Kobe, Hyogo

A thin band of land between the sea and the mountains.

Nada, in Kobe, is the largest sake-producing district in Japan, and it owes its existence to two accidents of geography: the cold wind that pours down off Mount Rokko in winter, and a hard local water called miyamizu, drawn from a few specific wells near the coast. Everything brewing needs, this narrow strip happened to have.

Winter is the season of the new sake, and through the cold months the breweries open their gates in turn. You drink it freshly pressed, unpasteurized, still rough and young—a taste available for only a few weeks of the year, gone by spring. The brewers say the miyamizu differs from well to well, and that a trained palate can hear the difference.

Much of Nada fell in the 1995 earthquake. The old wooden storehouses, some of them centuries old, came down into rubble in a single morning. And yet several were rebuilt, plank by plank, and are brewing still. Every winter, they press again. There is a stubbornness in that, quiet and annual, that is worth tasting alongside the sake.

Kobe's Kitano district was built for the foreign traders who arrived after the port opened in the 1860s. Their houses — still standing, still called ijinkan, foreign residences — line the hillside above the city. The antique market that appears nearby monthly draws on this mixed history: European silverware alongside Japanese lacquerware, Showa-era records next to Meiji-period glassware.

The market is small and irregular, announced through local channels and attended mainly by people who already know it exists. This is not a complaint. The vendors are collectors and dealers who have been doing this for years; they know what they have and where it came from. Conversation is part of the transaction.

Kobe is usually encountered through its food — the beef, the bread, the particular cosmopolitan character of its restaurant culture. The Kitano antique market offers a different version of the same history: the accumulated material culture of a port city that has been receiving things from elsewhere for a hundred and sixty years, and has been sorting through them ever since.