Yokohama, Kanagawa: King, Queen, Jack and the Ship That Stayed

The nicknames come first. Walk into Kannai (関内), the old quarter behind Yokohama's harbor, and three towers stand within sight of one another, known to everyone here as King, Queen and Jack. The Kanagawa Tourism Association passes on the story that foreign sailors in the early Shōwa era gave them those names, seeing face cards from a deck of playing cards. King is the Kanagawa Prefectural Government Main Building, Queen the Yokohama Customs House Main Building, and Jack the Yokohama Port Opening Memorial Hall.

Start at the water, though. Ōsanbashi (大さん橋), the international passenger terminal, pushes out into the harbor, and its history runs back to 1892, when work began on an iron pier extending the line of the British Wharf. The pier, about 457 meters long, was finished in 1894; it was damaged in the Great Kantō Earthquake of 1923, restored by 1925, and replaced by the present terminal in 2002. The rooftop deck got its name by public contest on December 4, 2006. Out of 3,995 suggestions, Kujira no Senaka, "Whale's Back," drew the most, with 26.

King, Queen and Jack Over Kannai

The Kanagawa Prefectural Museum of Cultural History describes the prefectural government building, completed in October 1928, as wearing tiled walls in an Art Deco manner with geometric ornament of its own invention. The tower at its front, the King, is called a pioneering case of teikan yōshiki (帝冠様式), "imperial crown style," in which a Japanese-style tower and roof are set over a Western building. Stand at the entrance and look for the line where one language of building hands over to the other.

The Queen, a few minutes toward the sea on Kaigan-dōri, is the main building of the Yokohama Customs House, completed in 1934 and recognized as a City of Yokohama certified historic building. Its tower ends in a dome in the manner of an Islamic mosque, which is where the building gets its reputation for an exotic air. Cross the road before you judge the shape; it reads differently from each side.

Jack is the clock tower at the southeastern corner of the Yokohama Port Opening Memorial Hall. Materials from the hall record that it was built in 1917 to mark the 50th anniversary of the port's opening, financed in part by donations from citizens, at a construction cost of 369,000 yen. What the money bought was a civic gathering place built around an assembly hall: 62 rooms, large and small, with capacity for 1,200 people.

The Avenue Built to Stop Fire

Nippon Ōdori (日本大通り) runs from the prefectural building down to the harbor, and it is wider than any traffic requires. That was the intention. After the great fire of 1866, the reconstruction plan took as its principle that densely packed blocks should be avoided, and broad roads and parks doubling as firebreaks became its core. The avenue divided the foreign settlement on the east from the Japanese town on the west. At the request of the British minister Parkes, the hired foreign engineer R. H. Brunton designed it in 1871; it was complete by 1877, and is described as Japan's first Western-style street. It was 36 meters across at first, narrowed to 22 meters in the rebuilding after the Great Kantō Earthquake, then widened again in 2002, its sidewalks and planting strips together reaching about 13.5 meters.

Bashamichi (馬車道) crosses the district a little inland, and the name means carriage road. Yokohama's tourism information says it was named for the carriages in which wealthy foreigners rode, and that the word came to stand for affluence, refinement and an international outlook. After the port opened, people attached to the consulates, to immigration and to the customs service passed along it. Walking it now, the name is the only carriage left.

The railway between Shinbashi and Yokohama opened in September 1872, and the Yokohama end of it stood where Sakuragichō (桜木町) Station is today. Nishi Ward's local history records that a second Yokohama Station, two stories of red brick with a tower, was built near the Takashimachō intersection in 1915, and that it burned in the Great Kantō Earthquake, leaving its outer walls standing. It had lasted eight years.

Red Brick, Requisition, and a Ship That Would Not Sink

On the waterfront in Minato Mirai (みなとみらい), Warehouse No. 2 of the Red Brick Warehouses was begun in 1907 and finished in 1911, the 44th year of Meiji, to a design by Yorinaka Tsumaki, who led the Temporary Building Bureau of the Ministry of Finance. Every brick was made in Japan, and No. 2 alone took close to 3.18 million of them. Put a hand on the wall and the figure stops being abstract.

