Kobe City Museum was opened in 1982. This is one of the many museums in Japan, which exist with the support of the municipality. It is located in a building built in neoclassical style in 1935. The museum building resembles a Greek temple with Doric columns on the front. Before it was located in the museum branch of the bank in Tokyo. The building was damaged during the Great Hanshin earthquake of 1995, but a year later after the restoration of the museum reopened. It is remarkable that the museum's collection, including national treasures stored there, were not injured.

The collection combined collections of the two museums - the Museum of Archeology and Art and the Municipal Museum of Art Namban the XVI century (or "southern barbarians", as they called all foreigners in Japan, at the beginning of the Portuguese, and then other Europeans who settled in the south of the country).

The collection includes 39,000 items, including archaeological finds, works of art, old maps and historical documents and artifacts related to the history of the city of Kobe. The history of the city is represented here, from ancient times to the 1995 earthquake and subsequent reconstruction of the city. In a separate exhibition includes objects found in the area of ​​Kitano-cho on those lands that once belonged to the foreign concessions.

Since Kobe has long been a port of international importance, it was agreed that the concept of a city museum as the interaction of eastern and western cultures. The museum presents the history of cultural exchange in Japan with the countries of Asia - Korea, China, and the Japanese culture of the Edo period, when direct communication with other countries is almost absent, and the Meiji period, when European culture has had perhaps the most tangible impact on the lives of the Japanese .