is one of nine wards of

Kobe Kobe ( , ; officially , ) is the capital city of Hyōgo Prefecture Japan. With a population around 1.5 million, Kobe is Japan's seventh-largest city and the third-largest port city after Tokyo and Yokohama. It is located in Kansai region, w ...

, Japan. It has an area of 31.4 km², and a population of 129,095 (2008). A leading national university in Japan,

Kobe University , also known in the Kansai region as , is a leading Japanese national university located in the city of Kobe, in Hyōgo. It was established in 1949, but the academic origins of Kobe University trace back to the establishment of Kobe Higher Com ...

, is located in this ward, as is the city's Oji Zoo. The Tadao Ando-designed Hyogo Prefectural Museum of Art is a short walk south of the Nada JR station. Rokko High School is in Nada-ku.

Sake production

Nada is a major

sake Sake, also spelled saké ( ; also referred to as Japanese rice wine), is an alcoholic beverage of Japanese origin made by fermenting rice that has been polished to remove the bran. Despite the name ''Japanese rice wine'', sake, and ind ...

producing region, and along with Fushimi produces 45% of all the sake in Japan. A plenitude of water good for making sake and a location near Osaka (the hub of physical distribution) made it one of the most principal areas of making sake. It was one of the sake production areas called Nada-Gogō. The fine taste of the Nada sake comes from ' Miyamizu' mineral-rich water, which was discovered during the Tenpō era (1830–1844) by Tazaemon Yamamura from the Uozaki-go district. Miyamizu is hard water high in

calcium Calcium is a chemical element with the symbol Ca and atomic number 20. As an alkaline earth metal, calcium is a reactive metal that forms a dark oxide-nitride layer when exposed to air. Its physical and chemical properties are most similar t ...

and

potassium Potassium is the chemical element with the symbol K (from Neo-Latin '' kalium'') and atomic number19. Potassium is a silvery-white metal that is soft enough to be cut with a knife with little force. Potassium metal reacts rapidly with atmosp ...

but low in

iron Iron () is a chemical element with symbol Fe (from la, ferrum) and atomic number 26. It is a metal that belongs to the first transition series and group 8 of the periodic table. It is, by mass, the most common element on Earth, right in ...

, making it ideal for making rich, full-flavored sake. Yamada Nishiki rice is grown in the Banshu eastern

Kansai plains The or the , lies in the southern-central region of Japan's main island Honshū. The region includes the prefectures of Nara, Wakayama, Kyoto, Osaka, Hyōgo and Shiga, often also Mie, sometimes Fukui, Tokushima and Tottori. The metropolitan ...

. It has larger, softer grains than regular table rice and is starchy, which makes it particularly suitable for sake making. Grains of Yamadanishiki rice have hard starch cores. This means that when they are soaked in Miyamizu water, they dissolve slowly but do not lose their shape. It is said that this characteristic is the reason why Yamadanishiki produces such uniquely flavored sake. The most essential factors for making pure sake are good grain polishing ability and low temperatures. In the five sake-producing districts in Nada, water from the river that flows from Mount Rokkō into the sea is used to power rice-polishing water mills, thus producing highly polished grains of rice, which is not possible with manpower alone. Furthermore, the combination of the cold winds, known as 'Rokko oroshi', and the influence of the inland sea makes for ideal weather conditions for brewing sake in winter.

Yamaguchi-gumi

The

Yamaguchi-gumi is Japan's largest ''yakuza'' organization. It is named after its founder Harukichi Yamaguchi. Its origins can be traced back to a loose labor union for longshoreman, dockworkers in Kobe before World War II. It is one of the largest organized c ...

, the largest

Yakuza , also known as , are members of transnational organized crime syndicates originating in Japan. The Japanese police and media, by request of the police, call them , while the ''yakuza'' call themselves . The English equivalent for the ter ...

group in Japan, and one of the largest criminal organizations in the world, has its headquarters in Nada-ku.

Education

Deutsche Schule Kobe DSK International (DSKI; 神戸ドイツ学院 ''Kobe Doitsu Gakuin'') is an international school on Rokkō Island, in Higashinada-ku, Kobe, Japan. DSK International is an International IB school in Kobe for ages 2 to 12. The school provides curr ...

used to be located in Nada-ku.Deutscher Bundestag 4. Wahlperiode Drucksache IV/3672

Archive
.

Bundestag The Bundestag (, "Federal Diet (assembly), Diet") is the German Federalism, federal parliament. It is the only federal representative body that is directly elected by the German people. It is comparable to the United States House of Representat ...

(West Germany). 23 June 1965. Retrieved on 12 March 2016. p. 35/51. "Deutsche Schule Kobe 7/2 Sowa-cho, Nada-ku"

References

External links

Official website of Nada-ku, Kobe
{{Coord, 34, 42, 45, N, 135, 14, 23, E, region:JP-28, display=title

Rice wine Rice wine is an alcoholic beverage fermented and distilled from rice, traditionally consumed in East Asia, Southeast Asia and South Asia. Rice wine is made by the fermentation of rice starch that has been converted to sugars. Microbes are the ...