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.