Kobe Harbor

On Christmas Day in Kobe Harbor the air was crisp and the skies were blue and the wind was....well, the wind made it feel darned cold.  But it was beautiful, nonetheless.  More so because the skies in China had been depressingly gray for nearly every day in December.  Kobe's blue skies with puffy white clouds were like a huge dose of Prozac.

Kobe was born as a port city and is still a port city at heart.  During the boom years of the Japanese economy, in the 1970's and 1980's, Kobe claimed to be the busiest port in the world.  Things have fallen off since then...partly due to a cooling in the economy and partly due to the earthquake of 1995.  But it is still one of the world's major ports.  The horizon bristles with cranes and the dock yards brim with shipping containers.

The city of Kobe has grown up to the edge of the ocean.  Due to the mountains at the North, it can't grow inland so the city has sprawled to the East and the West along the shore.  From Kobe to Osaka, some 30 miles to the East, is an unbroken stretch of urban and industrial sprawl that is much more densely concentrated than anything I've ever seen.  It's like a cartoonist's rendering of the future (or a case of SimCity gone amok).  It's all skyscrapers mixed in with oil refineries and Ferris wheels and four story golf driving ranges. And it's all interconnected by a network of suspension bridges and elevated highways that criss-cross in mid-air.  In the photo above, you can see Hanshin Expressway running along the shoreline with the city skyline in the background.

The Hanshin Expressway, by the way, was one of the casualties of the Great Earthquake of  January 17, 1995.   In 20 seconds that earthquake caused sections of the expressway to collapse, damaged 3/4 of the docks in the harbor, and collapsed a large number of older houses.  Thousands died and the material damage qualified it as the world's costliest natural disaster.  They have a memorial down at the harbor.  The memorial preservers some of the damages, like the one shown above, where the ground level in the harbor dropped and/or moved by several feet. 

Kobe sits on the North side of Osaka Bay.  Osaka, the namesake, sits on the Eastern side of the bay.  You can look at the whole mess on Google Maps Satellite view at this link.  The shores of the bay are lined with numerous islands, many of which are man-made.  In fact, Osaka's Kansai Airport sits on the largest of these man-made islands, connected to the mainland by a 2 mile box girder bridge.  At a cost of about $20 billion, the Kansai Airport qualifies as the costliest public works project in the world.

The photos, of course, show the view of Osaka Bay from the Kobe Harbor area.  You can't see Kansai Airport from here.   But still, on Christmas Day the view was quite a nice one.

The Kansai Airport is so-named because it serves the Kansai region of Japan.  This region is a megalopolis.  It includes Kobe, Osaka, and Kyoto and all the sprawl that connects these three cities.  It is the second largest population center in Japan, ranking behind only the Tokyo area.  Kansai was for hundreds of years the capital of Imperial Japan, until usurped by Tokyo relatively recently in during the 1800's. 

Kobe is a fairly young city.  Like Shanghai, it was made by trade with the West (starting when Japan opened it's borders in the 19th century).  Osaka has been a major city for centuries and has a rich history.  Kyoto, however, is a legend.  Kyoto is central to Japanese culture as is Rome or Athens to Western culture. 

These days, Kobe Harbor probably welcomes many more tourists than it does freighters.  If you were to take a picture, you would see plenty of cranes visible on the horizon, but the foreground would be nothing but hotels and shopping and such.  The tourists come to climb Kobe Tower, shown above, where they can get a good view of Osaka Bay.  From the top, you can also see bridges... seemingly hundreds of bridges... that connect all the little islands and inlets and such.

On the West Side of the Kobe Harbor is "HarborLand". HarborLand is an area that caters to the tourist shopper.  It is a network of interconnected malls and an amusement park.  Below is a photo of the HarborLand Ferris Wheel.  Somewhere in HarborLand, I am told, there is a statue of Elvis.  If I find that, I will provide a picture.