The view from in here

Finally, I've got some pictures which illustrate how it looks from where I'm sitting.

When you venture-out onto the balcony, one looks due south through all those wires. Those orange-and-white towers in the distance are cargo cranes down in the port facilities on Rokko island.


















When one walks-out the front door, you can look north towards the hills which are only a few blocks away.

The entire city of Kobe is pinned between a mountain ridge and the sea. It soon becomes apparent that the only ways to expand are to create artificial landmasses like Rokko island or carving ledges up the sides of the hills for new construction, as you can see in the upper-left portion of the photo. (One can also stack highways on top of each other and install underground shopping centers, but that's a given.)

Since all east-west traffic is funnelled through the built-up areas of the city, the shinkansen (the bullet-train) needs to bypass the urban area with a tunnel under the far side of the mountain ridge in the second photo. Shin-Kobe, the station where it stops, is located some kilometers off in the hills to the northwest.