EARLY FOREIGN REFERENCES TO HYOGO

AS ANOTHER CONTRIBUTOR to this Jubilee Number shows, the vicinity of Kobe has not been destitute of those historical incidents which give interest and distinction to a locality. But it may safely be said that until the coming of foreigners to Japan and even for some years after that event, Kobe was practically unknown, alike to foreigners and Japanese. In 1859, when Yokohama was opened to foreign trade. Kobe was a little fishing village on the eastern side of Hyogo, then a port of considerable importance, and once in days long past the seat of a Mikado. With its deep and safe harbour Hyogo offered refuge to junks that in stormy weather hesitated to encounter the shoals of the Osaka bar in a west wind or the turbulence of the Akashi strait when a gale was blowing out of the north-west. Richard Cocks, chief of the factory which the East India Company established at Hirado (near Nagasaki) in 1613, and which was withdrawn in 1623 after a somewhat chequered business career, speaks of arriving at Hyogo, or Fiongo as he calls it, on a journey through the Inland Sea to Osaka, on 9 December 1621, ‘having made xvij leagues this day, not without danger, seeing a greate bark, laden with rise, cast away in passing the straits at Fiongo’. No doubt the reference is to the Akashi straits, which in a tempestuous wind such as is often experienced in the winter months, and without any mark to indicate the shoal at its eastern entrance such as now exists, often proved fatal to junks. On the following day (10 December 1621) Cocks writes of departing from Fiongo, ‘having laden two barkes first with our merchandiz, to lighten our bark, she drawing much water, and now nepe tides’. Nevertheless, ‘as we passed the flattes of Osackay, we were on grownd divers tymes; yet, God be praised, we gott well affe againe, and arived at Osackay at 3 a clock in thafter nowne; but at the same place saw one bark cast away, laden with stones for the making of the castell, but all the people saved.’