The Weathercock on the Hill

If you climb the stone steps of the shrine at the top of the Kitano slope and turn around at the terrace wall, three different centuries sit on top of one another in the same frame of afternoon light.

Right beside your elbow are the weathered granite lantern and dark kuromatsu pine boughs of a twelfth-century Shinto shrine. Directly below the stone parapet—close enough that you could toss a pine cone onto its slate shingles—rises the steep pyramidal spire and warm red brick of a German trader's house built in the Meiji port era, crowned by a black wrought-iron rooster turning into the wind. And beyond the half-timbered gables, the whole coastal city tumbles down the narrow strip of land between the mountain and the sea until it meets the breakwaters and container ships of the bay.

From the street below, the hillside houses feel like monuments you crane your neck to admire. From the shrine terrace above, you see how small and domestic the spire really is against the water—just a proud iron bird perched on a red-brick chimney-top, keeping watch over the harbor breeze while swallows bank between the pines and the afternoon sun turns the bay to hammered silver.