Located close to the center of the Japanese archipelago, Kobe boasts excellent access from overseas, with the city center just 60 minutes by car and 30 minutes by sea from Kansai International Airport. Kobe is also an extremely convenient convention venue for visitors from elsewhere in Japan, thanks to the offshore Kobe Airport, Shin-Kobe station on the Shinkansen high-speed railway, and a number of other national and private railway lines.

Kobe is home to more than 60 large and small convention facilities, beginning with the Kobe Convention Center—a cluster of four facilities incorporating the International Conference Center Kobe, the Kobe International Exhibition Hall, the World Hall and the Portopia Hall. In addition, the city has a number of first-class hotels suitable for holding international conferences, making it feasible to host large conferences and conventions attended by up to 10,000 delegates.

Visited by almost three million tourists each year, Kobe boasts a wealth of accommodation facilities in terms of both quality and quantity. As a result, even when large-scale conventions are held in the city, there are numerous options for participants looking for a comfortable and convenient stay. In particular, in comparison with the Tokyo Metropolitan Area, Kobe features a great number of inexpensive business hotels as well as Japanese-style ‘ryokan’ inns. This allows the city to cope with the demand for almost any type of accommodation, not only for convention participants, but also for tourists and visitors on limited budgets.

Convention participants can sample a variety of unique dining and party experiences during their stay in Kobe. The possibilities include a banquet on the summit of Mt. Rokko or on a cruise ship in the bay while enjoying the “10-million-dollar night view,” or a feast at Arima Onsen, one of Japan’s three oldest spa resorts, and Japan’s leading sake brewing area.

In addition to conventional tourism, Kobe offers a wide diversity of unique excursions, including industrial tourism to places associated with the materials, electrical machinery, food production, pharmaceuticals and apparel industries, as well as earthquake disaster-related facilities that no other city has, and the world’s most-powerful large-scale synchrotron radiation facility.

In 1981, Kobe gained an advantage over its rival cities across Japan by developing the Kobe Convention Center, a complex which combines the International Conference Center Kobe, the Kobe International Exhibition Hall, etc., with first-class hotel facilities. Since that time, more than 20,000 conventions have been held in the International Conference Center Kobe and the Kobe International Exhibition Hall alone. In addition, throughout the city as a whole, approximately 3,000 international conferences have been staged to date. Based on this wealth of experience and accumulated know-how, Kobe has built up a comprehensive support system that includes the provision of grants of up to 10 million yen (from the Portopia Memorial Fund, or the Tsutomu Nakauchi Convention Foundation), etc.

Compared with the Tokyo Metropolitan Area, and even with other convention facilities in the Kansai Region, Kobe’s convention hosting costs are extremely reasonable. Moreover, accommodation facilities in Kobe are significantly lower than in Tokyo, a consideration that is appreciated by convention organizers and participants alike.