Their working life ran out oddly. After the war ended in 1945 the warehouses were seized by GHQ, the headquarters of the Allied occupation, and used as the U.S. military port headquarters; about ten years later they returned to service as customs warehouses and public storage sheds. Warehouse operations ceased in 1989, and on April 12, 2002 the buildings opened again as a cultural and commercial complex. Inside, it is worth looking for what the storage years left behind.

In front of Yamashita Park (山下公園), the Hikawa Maru (氷川丸) lies at its mooring. Completed in 1930, the liner keeps a passenger record: Nippon Yusen's history of the ship notes Charlie Chaplin boarding on June 2, 1932, Prince Chichibu and Princess Setsuko in 1937, and Jigorō Kanō in 1938. From November 1941 until 1945 it served as a special naval hospital ship, carrying 30,000 wounded and sick soldiers in three and a half years. It struck mines three times in that period and did not sink.

Retired in 1960, the ship has been moored in front of the park since June 2, 1961, a date Yokohama keeps for another reason as well. The city's account traces its port opening anniversary to June 2, 1860, when the whole town marked the port's first anniversary with festival floats and hand dancing; the Port Opening Festival held around the date has run since 1995 and has grown into an event drawing some 750,000 people. The ship became a Yokohama City tangible cultural property in 2003 and a nationally designated Important Cultural Property in August 2016, and is the only passenger-cargo ship built before the war that still survives.

Gold Leaf and a Butcher's Bun in Chinatown

Yokohama Chinatown (横浜中華街) grew around a temple to Guan Yu, the Chinese general venerated as a god. Chinatown's own account prefers one version among several: that in 1862, not long after the port opened, a single Chinese arrival carrying a wooden image of Guan Yu is said to have set up a modest shrine on this spot, with a full temple following in 1871. The building now standing is the fourth. Fire of unknown cause took the previous one on New Year's Day 1986, and the new Kantei-byō (関帝廟) was completed in 1990 after more than two years of work and 3.5 kilograms of gold leaf. A temple has held this ground for about 150 years.

Order sanmāmen (生碼麺) here and the name is a small lesson. Chinatown's own account explains that 碼 means ingredients, so the dish is noodles under fresh, lively ones; the character 馬, horse, is sometimes used in its place, with the suggestion that eating it lends you a horse's energy. Bean sprouts form the base, joined by onion, green pepper, leafy greens, wood ear and pork. The Ministry of Agriculture, Forestry and Fisheries calls it a noodle dish that began in Yokohama, with no settled definition and a different arrangement in every shop. Despite how the name sounds in Japanese, there is no saury in it.

Edosei (江戸清) tells its own story beginning with meat. The founder, Takahashi Seishichi, opened a butcher's shop in the foreign settlement, now Chinatown, in the 27th year of Meiji. The third-generation owner brought a cook from Wuhan in China, and after much adjustment they arrived at a filling of fresh domestic pork with shrimp, crab, bamboo shoot, cabbage and spring onion, wrapped in dough. Because the house sold pork, the result was named buta-man, a pork bun, rather than the usual niku-man, a meat bun.

Hotel New Grand stands in front of Yamashita Park, close to Chinatown, and two of its dishes were invented during the years the hotel was requisitioned. Its own account says the second head chef watched American soldiers eating boiled spaghetti seasoned with salt and pepper and tossed in tomato ketchup, then worked the idea up into something fit for the dining room, using garlic, onion and tomato sauce; Yokohama's tourism office relates the same origin. The pastry chef of those years, needing desserts showy enough for American officers' wives, set pudding beside ice cream and canned fruit and served the whole on a dedicated piece of tableware called the Colton dish.

From Honmura to the Houses on the Bluff

Motomachi (元町) is a shopping street whose origin has nothing to do with shopping. The street's own history tells it this way: when the port opened, 90 households from Yokohama village were moved to the neighboring settlement of Honmura (本村), and in 1860 Honmura was renamed Yokohama Motomachi, the original town. Uchikipan (ウチキパン) has been baking on it since 1888. The shop describes its England Bread as handmade over a long rise with a hop-based starter, a method carried through more than 130 years, and the city's tourism office adds that the slow, cool fermentation gives a light and fragrant loaf.

