Kobe City Museum

Introduction

Kobe City Museum stands on Kyomachi-suji, the main street of the old foreign settlement, and the building is itself an exhibit: completed in 1935 as the Kobe branch of the Yokohama Specie Bank, later used by the Bank of Tokyo, and converted into a museum in 1982. Its neoclassical stone facade, great columns and heavy lobby line up with the Meiji and Taisho trading-company buildings around it. The museum's theme is international cultural exchange, the contact and change between East and West. Among more than 70,000 holdings, the weightiest are the national-treasure bronze bells and halberds excavated at Sakuragaoka and Japan's most systematic collection of namban and red-hair art, screens, Western-style paintings and glass spanning the Azuchi-Momoyama to Edo periods and tracing what Portuguese, Spanish and Dutch ships brought ashore. Old maps and a model of the settlement explain how Kobe grew into a port city. The permanent galleries on the second floor follow six themes; the first-floor history gallery is free, the collection costs only JPY 300 for adults, JPY 150 for university students and nothing for high-school age and under, with special exhibitions extra. Older guides quoting JPY 700 are wrong. Hours are 09:30-17:30, to 20:00 on Fridays and Saturdays during special exhibitions, closed Mondays. Eight minutes from Motomachi station, it pairs with a walk through the settlement and lunch in Nankinmachi, and the museum occasionally runs guided walks of the district's modern architecture.

✨ Highlights

🛈 Practical Info