兵庫物語Hyogo Monogatari
When it comes to sightseeing in the Kansai region, many people have been to Osaka, Kyoto, and Nara. Not many go as far as Hyogo. And while anyone can conjure an image of what Osaka, Kyoto, Nara, or Tokyo looks like, Hyogo has no such image.
Kobe is the largest urban center in Hyogo Prefecture, and it is a place I personally feel a deep attachment to. But it is widely known that the Kobe of today is a far cry from what it once was. Put simply, among Japan's major cities Kobe is now positioned as the one that has lost the most of its appeal. The exodus of younger generations from Kobe accelerates year by year. The distinctive attraction that once set Kobe apart from Osaka and Kyoto has become entirely a thing of the past.
When I was small, my father's work brought us to Kobe every summer. It was one of the cities I loved most. Among the cities of Kansai it was perhaps the only one where time moved gently. Walking through the pleasant sea breeze that is unique to a coastal city, you could forget the clamor of urban life and relax. But at a certain point everything changed. That point was January 17, 1995, the Great Hanshin-Awaji Earthquake. A magnitude 7.3 earthquake inflicted catastrophic damage on Kobe. The reconstruction of the city began immediately afterward, but thirty years later the vitality that existed before 1995 has never returned. I believe the cause is clearly the failure to hold a vision for the future of the city in the process of post-earthquake reconstruction.
Earthquakes cannot be avoided in Japan. The problem is always what vision guides the rebuilding of a city after the reset of seismic destruction. Japan does not have this. The problem Kobe has carried serves as both a reference point and a cautionary lesson when considering what follows the massive earthquakes that every city faces as a potential risk. Understanding this failure in urban planning will matter when the inevitable Tokyo metropolitan direct-hit earthquake or the Nankai Trough megaquake reshapes Japan's cities.
Yet almost no one knows that Hyogo possesses a history of extraordinary complexity found nowhere else in Japan. The reason is that the concentration of Hyogo's image onto Kobe alone has produced a distorted perspective. That distortion is the image of the "exotic city." This image derives from the history of the foreign settlement established in Kobe around the time of the Meiji Restoration. The city-building carried out in the settlement had far-reaching influence. One representative example is the culture of meat eating. For centuries, under the influence of Buddhism, the consumption of meat had been officially prohibited in Japan. But people for whom eating meat was part of daily life asked for it openly in their new surroundings, and the demand reached both the shogunate and the new government.
This is what happened in Kobe. Seen from another angle, Kobe was the front line of the Western experiment in the Westernization of Japan. Traces of the foreign settlement remain in Kobe to this day. This is certainly one face of the city, but historically it spans a mere 160 years. Because Kobe depended too heavily on this image in the years that followed, its tourism strategy has been a sustained failure to the present day. Virtually every tourist who comes to Japan visits Osaka, Kyoto, and Nara, but Hyogo has been unable to benefit from that flow. This has long been a challenge for the prefecture, and the reason is clear. The rich history of Hyogo as a whole has been ignored, and a single district of Kobe centered on the foreign settlement has been branded as the image of the entire prefecture.
There is an interesting nuance, however. People from the Kansai region, while not knowing the pluralistic cultural and historical depth of Hyogo, do sense that something about the way "Hyogo" is spoken of feels off. For example, when Japanese people say where they are from, they normally say "I was born in Tokyo" or "I was born in Kyoto." But for some reason people from Hyogo Prefecture never say "I was born in Hyogo." They say "I was born in Kobe" or "I was born in Himeji" or "I was born in Awaji Island." Behind this lies the most complex set of circumstances surrounding the formation of any prefecture in Japan. What is fascinating is that this historical residue persists to this day.
Discussing Hyogo is a formidable task, but we must begin by establishing what Hyogo actually is.
The present Hyogo is recognized as a single administrative unit called a prefecture. But its interior is composed of five distinct provinces with entirely different origins. They are Settsu, Harima, Tajima, Tanba, and Awaji.
These five provinces originate in cultural spheres where the climate, industry, culture, and history are all different. They were never in a relationship that could naturally be bundled into a single administrative body. Even within Hyogo, traveling from Amagasaki near Osaka to Himeji near Okayama feels nothing like moving within the same prefecture because the cultures are so different. Continue from there to Toyooka on the Sea of Japan coast and you have entered another world entirely. Dialects vary significantly even within the same prefecture. And Awaji Island to the south was governed by the Hachisuka clan of Awa until the Meiji Restoration. It was effectively Tokushima's territory and an extension of Shikoku.
