I didn’t see any of the standard tourist sites in Kobe except for Chinatown; I was here for a Frank Lloyd Wright-designed house that was closed for renovation when I was last in Japan, just outside of the city. I had a marvellous time: the aforementioned house which was beautiful and nearly empty of visitors, charming carpentry tool museum, secondhand bookshop, artist studios under train arches, a whole room to myself in a converted old doctor’s clinic, local shotengai looking for tsukemono, onsen day at a 70s hotel over in Arima, lots of cable cars.