Nankin-machi Audio Guide

Nankinmachi: what does the audio guide cover?

1. 01

   Welcome to Nankinmachi

   Welcome to Nankinmachi, written 南京町 in Japanese, the Chinatown of Kobe in Chuo Ward. You are standing in a compact district where Chinese-style gates, lanterns and shopfronts sit just steps from one of the city's busiest shopping streets. The name belongs to the whole neighborhood, which stretches across Motomachi Street and Sakaemachi Street, so this guide tells the story of that area as a whole. Nankinmachi lies south of Motomachi Station, on both the JR and Hanshin lines, and just south of the Motomachi shopping street. It takes in the first and second blocks of Motomachi Street and of Sakaemachi Street. The whole thing measures roughly 270 meters from east to west and about 110 meters from north to south, which makes it easy to cover on foot. It is counted as one of Japan's three great Chinatowns, alongside Yokohama and Nagasaki's Shinchi district. In the next few minutes you will hear how it began with the opening of Kobe's port, how it fell on hard times, and how its shopkeepers rebuilt it into the place you see today.

2. 02

   A Neighborhood Born with the Port

   The story starts with the opening of Kobe's port, traditionally dated to 1867, the year before the Meiji era began. Foreign merchants were assigned a designated foreign settlement. Qing China, however, had no treaty with Japan at the time, so Chinese merchants could not live inside it. Instead they settled on the western edge of the settlement, in the area that is now Nankinmachi. There they opened general goods shops, pork sellers and eating places. Because so many Chinese lived and traded here, people began calling the district Nankinmachi, or sometimes Nankingai, meaning Nanking Town or Nanking Street. Here is a detail that surprises many visitors. Kobe's wider settlement pattern let foreign residents live mixed in among Japanese neighbors rather than behind walls. Many overseas Chinese and Westerners treated the waterside district as their workplace and built their homes up on the hillside. Historians connect this scattered pattern to the good relations Kobe's Chinese community has long enjoyed with Japanese society.

3. 03

   From Kitchen of Kansai to Ashes and Back

   By the early Showa era, Nankinmachi had a reputation that said it all: if you went to Nankinmachi, you could find anything. It thrived as the kitchen of the Kansai region, a bustling market district feeding the surrounding cities. Then came 1945. The great Kobe air raid burned the whole Motomachi area to the ground. After the war, rows of barracks formed a black market, and in time the district turned into a back street crowded with bars catering to foreigners. It was a long way from its glory days. The turning point came from 1975 onward, when the area was designated for a city land readjustment project. Local shop owners decided to bring Nankinmachi back and founded the Nankinmachi Shopping Street Promotion Association. They settled on a single name, Nankinmachi, and set out to rebuild the place as a true Chinatown, working on both the physical streets and the events held in them.

4. 04

   Gates, Stone Paving and the Spring Festival

   Look around and you will see the results of that rebuilding. A redevelopment plan was drawn up in 1981, and the actual streetscape work began in 1982. Gates now mark the entrances, utility poles were moved underground, and the main street was widened and laid with stone paving. In the 1990s, Chinese-style buildings were added under Kobe's urban landscape ordinance, deepening the Chinatown look. The district has also been tested. In 1995 the Great Hanshin-Awaji Earthquake caused serious damage here, and Nankinmachi recovered and still welcomes crowds of visitors. If you come around the lunar new year, you may catch the Spring Festival, which draws many Japanese residents and tourists as well as the Chinese community and has become a major event for the whole city. Its dragon dance has its own story. Young members practiced the dragon dance ahead of the very first Nankinmachi Spring Festival, and after the festival the group took the name Nankinmachi Buryutai, the Nankinmachi Dragon Dance Team.

5. 05

   Before You Head Off

   Here is something to carry with you as you wander. Unlike Yokohama's Chinatown, Nankinmachi has very few residents and is almost purely a place of commerce. The community's everyday life unfolds elsewhere, in the hillside neighborhoods such as the Koikawa Street area, Tor Road and Kitano, where Kobe's overseas Chinese have mostly lived. The Kobe Chinese temple dedicated to Guan Di and the Kobe Chinese school are up in the hills too, and many of the city's famous Chinese restaurants are found around Sannomiya. There is one more curiosity about the name. Yokohama and Nagasaki both renamed their districts Chinatown, but Kobe kept Nankinmachi, since the name was already widely known and loved. So as you leave, notice the gates, the paving and the lanterns, and ask yourself which of these were built within the last few decades by shopkeepers determined to revive their street. Then walk up toward Kitano or the hillside to see where the wider story of Kobe's Chinese community continues.