Above Motomachi, the Yamate bluff carries a line of Western houses, and one of them is an immigrant. The official account of the Yamate houses records that the Diplomat's House was built in 1910 in Minamihiradai, Shibuya, in Tokyo, as the residence of Uchida Sadatsuchi, a diplomat of the Meiji government, to a design by the American architect J. M. Gardiner; in 1997 the city received it from Uchida's grandson, moved it to the Yamate Italian Garden and restored it there, and it was designated an Important Cultural Property. Berrick Hall, further along, went up in 1930 for B. R. Berrick, a British trader, designed by another American, J. H. Morgan, in a Spanish idiom.

The bluff ends at Minato no Mieru Oka Kōen (港の見える丘公園), the hill park named for its view of the harbor, which is said to be the model location for Studio Ghibli's From Up on Poppy Hill. On March 22, 2012, a pole was installed there for the international signal flags U and W, which the film's heroine raises each morning to wish ships a safe passage, along with a panel bearing the director Gorō Miyazaki's own drawing and signature, reported at the time as the first film memorial site Studio Ghibli had formally recognized. Find the flags, then let the harbor fill in behind them.

A Cliff Called Noge, a Street Named by Donors

Noge (野毛) is a drinking quarter built on a slope, and the slope is in the name. Naka Ward's notes on its town names give two readings: that Noge renders a word for a promontory, or that noge, in old place names, generally meant a cliff. The district was once Nogeura in Tobe village, Kuraki district, and Noge-chō was established as a town in the Man'en era. Around the opening of the port, the ground above the cliff was called Noge-yama and the ground below Nogeura, which is Noge-chō now. The stairways say the rest.

A local account dates Noge's turn toward eating and drinking to the black market that appeared after the war, when whale meat and illicit shōchū, a distilled spirit, began to circulate. A row of stalls known as Whale Alley grew up, and the number of places pouring shōchū rose sharply. The stalls were cleared away in one sweep for the Tokyo Olympics of 1964 and the shopping street declined; after the Tōkyū Tōyoko Line's Sakuragichō station was abolished in 2004, young tenants took over empty premises as they found them and opened bars and café bars. Signs for whale dishes are still there to be found.

Isezakichō (伊勢佐木町) was named by subscription. Naka Ward's account of the name credits three people who paid for the road's construction, Iseya Nakamura Jirōbei, Sagawa Giemon and Sasaki Shingorō, who received silver cups from the prefectural governor; one character was taken from each surname to make the name, Ise, Sa, Ki. The ground under the shops was marshland in the Yoshida Shinden reclamation, filled in from an inlet, and the town was formally established on May 20 in the 7th year of Meiji.

Cold Shiumai and a Club Named for Sailors

At Yokohama Station the line is for shiumai, steamed pork dumplings. Kiyōken's (崎陽軒) company history explains that the whole point was to taste good cool, since people would be eating them on trains; after about a year of trial and error the answer turned out to be pork mixed with dried scallop adductor muscle. In 1928 a dim sum cook was brought in from Yokohama's Nankinmachi, the Chinese quarter that is now Chinatown, to help settle the recipe. Eat one at room temperature and the reasoning explains itself.

The shiumai bentō followed in 1954, introduced as the shiumai's younger sister. The company lists what is in the box: rice packed in small tawara shapes, the bale form rice is traditionally stored in, with a pickled plum and black sesame on top; five shiumai; marinated grilled tuna; fish cake; fried chicken; rolled omelette; simmered bamboo shoot; an apricot; cut kombu and shredded ginger. The soy-sauce container has a face. In 1955 the manga artist Ryūichi Yokoyama offered to give the white porcelain bottle eyes and a nose, named it Hyō-chan himself, the name owing something to the gourd shape of the original container, and 48 versions were made, one for each character of the iroha syllabary.

Yokohama F. Marinos (横浜F・マリノス) began as a works team. The club's history traces it to the Nissan Motor football club founded in 1972, which became Yokohama Marinos in 1992 and took its present name in 1999 after merging with Yokohama Flügels. Marinos is Spanish for sailors, chosen, the club says, to put the image of crossing the seven seas toward the world together with Yokohama's character as an international port. The matches are at Nissan Stadium in Shin-Yokohama, well back from the water, which is a reasonable place to finish a walk through a city that keeps borrowing the vocabulary of the sea and carrying it inland.