INTRODUCTION

FOREIGN POPULATIONS IN Kobe have undergone three distinct stages of flux. The first phase can be marked by the arrival of the first foreigners who settled in the fledgling Hyogo port, the area adjoining the current city and what would later be incorporated into the wider city of Kobe in 1868. From this point onwards, foreign communities thrived in the city throughout the Meiji, Taisho and Showa eras until the advent of WWII, which saw the population haemorrhage due to the outbreak of hostilities between the Allies and Japan. During the war, only foreign nationals whose countries were allied with the Japanese or whose countries remained neutral were allowed to live and work in the city as normal. The hostilities marked the second transitional period for Kobe's foreign population as many of those who left before the war failed to return. A few did choose to return however, and the influx of new émigrés in the years after the war changed the city's demographic once again. While the foreign population began to thrive once more in the city as the Japanese economy recovered, the foreign nationals living in Japan never regained as much influence as they had done before the war. The third, and final stage for the city's expatriate community was marked by the Great Hanshin Earthquake of 1995. While the disaster affected every resident living in the affected area, Japanese or otherwise, the community was again disrupted as many of the workplaces associated with expatriates in Kobe, such as shipping and foreign consular work, were relocated to nearby Osaka.

Visitors eager to sample the nostalgia of bygone Japan generally head to the city's affluent Kitano-cho, where tourists are ferried up the hill in a Showa-teki bus to see picturesque ‘foreign’ houses perched at the foot of the Mt. Rokko range. There almost seems to be a national longing among the Japanese for a purer, more innocent Japan that is perceived to have existed before the war. A Japan free of the concrete towers that pepper the horizon making one city indistinguishable from the next; a halcyon period where jinrikshas weaved among the trams or chinchin densha, where rosy-cheeked children sipped ramune, their laughter intermingling with the clip-clop sounds of women's geta.