The 1995 Kobe (Hyogo-ken Nanbu) earthquake (Mw 6.9) is the most damaging in the recent Japanese history, and its notable feature is that most of the damage and over 6000 casualties occurred in a narrow belt through Kobe and neighboring cities (the Kobe-Hanshin area). Usually a fault-rupture propagation generates strong ground motions along the direction of propagation, and this directivity effect should be significant above the source faults and beyond its leading end. However, the damage zone of the Kobe earthquake is migrated noticeably from the fault trace into the center of Kobe city. Three-dimensional (3-D) simulations of ground motion in Kobe show that this migration is due to the strong amplification and ray bending in the sedimentary basin below the city in cooperation with the multipathing effects at a basin/bedrock boundary. ¿ 1998 American Geophysical Union