Aug. 29, 2013 
Kitano Elementary School of Kobe was closed in 1996 following a decline in the number of pupils, but two years later, it restarted its life as a new, experience-type tourist spot. The elementary school, set up in a fashionable uptown area in Kobe in 1908, endured the devastating earthquake of January 1995, which claimed about 6,400 lives and flattened many buildings in the internationally known port city and neighboring regions. Further back, the modern three-story building survived the repeated U.S. air raids in 1945 toward the end of the Pacific War.
The closed school building was remodeled to help revive tourist demand following the great earthquake and activate local industry, while maintaining its original look and design, including corridors, an auditorium and other facilities inside, as much as possible.
Currently called Kitano Meister Garden, the structure houses about 20 tenants; the first floor is occupied by food and confectionary shops, while the second floor is used by handcraft shops and ateliers. The tenants, which use what used to be classrooms on both sides of the corridor, are partially reshuffled from time to time.
The new tourist spot not only sells original Kobe brand products but also provides visitors with an opportunity to take a firsthand look at how these products are made. The auditorium on the third floor is used as a hall for various events and workshops. At craft shops on the second floor, visitors can have a chance to make their own products, such as accessories, soaps and Japanese-style candles.
As about 19 million tourists visit Kobe every year, Kitano Meister Garden attracts about one million tourists, mainly females and package tour visitors, having surpassed 10 million in terms of the cumulative number of visitors in 2010. The former playground, to the west of the school building, is remodeled as a parking lot and it is occupied by many sightseeing buses almost all the time.
The former school building faces the northern part of what local people call Tor Road running north and south between the Kitano area and the portside former foreign settlement of Kobe, one of a few ports opened to foreign countries by the Kokugawa shogunate government in the middle of the 19th century. The Kitano area, which lies on the foot of the Rokko Mountains, accommodates over 30 time-honored foreigners’ residents, some of them designated as public cultural assets. Kitano Meister Garden is expected to make the area even more attractive to visitors, demonstrating Kobe’s further attempt to overcome the effects of the killer earthquake while preserving its exotic atmosphere as an international city.
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