Kobe

In the most recent Population Census the population is about 1.525 million (1,525,152 in 2020). Over the five years from 1,537,272 in 2015 it lost more than twelve thousand. At a scale beyond 1.52 million, it is a designated city that has passed the stage of growth, and the total has begun to fall.

The number of children is thinning even faster than the total. Those under 15 fell from 185,084 (2015) to 171,315 (2020), nearly fourteen thousand fewer in five years. Over the same period the share aged 65 and over rose from 26.8% to 27.5%, past a quarter. On the other hand, households with children make up 17.0% (2020), the highest of the three cities. The residential land price is around 338,000 yen per m², above Kyoto and Osaka and the highest of the three cities. The Fiscal Capacity Index is 0.76, the lowest of the three cities — a structure in which the part not covered by its own tax revenue is filled through the local allocation tax. The childcare waitlist has fallen to 0. What is worth keeping in view, though, is that these are averages for a city of 1.52 million. Kobe is divided into nine wards, differing greatly in character from the old town along the coast to the new towns in the northwest beyond the mountains. The gaps between wards are flattened out and do not appear in this single figure. Why the city takes this shape cannot be read without going back to the origins of the port’s opening and the scarce flatland.

In 1868 the Port of Kobe opened. Everything begins with this harbor. The Rokko mountains to the north and Cape Wada to the south block the wind; the deep water along the bay and the small tidal range made this a harbor well suited to anchoring ships. Because the Rokko range drops steeply straight into Osaka Bay, the water deepens immediately from the shore — this city opened as a “fine natural harbor.” In the terms of economic geography, it is a textbook case of a harbor location summoning a city.

The harbor summoned industry. In Kobe after the opening, tea processing, match-making and spinning to make export goods arose first, and then it turned into a great center of rubber industry, shipbuilding and steel using imported raw materials. Port and industry gathered people onto the narrow band of flatland pinched between mountains and sea. But that same landform sharply limited the city’s room to grow. With the Rokko mountains pressing right behind it and flatland scarce, this city had no choice but to make, on its own, the land to hold a still-growing population.

The measure Kobe took was to cut the mountains and fill the sea. It cut the mountains away to run roads and rail, opened new towns on the cleared sites, and carried the excavated earth out to the sea to build man-made islands such as Port Island and Rokko Island. This chain of moving earth was called “the mountains going to the sea.” The very geographic constraint of insufficient flatland, pinched between mountains and sea, produced a city-building unique to this place: turning mountains into residential land and the sea into new urban area. And in 1995 the Great Hanshin-Awaji Earthquake struck the city; the port facilities were restored in two years. Beginning with a fine harbor, summoning industry, having the scarcity of flatland rework its mountains and sea, and crossing the earthquake — Kobe’s numbers stand on the origins that the constraint of a landform pinched between mountains and sea has taken on, era by era.

What characterizes Kobe is that while the total population fell by twelve thousand, the number of children fell even faster, by nearly fourteen thousand. And Kobe’s waitlist is 0 children. Here too it must not be misread. Although households with children, at 17.0%, are the highest of the three cities, the absolute number of those under 15 itself is thinning by nearly fourteen thousand in five years. The zero of a city whose stock of children is shrinking is the reverse, in dynamics, of the Urayasu zero that caught supply up to rising children; it fits the figures better read as the result of supply and demand balancing downward.

The total population falls, the absolute number of children falls even faster, and the elderly share is past a quarter — in a 1.52-million city where these three run at once, the childcare figures too converge on small values. And this too is an average across nine wards: between the old town along the coast and the new towns in the northwest beyond the mountains, the circumstances of children and childcare cannot be the same. In parts of the new towns opened by cutting the mountains, it is known that aging set in early among residents. The average figure flattens such ward-by-ward differences in timing. A number, on its own, does not fix its own meaning.

Kobe holds many functions of its own. One is the harbor that has stood since the opening in 1868, where the landform of mountains dropping straight into the sea still inscribes the city’s origin on the map. Another is the man-made islands built in the sea from earth cut from the mountains — Port Island and Rokko Island — which, as an answer to the constraint of scarce flatland, brought forth a built-up area unique to this city upon the sea. And the new towns of the northwest, opened on the cleared sites of the cut mountains, pushed the residential area out beyond the narrow flatland.

On a narrow band of land pinched between the Rokko mountains and Osaka Bay, Kobe has stacked the functions of port, industry, man-made islands and new towns while wrestling with its landform. The harbor of the opening, the man-made islands at sea and the mountain residential areas all rest, in the end, on the same constraint of “insufficient flatland.” The earth cut from the mountains, and the sea filled with that earth — the ridgeline of the mountains, lowered by the cutting, and the shore of the man-made islands, pushed that much farther out to sea, still face each other and shape the outline of this city.