Kobe: Wealth, Gangsters, and Breathtaking Cityscapes

While the past 2 months of touring with Dinosaur Zoo has given a chance to see a lot of Japan's countryside and cityscapes, in terms of the latter, easily the most striking stop has been Kobe. While working for Peaceboat, a Japanese NGO that sails people around the world about a decade ago, I had a brief stop in the Kobe's port, but I wasn't there anywhere long enough to make an impression of the city either way. As such, I welcomed this chance to see the city again, and quite frankly I was blown away.

Living in Tokyo, which according to Finance Online, is currently the wealthiest city in the world, I'm not a stranger to seeing clean streets, amazing architecture and constant supercars. All that being said however, when you get into Tokyo's back streets, and away from it's shiny main streets, you still see grime. There is still graffiti, crows digging through garbage, and cockroaches scurrying in it's hyper-narrow back alleys. While carefully tucked away and generally out of sight, all of the city's major areas have back streets and a grimy underbelly that is there if you look closely.

When I was in Kobe, however, I didn't see any of that. Major or minor, every street was pristinely clean. Granted, I did only have two days there, but try as I might, I couldn't even find Graffiti. Talking to our tour manager George, he told me that Kobe is actually known for that. (Coincidentally, it's also known for having beef so good that Kobe Bryant's father named him after it.) In general, Japanese people take an incredible amount of pride in outward appearance, and pretty much anywhere in the country you won't find trash on the street, or so much as a spot of rust on a car... but Kobe seemed to take it to another level. As one of the country's older port cities, it is also known for cosmopolitanism, and fashion, and the Japanese themselves say "If you can't go to Paris, you go to Kobe." 

Oxymoronically however, one of the other interesting things about the city is that despite how clean it is, it also harbors the country's largest Yakuza organization, Yamaguchi-Gumi, which is one of the largest criminal organizations in the world. With over 20,000 members, and activities stretching to other areas of Asia and even in the US, the Yamaguchi-Gumi makes billions of dollars per year and has a higher income than a lot of small countries. That could explain some of the wealth.

Even the theatre we performed in, the biggest (and nicest so far) illustrated the wealth and the class of this city. 

Recently, as there has been a splintering in the Yamaguchi-Gumi, many have feared that this would lead to violence in the city, but if there was any, the city certainly didn't show any scars from it. Would love to come back here and explore this place again sometime. Maybe next time I can find some graffiti.

References:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yamaguchi-gumi
https://financesonline.com/10-wealthiest-cities-in-the-world-its-not-new-york-or-london-at-the-top/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kobe