No other prefecture in Japan is this internally heterogeneous. Conversely, anyone with an interest in Japan's modernization would do well to study the history of Hyogo's formation in depth. The dynamics of modernization, or rather Westernization, are compressed into it. Understanding how Hyogo Prefecture came into being makes the mechanisms of Japan's modernization visible.
The defining feature of Hyogo is that it possessed an extraordinarily complex world "divided into more than 130 pieces," a condition found in no other prefecture. During the Edo period approximately fifteen domains governed Hyogo in a fragmented arrangement.
In the Kobe and Hanshin area of Settsu there were the Amagasaki domain, the Sanda domain, and part of the Takatsuki domain. In the Himeji area of Harima a multitude of domains stood side by side including Himeji, Akashi, Tatsuno, Ako, Ono, and Mikazuki. On the Sea of Japan side in Tajima were the Izushi and Toyooka domains. In the mountainous interior were the Sasayama and Kaibara domains. Awaji Island was under the control of the Hachisuka clan of the Tokushima domain. This alone is complex, but the heart of the problem lies further in.
In addition to the approximately fifteen domains, special territories called tenryo that were directly administered by the Edo shogunate were scattered across Hyogo, near the Ikuno Silver Mine in Tajima and in the port town of Hyogo-tsu among other locations. These tenryo were the shogunate's directly held lands, established primarily to prevent resources and trade from being monopolized by individual domains. The direct ruler was the Tokugawa shogunal house. Allowing a single domain to monopolize silver mining would invite destabilizing movements aimed at seizing hegemony. Tenryo were therefore deployed on a national scale. But adding further complexity, more than one hundred small territories called hatamoto-ryo, lands held by bannermen loyal to the shogunate, were scattered across Hyogo. This is why the total exceeded 130 divisions. The very concept of division, however, is a perspective that looks backward from the unified Hyogo Prefecture of the Meiji era onward. In reality it suggests a pluralistic world. Even so, why was such an apparently inefficient territorial structure created?
The intention was for the shogunate, based in the distant city of Edo, to monitor and surveil the western domains. The western domains were those holding territories primarily across the entire region west of Kansai. Historically these were the lords who had sided with the Toyotomi faction against the Tokugawa at the Battle of Sekigahara in 1600. At the very beginning of the Edo period these western lords traced their roots to the anti-Tokugawa side, and the shogunate needed to keep them under strict control to prevent rebellion. But for a government centered in Edo, managing the vast western territories at such a distance was difficult. The shogunate therefore identified the present-day Hyogo area as the front line for managing the western lords.
The shogunate gave countless small parcels of land to trusted bannermen and scattered them across the Kansai region to strengthen the surveillance network. This worked superbly. Hyogo in particular was a vital defensive position in the west, and its territorial structure was deliberately fragmented. This was a characteristic unique to Hyogo within Japan. Because Hyogo was also close to Kyoto, small landholdings independently owned by Kyoto's temples, shrines, and court nobles were dotted across the area as well. The result was an extraordinary political mosaic in which the lord changed every time you crossed into the next village.
The perspective that Hyogo never existed as a single prefecture is essential. As I have noted, the history of Hyogo's formation is a microcosm of the formation of modern Japan. The truth of modern Japan is that it forcibly bundled together entirely different pluralistic worlds into one. Once this perspective is in place, it becomes clear that the understanding of many people who assume they "know Japan" is in urgent need of an update. Their claim to know Japan is based on having seen only an extremely small part of it.
Why then did the Meiji government need to force the unification of Hyogo? The answer lies in the foreign settlement in Kobe. Japan was opened under military pressure while the country was shaken by civil strife, and once the market was opened, competing trade interests moved openly and covertly to secure their positions. At the same time, however, people in various regions were attacking foreigners out of resentment of foreign contact in the upheaval of the Meiji Restoration. The Meiji government found itself needing to manage the situation so that the two sides did not come into open conflict domestically. The place it turned to was present-day Kobe. What exactly is Kobe?
