Rhine House (Line no Yakata)

Introduction

Rhine House is the only ijinkan in Kitano you can walk into without a ticket, which makes it the right first stop on the slope. Built in 1915 as a two-storey timber house for Mrs J. R. Drewell, it joins the main block to a servants' wing in an L, with a south porch on paired square columns, a glazed balcony above, decorated bay windows east and west, wooden shutters, heavy clapboarding and a dentilled cornice under grey glazed Japanese tiles, the vocabulary of Kobe's Western houses since the 1880s. Kobe City bought it in 1978 and chose the name by public competition: the last foreign resident, a German named Oberlein, lived here until 1968, while the horizontal lines of the siding echo the Japanese word 'rain' for line, so the name is a pun rather than a direct nod to the Rhine. It became a city-designated traditional building in 1980 and a landscape-forming building in 2016; from 2017 the whole house was dismantled and reassembled with seismic reinforcement, every wall, floor, ceiling and moulding restored, reopening in 2019. Downstairs holds a seasonally redressed photo corner, a map of Kitano and a souvenir shop; upstairs is a timeline of the ijinkan district and the foreign settlement, with the post-1995-earthquake repairs and the recent dismantling, plus multilingual QR codes and a film. Twenty minutes covers it. Tripods and commercial photography are banned, and it closes on the third Thursday of February and June.

✨ Highlights

🛈 Practical Info