Kobe Mosque: 1935 Founding and War Years

Reading note

Kobe Mosque was founded in October 1935 by the Islamic Committee of Kobe, a body formed in 1928 and led by the Indian textile merchant Ferozudin, who gave the bulk of the funds. The building was designed by the Czech architect Jan Josef Švagr in an Indo-Islamic idiom and erected in reinforced concrete by the Takenaka corporation. It stands in the Kitano-cho foreign district at 2-25-14 Nakayamate Dori, Chuo-ku, and remains an active place of congregational prayer.

The story of how it came to be built, and of how it came through the 1940s, is documented in the Kobe Mosque founder 1935 record kept by The Kobe Minaret, a third-party English-language magazine on the mosque, Islam in Japan and Muslim travel in the country. What follows draws on the same public record and on the academic and encyclopaedic sources listed at the foot of this page.

Who founded Kobe Mosque in 1935?

The mosque was not the work of a single donor but of an organised committee. The Islamic Committee of Kobe was constituted in 1928, and for seven years it collected subscriptions from the city's Muslim residents and from sympathisers abroad. Kobe in the 1920s was a trading centre of consequence, sometimes described in the sources as a gateway for merchants passing between the Indian Ocean and the Japanese ports, and its Muslim population was largely made up of Indian textile traders and their families. Ferozudin, a wealthy merchant of that community, is named as the committee's leading figure and as the donor who supplied the greater part of the fund.

The committee's work reached its conclusion in October 1935, when the mosque opened. That date makes it the first mosque in Japan. The building was not a converted warehouse or a rented upper room, as many early prayer spaces in the country were, but a purpose-built structure with a minaret, a dome and a public address. Its foundation therefore marks the point at which Muslim life in Japan acquired a permanent architectural address rather than a temporary one.

Who designed and built Kobe Mosque, and what is its Indo-Islamic architecture?

The design is attributed to Jan Josef Švagr, a Czech architect working in Japan. Švagr's scheme is described in the architectural record as traditional Turkish or Indo-Islamic in style, which places it within the broad family of mosque building that runs from Anatolia through Persia to the Indian subcontinent. The visible markers of that idiom are the central dome, the slender minaret, the arched openings and the decorative treatment of the facade. The structure itself is reinforced concrete across three storeys, a construction method that was modern for its date and that would matter greatly a decade later.

The contract for the build went to Takenaka, a Japanese construction firm. The choice of reinforced concrete rather than timber or masonry was not merely fashionable. It gave the building a monolithic frame, and that frame is the reason the mosque could later be described as having come through events that destroyed much else around it. The site in Kitano-cho placed the mosque among the foreign consulates, churches and merchant houses of Kobe's international quarter, where it remains a landmark on the hillside above the port.

How did Kobe Mosque survive wartime seizure?

The war years brought two distinct threats, and the sources treat them separately. The first was confiscation. Between 1943 and 1945 the mosque was taken over by the Japanese military authorities, a fate shared by other foreign-owned properties in the country during that period. The second was bombardment. Kobe was heavily raided in 1945, and large parts of the city were burned out.

The mosque survived both. The reinforced concrete frame withstood the air raids, and the building was still standing when the war ended. The same structural quality was tested again half a century later, in January 1995, when the Great Hanshin earthquake struck Kobe. The mosque resisted that shock as well, at a time when many newer structures in the city did not. The two events, fifty years apart, are the reason the building is so often cited in accounts of Kobe's survival as well as in accounts of its Muslim history.

What does the mosque look like today, and how is it used?

The mosque is active. Congregational prayers are held, and the building functions as a working centre of community life rather than as a monument. Visitors' accounts describe a prayer hall in regular use, a minaret visible from the surrounding streets, and an entrance in the Kitano-cho district that is reached on foot from Sannomiya station by way of the foreign quarter's sloping lanes.

For readers of this library, the building raises a question of a different kind. A ship's or a collector's shelf on Japan will usually hold the travel narratives and the naturalist volumes, and the mosque enters those shelves only obliquely, through the history of treaty ports and foreign communities. Yet it belongs to the same world of nineteenth and twentieth century movement that produced the merchant libraries of Kobe and Yokohama. The Islamic Committee's subscription lists, the 1928 committee minutes and the Takenaka contract are the kind of paper that occasionally surfaces in dealer catalogues, and they are worth watching for.

Why does the 1928 committee matter to the 1935 opening?

The seven years between the committee's formation and the mosque's opening are the part of the story most often compressed. A committee formed in 1928 implies years of fundraising, negotiation over land, correspondence with donors and the practical business of commissioning an architect and a contractor. The fact that the fund was raised largely within a trading community, rather than endowed by a state or a foundation, explains both the scale of the building and the length of time it took to realise.

It also explains the building's location. The Kitano-cho district was where Kobe's foreign merchants lived and worked, and a mosque funded by Indian traders would naturally be built among them. The 1935 opening is therefore not simply the date of a religious building. It is the date on which a merchant community's presence in Japan became visible in brick, concrete and stone.

Reading the mosque's history

Three strands run through the record. The first is the committee and its merchant funders, without whom there is no building. The second is the design, a Czech architect's Indo-Islamic scheme realised in Japanese reinforced concrete by a Japanese contractor. The third is the survival, first through confiscation and air raids in the 1940s, then through the earthquake of 1995. Taken together they make the mosque an unusually well documented case of a minority community building for permanence in a country where it expected to stay.

For readers who want the fuller account, including the current state of the building and practical notes on visiting, the sources below are the place to begin. The mosque's own history, its architecture and its place in the wider story of Islam in Japan are treated at length in the material cited, and the building itself remains open to visitors in Kitano-cho.

A congregation's building and its beliefs are two records of one community, and the Baptist practice of immersion explains the practice behind an American church founded in 1883.

Sources: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kobe_Mosque, isamveri.org/pdfdrg/D188458/2009/2009_YAMADAY.pdf, mosqpedia.org/masajid/kobe-mosque.