To understand this we must first look at an entity called Hyogo-tsu. Hyogo-tsu was located along the coast of what is now Hyogo Ward in Kobe and was once known as Owada no Tomari. This location is slightly to the east of the Sannomiya and Motomachi areas now known as central Kobe, and this spatial relationship is important. Hyogo-tsu had flourished as a port since antiquity. It was constructed in the early eighth century as the most important hub on the Seto Inland Sea shipping route. In 804 the monks Saicho and Kukai set sail from this port as members of the mission to Tang China. The history of Hyogo-tsu reaches back to the journeys of the giants of Japanese Buddhism. In a sense Hyogo-tsu was the gateway to the sea routes connecting Japan to the continent.
The figure who fundamentally reformed Owada no Tomari, the predecessor of Hyogo-tsu, was Taira no Kiyomori, a figure I have discussed throughout the On Dogen series. In the late Heian period Kiyomori undertook a massive expansion of this port as a base for trade with Song China and constructed Japan's first artificial island as a breakwater. Kiyomori envisioned an international trading city built around this port, and in 1180 he abandoned Heian-kyo and relocated the capital to Fukuhara at this site. His intention was to eliminate interference from the temple powers of Enryaku-ji in Kyoto and Kofuku-ji in Nara and to establish a maritime state through expanded trade with Song. The relocation failed within six months and the capital returned to Kyoto. But the blueprint Kiyomori saw for this land would be realized seven hundred years later in the Meiji period. The critical point, however, is that the location shifted.
After Kiyomori's death, Owada no Tomari came to be called Hyogo-tsu in the Kamakura period. The source of the name Hyogo Prefecture as we know it today is in fact this Hyogo-tsu, with its rich historical lineage. In the Muromachi period the port flourished as the international hub for the Japan-Ming trade initiated by Ashikaga Yoshimitsu. In the Edo period it thrived enormously as a port of call for the kitamaebune ships linking the Sea of Japan coast of Hokkaido and Tohoku with the Kinki region. The population of Hyogo-tsu alone exceeded 20,000 by the mid-Edo period, and the port became a base from which major merchants operated in the development of Ezo, present-day Hokkaido.
Viewed historically, Hyogo-tsu functioned as one of Japan's premier port towns in every era. It is the memory of this port, spanning more than a thousand years, that lies at the root of the name Hyogo. Put differently, the real Hyogo is Hyogo-tsu on the coast of present-day Hyogo Ward in Kobe. Just as the real Kyoto refers to only a tiny district within the city, the real Hyogo is an extremely limited place. And that place holds more than a thousand years of history and an overwhelming accumulation of historical capital built through international trade.
But in the years surrounding the Meiji Restoration of 1868, this historical context was ruthlessly displaced to serve the interests of the Meiji government and the Western powers. The government faced the staggering task of consolidating the mosaic of more than 130 fragments into one. When the nationwide abolition of domains and establishment of prefectures was carried out in 1871, more than thirty small prefectures proliferated across the Hyogo area, including Himeji, Amagasaki, Akashi, Sasayama, and Izushi. This was wildly inefficient from the standpoint of tax collection and governance. The government consolidated them into three large units: Hyogo Prefecture combining the port of Kobe with the Settsu region around the Hanshin area, Shikama Prefecture centered on Himeji in Harima, and Toyooka Prefecture covering the Sea of Japan side and the inland areas of Tajima and Tanba. Hyogo was thus reorganized into a three-prefecture structure. But this structure lasted only five years.
In 1876 Shikama Prefecture and Toyooka Prefecture were abolished and absorbed into Hyogo Prefecture. On top of this, Awaji Island, which properly belonged to the Shikoku side, was attached to Hyogo. The government's seizure of Awaji from the Tokushima side and its forced attachment to Hyogo remains a source of strong resentment to this day. Let us now look at why the government carried out this act of force.
At the moment this was done, Hyogo was forcibly unified under the intent of the central government without resolving the mosaic of more than 130 fragments. It goes without saying that this unification was unilateral, completely disregarded historical context, and amounted to nothing more than a forced amalgamation. This is the fundamental pathology that has continued to fracture Hyogo's sense of identity to the present day.
The figure who led this coercive measure was Toshimichi Okubo (1830–1878), the Minister of Home Affairs at the time. Many government officials opposed the forced consolidation, but Okubo dismissed them with the instruction to "rethink the matter so as to strengthen the power of Hyogo Prefecture as an open port," and the formation of Hyogo was decided unilaterally in disregard of the will of the regions. The enormous territorial expanse of Hyogo Prefecture was in other words designed in reverse from the national policy of turning the port of Kobe into an international trade hub. Behind this decision lay the structure of trade interests that took hold once the country was opened and the Japanese market became the stake.
