Kobe, Japan on April 12th

We are now on Day 100 of our Around The World cruise. It would be a great time to sit back and take stock of what we have done so far, but we are moving much too fast and seeing too much to have that luxury. As it is, we are days behind recording what we did do, so on we go.

Today’s excursion, The Glory of Mt. Rokko,begins at 9:00am and will last 3.5 hours. We are due to sail at 2:00pm, so this will be a quick one that stays right in town. We board our bus and meet Masa, our guide. Her name means “diamond” and she is yet another cheerful, interesting ambassador of her city and country.

We have a half hour or so to get to the base station of the Rokko Cable Car that will take us to the top of Mt. Rokko, which gives Masa an opportunity to feed us information. She starts out by supplying us each with a Mt. Rokko Guide Map. Quick aside: Here is something to add to our enormous list of things we like about Japan and the Japanese: when you go to a tourist attraction, they invariably have a brochure to give you, and it will be in at least two languages, Japanese and English. Now to Random Fact mode:

Kobe was one of the ports most directly affected when contact with the west was opened up in 1868, and many of its buildings were built in the first decades of the 20^th
In fact, this year the city will celebrate the 150^thanniversary of the opening of the port.
The world famous Kobe Beef owes its pedigree as the world’s finest beef to the isolation of the herds. That isolation is partly a result of the Shogunate of the 16^ththrough 19^thcentury closing the nation to the outside world and partly topographic in that the rugged landscape kept herds small and isolated.
There are 800 cities in Japan, and Kobe ranks sixth in population at around 1.5 million.
The 1995 earthquake that killed almost 7,000 left a total of 300,000 homeless, so a great deal of public housing exists in Kobe, built in the aftermath of that disaster.
Someone asked about the public pension system: as long as you put in a minimum of 25 years of work, you may retire at age 60 at around 50% of your salary. In recent years, actuaries calculated that providing benefits at this low age would be unsustainable, so it has been raised to 65 and the percentage you receive is dropping as the population ages and more people must be supported. Right now four people that work are supporting one person on retirement. In twenty years, that will drop to two people supporting one.
The birth rate is also down to 1.4, which, of course, is below the replacement value, so the total population is decreasing.
Japan has vey strict immigration policies, based on skills needed.
Kobe is wedged between Mt. Rokko (pronounced Row’ koh) to the north and Osaka Bay to the south, so the city is narrow and easy to navigate.

We have arrived at the base station for the Rokko Cable Car, built in 1932. This is more commonly known in our part of the world as a funicular railway as the cars run on tracks. Of course, the mode of power is a cable pulled by an electric motor, hence it is locally described as a cable car. There are two cars, one of which departs the summit on the half hour, with its sister departing the base at the same time. We have just missed the 9:30 departure, so we get our tickets from Masa and wait as she explains that there will be steps at the summit station that we must climb to reach the tourist area at the top. The car will gain 1,600 feet in altitude in about ten minutes.

Right on time, we board quickly and off we go. This car moves right along, and the angle of ascent appears to be about thirty degrees or so. Midway, of course, we pass the other car that is descending on the short side track. The part of the car we are in is open, and it is a beautiful ride through forest, with an occasional glimpse of Kobe below, as well as a few lingering cherry blossoms! Before you know it, we are at the summit station.

The ten-minute ride being over, now we must climb a fair number of stairs to get to the observation area. At the base, Masa has told us thirty. There are many more than that, however, and this inaccuracy earns her a tongue-lashing from one of our fellow passengers. The guy shouldn’t have been on this damn ride in the first place, as the guidebook warned of having to climb stairs, but no matter. His entitlement mentality is unleashed on our guide. Of course, she politely listens, and I would bet she is thinking what I am thinking as I watch this harangue: “What an a-hole.” [We have learned that in Japan, such confrontational behavior is extremely rude, even more so than we think. So we cringe.]

