Hyogo Story
Hidden Truths of a Westenizing Japan
Have you ever been to Hyogo when visiting Japan?
When it comes to sightseeing in the Kansai region, many people have been to Osaka, Kyoto, and Nara. Not many go as far as Hyogo. And while anyone can conjure an image of what Osaka, Kyoto, Nara, or Tokyo looks like, Hyogo has no such image.
Kobe is the largest urban center in Hyogo Prefecture, and it is a place I personally feel a deep attachment to. But it is widely known that the Kobe of today is a far cry from what it once was. Put simply, among Japan’s major cities Kobe is now positioned as the one that has lost the most of its appeal. The exodus of younger generations from Kobe accelerates year by year. The distinctive attraction that once set Kobe apart from Osaka and Kyoto has become entirely a thing of the past.
When I was small, my father’s work brought us to Kobe every summer. It was one of the cities I loved most. Among the cities of Kansai it was perhaps the only one where time moved gently. Walking through the pleasant sea breeze that is unique to a coastal city, you could forget the clamor of urban life and relax. But at a certain point everything changed. That point was January 17, 1995, the Great Hanshin-Awaji Earthquake. A magnitude 7.3 earthquake inflicted catastrophic damage on Kobe. The reconstruction of the city began immediately afterward, but thirty years later the vitality that existed before 1995 has never returned. I believe the cause is clearly the failure to hold a vision for the future of the city in the process of post-earthquake reconstruction.
Earthquakes cannot be avoided in Japan. The problem is always what vision guides the rebuilding of a city after the reset of seismic destruction. Japan does not have this. The problem Kobe has carried serves as both a reference point and a cautionary lesson when considering what follows the massive earthquakes that every city faces as a potential risk. Understanding this failure in urban planning will matter when the inevitable Tokyo metropolitan direct-hit earthquake or the Nankai Trough megaquake reshapes Japan’s cities.
Yet almost no one knows that Hyogo possesses a history of extraordinary complexity found nowhere else in Japan. The reason is that the concentration of Hyogo’s image onto Kobe alone has produced a distorted perspective. That distortion is the image of the “exotic city.” This image derives from the history of Western occupation of Kobe around the time of the Meiji Restoration. The city-building carried out by Westerners on the stage of Kobe had far-reaching influence. One representative example is the culture of meat eating. For centuries, under the influence of Buddhism, the consumption of meat had been officially prohibited in Japan. But Westerners who carried a meat-eating culture demanded it openly in their new territory and forced the issue upon both the shogunate and the new government.
This is what happened in Kobe. Seen from another angle, Kobe was the front line of the Western experiment in the Westernization of Japan. Traces of the Western occupation remain in Kobe to this day. This is certainly one face of the city, but historically it spans a mere 160 years. Because Kobe depended too heavily on this image in the years that followed, its tourism strategy has been a sustained failure to the present day. Virtually every tourist who comes to Japan visits Osaka, Kyoto, and Nara, but Hyogo has been unable to benefit from that flow. This has long been a challenge for the prefecture, and the reason is clear. The rich history of Hyogo as a whole has been ignored, and a single district of Kobe centered on Westerners has been branded as the image of the entire prefecture.
There is an interesting nuance, however. People from the Kansai region, while not knowing the pluralistic cultural and historical depth of Hyogo, do sense that something about the way “Hyogo” is spoken of feels off. For example, when Japanese people say where they are from, they normally say “I was born in Tokyo” or “I was born in Kyoto.” But for some reason people from Hyogo Prefecture never say “I was born in Hyogo.” They say “I was born in Kobe” or “I was born in Himeji” or “I was born in Awaji Island.” Behind this lies the most complex set of circumstances surrounding the formation of any prefecture in Japan. What is fascinating is that this historical residue persists to this day.
Discussing Hyogo is a formidable task, but we must begin by establishing what Hyogo actually is.