This is the heart of Hyogo's history. Anyone with an understanding of historical context and a connection to the land would recognize that forcibly binding five separate provinces into one was plainly untenable. But within the logic of market opening, the local history of these regions did not enter the calculation. What mattered was the yardstick of trade interests. Japanese historical context was cast aside, and the situation worsened as a structure in which only the logic of profit counted took hold. The Meiji government itself had come into being supported by its relations with the foreign powers, a fact that could not be spoken openly at the time, and it found that logic hard to resist.
The purpose of Hyogo Prefecture's formation was thus positioned as a strategic initiative of the Meiji government to develop the port of Kobe. The underlying cause was that the government could not cover the enormous infrastructure costs required for the major development of Kobe with its foreign settlement. To finance the massive infrastructure for the settlement and port, the government carried out its next act of force. It forcibly attached Shikama Prefecture in Harima with its rich agriculture, Toyooka Prefecture in Tajima and Tanba with their abundant resources including the silver mine, and Awaji with its thriving agriculture and dairy farming, thereby manufacturing a giant involuntary sponsor to subsidize Kobe. The formation of Hyogo Prefecture was in essence a product of the aligned interests of a structure of trade concessions and Meiji government rulers eager to fold those concessions into national policy. It was carried out violently, in complete disregard of Hyogo's internal circumstances.
As if to prove the point, the first governor of Hyogo Prefecture was Hirobumi Ito (1841–1909), who would later become Japan's first Prime Minister. Born in the Choshu domain, which produced many of the new government's leaders, Ito had studied in Britain and understood the design principles of Western port cities. The very fact that he was installed as governor of Hyogo is evidence that this prefecture was conceived not as an ordinary administrative unit but as a national-policy hub for international trade. In the long history of the port, the context shifted from a trade hub oriented toward Asian nations to a trade hub oriented toward the Western powers. But this is the most generous framing. The reality was the incorporation of Japan's economy under the system of unequal treaties.
Here we encounter a critical source of dissonance regarding Kobe. The port that the Meiji government designated as an open port and developed to receive Western ships and Western residents was not the original "Hyogo," not Hyogo-tsu. It was a site 3.5 kilometers to the east. That site was Kobe Village.
When the 1858 Treaty of Amity and Commerce between the United States and Japan pressured the Japanese side into opening a port, the designated site was in fact Hyogo-tsu. The Western powers also recognized that Hyogo-tsu, with its established infrastructure for trade with Asian nations, would be far easier to use. But the shogunate refused to open Hyogo-tsu. The reason was that Hyogo-tsu served at the time as the outer port of Osaka, with active trade and a large population. Establishing Western residential areas there would inevitably lead to clashes with the Japanese population. As an alternative the government turned its attention to Kobe Village to the east of Hyogo-tsu, a quiet stretch of sandy ground and farmland. Because Kobe Village held no existing trade interests, securing the land was easy. The villagers of Kobe were forcibly removed and their confiscated land was handed over as a foreign settlement.
On January 1, 1868, just before the Meiji Restoration succeeded, a simultaneous volley of celebratory cannon fire erupted from eighteen British and American warships led by HMS Rodney, and the port of Kobe was opened. The population of Kobe Village at the time of opening was approximately 3,600. It was nothing more than a small fishing hamlet fronted by a sandy beach. On this land a foreign settlement was constructed to the design of the British civil engineer J.W. Hart. A grid of streets, tree-lined avenues, parks, street lamps, and sewers were installed across 126 plots. English-language newspapers of the time praised it as "the most beautifully designed settlement in the Orient." Yet historical context had been left entirely behind in the process. Because the settlement construction was not completed in time for the opening, a mixed-residence zone for Westerners and Japanese was designated in a portion of the area. This mixed zone would later give rise to the Kitano Ijinkan foreign-houses district and the Nankinmachi Chinatown that are now Kobe's tourist destinations, and it became the matrix of Kobe's distinctive culture.
To legitimize this forced consolidation the government launched a branding campaign affirming the opening of the ports and Westernization. It positioned Kobe as a symbol of bunmei kaika (文明開化), the dawn of civilization. The campaign declared that Westernization was cutting-edge and that the Japanese way of life was behind the times. As this mood spread under the Meiji government's direction, the customs of the settlement were brought in without regard for Japan's landscape, changing the face of the city piece by piece. And a current arose that asked the Japanese side to accommodate those ways of life. The most representative symbol of this was Kobe Beef.