But I digress. Please excuse the side track. We have arrived and attempt to get some wonderful views of Kobe and Osaka Bay, but the haze limits what we see. It is a beautiful morning, however, and there are some nice small gardens to view that include some miniature daffodils to admire. We also browse through the gift shop and buy some post cards. Swiss music is playing over loudspeakers, which we find a bit confusing, but we find out later. See below notes. We enjoy chatting with Masa. It’s a very nice visit on top of 3,000-foot Mt. Rokko.

As we are ascending in the cable car, our bus is ascending the very twisting and turning auto road to meet us. It arrives and we board for the long trip down. Masa continues:

There is a ski area up on the mountain, and a “ropeway” will take you to the summit.The ropeway is what we would call a cable car.
We see quite a few houses up here. Before air conditioning, this was the most exclusive neighborhood you could live in. It is still home to some in a variety of housing, some modest and some opulent. There are also a fair number of corporate retreats.
It is 9 degrees (Celsius) cooler on the summit than in Kobe.
Rokko is a symbol of Kobe andOsaka (36 miles to the east of Kobe).
There are many wild boars on the mountain, and there are times when they wander into the city in search of food.
100 years ago, when a man named Arthur Groom first opened up the area, including constructing a golf course, there were few trees on the mountain. Many of the species we see were brought in by foreigners.
In some respects, people in the Kobe area are fascinated by things Swiss as a result of Mt. Rokko being such a popular recreational area. There is an annual Swiss Festival, which includes a yodeling contest.
There is an elementary school on the mountain. As the fulltime population decreased (as the installation of a/c increased in the city), so did the number of students. When it got down to only 70 students, in order to keep it viable, the City of Kobe began, in 2001, to allow anyone in the city to send their children there rather than the required neighborhood school. The school now has 358 students.
Not many years ago, a typhoon hit causing a great many landslides on the mountain.Repairs are still ongoing, as we can see.
Masa notes that there are not very many super rich in Japan, nor are there many very poor.
In Japan, often real estate on the hillsides is cheaper than around the train station.On our descent into Kobe, we see some huge public housing developments with fantastic views of the city.

After we wade back into city traffic, it is about a fifteen-minute drive to our next stop: the Hakutsuru Sake Brewery Museum. Sake is the national drink of Japan, and the Nada district of Kobe is a leading production center in Japan. The company we are visiting was started in 1743, and there are ten to twelve large sake brewing companies in the area. The two elements that drew such a large number of brewers were high-quality natural spring water and cold winters. The water flows down from the mountains in Kobe’s back yard. And prior to mechanical refrigeration, cold weather was required. The winter winds in Kobe were ideal for that purpose. Our guide says that excellent sea transportation was also a reason so many sake breweries set up shop here. In the days before good roads, shipping by sea to Tokyo was the most efficient.

The museum is next to an enormous industrial complex of buildings that house the actual brewery. Hakutsuru means “Blue Crane” and this company is very well known in Japan and exports to fifty countries around the world. The museum is very well done, with many rooms with dioramas showing the various steps in the brewing process. Masa explains as we walk through, but there really isn’t enough time to really take it all in. There is a nice brochure (of course) that we receive to get more detail.

Obviously, there is a store and a tasting room with generous tastings of four different varieties of Sake. We try all four and like one of the fruit-flavored ones the best. The store has all kinds of sake stuff, tons of it. We buy one small gift and no sake. Steve waits in line to pay and his bad line karma kicks in. The person ahead of him is buying the place out. Whatever.

We have to head back to the ship, and it’s a good thing it won’t be leaving for a couple of hours because we are stuck in traffic. It gives Masa a chance to give us one more morsel of information: Kobe Steel has a very good rugby team, and Kobe will host the World Rugby Cup next year.

We eat a quick lunch and then watch as we sail out of Kobe at the scheduled 2:00pm. Peter Croyle has an Enrichment Lecture on our next port of call, Kagoshima, Japan. The distance we must cover is 617 nautical miles, so we won’t arrive there until 1:00pm tomorrow. That will give us time to rest up for our fourth port in four days.