Kobe City Museum

The Kobe City Museum occupies a neoclassical building from 1935, formerly the Yokohama Specie Bank, in the old foreign settlement district south of Motomachi. It focuses on Kobe's history as a port and international trading city, with particular strength in the Namban period — the years of early contact with Portuguese and Spanish traders in the 16th and 17th centuries.

The museum has an outstanding collection of Namban art: folding screens, lacquerware boxes, and paintings depicting foreigners in Japan with the mixture of accurate observation and stylised exaggeration typical of the period. The building itself, in the middle of what was once the foreign settlement, is worth seeing — it is one of the best surviving pieces of early Showa neoclassical architecture in the Kansai region.

things to do museum
A story
The museum's most celebrated possession is a collection of Namban art — the lacquerwork, paintings, and screens produced by Japanese artists in the 16th and 17th centuries depicting Portuguese and Spanish merchants and missionaries. The Namban ("Southern Barbarians") were the first Western traders in Japan, and their appearance — long noses, baggy trousers, large hats — fascinated Japanese artists who had never seen Europeans before.