheds are painted in pale gray and green. Long hulls lie alongside the quays, and the cargo placed on the pier surfaces looks like a pattern. By 1979-83 the roofs on the jetty at the upper right have been repainted red, and fine dots that look like rows of cars increase along the edge of the pier. Between the transit sheds the sidings that brought in freight cars remain as thin lines, and the rows of long roofs and the rows of tracks alternate, forming stripes. The sea is an even deeper color, and many ships are stopped offshore.

The change appears clearly in 1984-86. The row of transit sheds remains, but on its inland side one corner of the fan of sidings has turned into earth-colored cleared land. The main role in cargo handling had moved to the offshore piers. At the upper right of the same photograph, the water surface between the jetties is in the middle of turning into square land, and the earth of the unfinished fill is still bare in the photograph. This is the lot that opened as a park at the end of the 1980s.

After the town opening

The former site of the freight station, which had finished its role, was planned as a place to reconnect the port and the city center, and the town opened in 1992. Commercial facilities and office buildings, plazas and promenades were placed, and a Ferris wheel became the landmark at the water's edge. However, in January 1995, three years after the town opening, an earthquake struck Kobe, the port's quays and piers collapsed in many places, and it took a long time for cargo handling to return. In 2001 the Kobe Municipal Subway Kaigan Line came through, and Harborland Station opened underground. In the 2010s the commercial facilities at the water's edge were rearranged as one, and their name was also changed.

In today's photograph large box-shaped buildings and wide paving line up where the rows of transit sheds stood, and the notches between the thin jetties have been filled so that the shoreline is smooth. At the bottom of the frame the jetties that lined up like fingers and the boat basins between them have turned into a single flat piece of land, with large roofs lined up in order. In the city area on the left half, only the buildings have been replaced while the framework of streets has been kept. Among this, only the band of tracks rising diagonally from southwest to northeast and the shadow of the long, narrow structure alongside it are in the same position as in the old photographs. Even though the port side was replaced almost entirely, the line of the railway did not move.

The land is low. The center of the cross-section is 2 m, the south also 2 m, the north 2.3 m, the east 3 m, and only the western measuring point toward inland reaches 3.4 m. The sequence of values shows that there is almost no step between the port and the city area behind it. The condition that the sea and the surface of daily life are at almost the same height is worth keeping in mind as a premise when walking this town. To learn the assumptions for storm surges, tsunami and heavy rain for each piece of land, the quickest way is to look at the hazard maps published by the City of Kobe and Hyogo Prefecture.

Land price records remain from just after the town opening. In a residential area of Higashide-cho, Hyogo Ward, about 550 m to the southwest, 275,000 yen per square meter in 1995 is the highest up to the 2026 official land prices (Chika Koji), and from there the price fell for a long time, with small rebounds along the way, bottoming out at 137,000 yen in 2015 and 2016. In the 2026 official land prices it is 158,000 yen, a level that has recovered a little over 10% of the fall. The 30-odd years in which the port scenery turned into a face for tourism were also, for the residential area behind it, 30-odd years of falling and coming back.