34.6910° N, 135.1826° E

KOBE

Most Famous People Born in Kobe, Japan

Notable people

742

Peak decade

1980s

Median birth year

1963

Most distinctive

Rikishi 71.1×

Kobe was Japan's most foreign-facing port long before the 1995 earthquake, and the old Kitano settlements still show in an unusual density of bilingual Novelists. The real surprises are the voice-acting studios and manga houses that clustered here postwar — Seiyū and Manga counts running at seventy and sixty-plus times their global baselines — and a Judo bench that traces back to Kanō Jigorō founding the sport down the road.