The people living in Kobe's settlement had a meat-eating habit and naturally sought beef in Japan. But in a country where the open consumption of meat had been prohibited under Buddhist influence, there were no cattle raised for slaughter. The practice was taboo. Yet the demand from the settlement was large. Draft cattle were procured from various regions and the search for good beef began. Among the cattle sourced was a breed raised for farm work in the deep mountains of the Tajima region along the Sea of Japan. When residents of the settlement tasted this Tajima beef they were rapturous in their praise, and the beef eaten in Kobe came to be known as Kobe Beef. The first beef restaurant in Kobe was in fact opened by a British man in 1867, on the eve of the Meiji Restoration. Seen from another angle, many foreign tourists still come seeking Kobe Beef today. How many of them understand this history is another question. In a sense Kobe Beef was born as a debt of modernity and should not be glorified without qualification.
Around the same time a Freemason Sunrise Lodge was opened in Kobe. The Freemasons had in fact been establishing lodges in rapid succession in treaty ports on the eastern side of Japan such as Yokohama as well. At the time eight lodges operated within Japan. Because the Freemasons sought a meat-eating culture, they used the Kobe lodge as a base and began distributing Kobe Beef to the other lodges. Meanwhile Charles Henry Dallas, the master of the Yokohama lodge, began sourcing beef from Yamagata Prefecture, the home region of his mistress. This would eventually become Yonezawa Beef.
It was in fact in Kobe on the Kansai side rather than the Kanto side that the Freemasons first took root in Japan. As the settlement was built out, the city rapidly shifted from Japan's distinctive wooden architecture to streetscapes of brick and stone. What is superficially described and glorified as Western-style had behind it a network of trade linking the lodges. This history too is almost entirely unknown today.
What I have described here is only one facet of the history. But the fact that Hyogo Prefecture was formed by forcibly binding five provinces into one is a mirror that reflects how all of Japan was transformed by the Meiji Restoration. It is the front line for reconsidering the significance of Westernization as applied to other countries. This is how I view Hyogo Prefecture.
Modern Japan succeeded in building a centralized nation-state by cramming the countless small worlds that possessed their own distinct histories and cultures into the homogeneous administrative unit of the "prefecture" and erasing them. What was lost in the process is beyond measure. And because those who led this violence needed to affirm themselves and Westernization, they launched a massive national campaign. Using Western academic frameworks, they branded the governance of the Tokugawa shogunal house during the Edo period as "feudalism" and "despotism" and went so far as to declare it an era of rule by barbarians. But no era trusted place, respected place, and nurtured the culture of place as the Edo period did. It is the history since the appearance of the Meiji government that has been overwhelmingly feudalist, despotic, and barbarous in its development. In a previous article I cited a poem of November 1934 by Chuya Nakahara (1907–1937): "What they call the dawn of civilization, I call the development of barbarism." Precisely so.
Seen in this light, it becomes clear that for those in power the disclosure of the true history of Hyogo was something to be avoided at all costs and concealed with the utmost thoroughness. Because inscribed in it as self-evident proof are the enormous distortions in the story of modern Japan's Westernization and its so-called dawn of civilization. The Great Hanshin-Awaji Earthquake should have been a once-in-a-millennium opportunity to expose this concealment and these falsehoods. Regrettably the truth remained suppressed, and to this day Kobe's history is told only within the framework that emphasizes the Western residue of its occupation.
Hyogo is the prefecture in which lost plurality survives most vividly and at the same time the prefecture in which the violence of the modernization that forcibly bound that plurality into one is most nakedly exposed. By looking at both faces, the memory of "a world in which different things existed side by side" that the Japanese lost after Meiji can be recovered. And the five provinces of Hyogo continue to show their different faces even now.
Taira no Kiyomori dreamed of a port. Toshimichi Okubo layered a national strategy upon it. Hirobumi Ito gave it form through Western design principles. Behind them stood the structure of an era that hurried to open the market. The Hyogo Prefecture that was born from all of this is a microcosm of Japan's modernization. No, it is a microcosm of modernity itself. And within that microcosm the memory of five provinces, stretching back continuously from long before the modern era, still breathes. Reading the layered depth of this accumulated time is the key to truly understanding Hyogo.