Kobe Audioguides

Kobe has always been a city in between. Wedged between Osaka Bay and the steep green slopes of Mount Rokkō, it never had much flat land to spare, so it built its identity vertically, commercially, and internationally. When Japan opened to foreign trade in 1868, Kobe became one of the first ports to receive the world, and the legacy of that opening remains in Kitano, where Western merchants built Victorian and German-style homes called ijinkan that still stand on the hillside today. The neighborhood reads like a postcard from a century ago, a mix of European architecture that earned Kobe the old saying: if you cannot go to Paris, go to Kobe.

The ward of Nada-ku produces 45 percent of all sake in Japan, drawing on the pure snowmelt water of the Rokkō Mountains, and the breweries that line the Hamakaze walk have been at it since the 17th century.

Kobe beef, the Tajima-strain wagyu that became shorthand for luxury dining worldwide, comes from cattle raised in the surrounding Hyogo Prefecture. The 1995 Great Hanshin earthquake killed more than 6,400 people and knocked the Port of Kobe from its position as one of the busiest in Asia, but the city rebuilt with characteristic discipline and pragmatism.