Yokohama
On Saturday 26th I went down to Yokohama (south of Tokyo) just to look around the seafront Yamashita Park. I haven’t done that in years. The weather was good, I had no schedule, plus I’d been thinking for several months of going there. So, I did. It was easy to reach - only about 30 minutes on the Shonan-Shinjuku Line from Shinjuku Station in central Tokyo. I walked all around the place taking pictures for four hours, then I decided to go home because I was getting tired. I was too tired to walk over to the big ferris wheel in the Minatomirai area north of Yamashita Park and go for a ride there. I can do that some other time. Some people think that Osaka is Japan’s second largest city, but it’s not. Yokohama is the second largest. I couldn’t visit a couple things I wanted to see. The Yokohama Marine Tower is being renovated, and the Foreigners General Cemetery and the Hikawa maru floating museum were both closed because of the coronavirus pandemic. But I’m happy that I got some excellent pictures.
Yokohama was a small fishing village until it became one of the first Treaty Ports open to foreign trade in the late 1850s. After that it grew like crazy and hosted a large foreign community. Today, the Osanbashi International Passenger Pier - used by cruise ships in better times - occupies the same spot as the 19th century commercial pier. Yamashita Park, in close proximity to the pier, used to be the red light district of bars and bordellos where foreign sailors would carouse. After the devastating 1923 Great Kanto Earthquake, the city used earthquake rubble to reclaim the waterfront land and re-open the area as a park in 1930.
Interestingly, the Yokohama Marine Tower occupies the same site used by the first Canadian Trade Commission to Japan until it was destroyed in the 1923 earthquake. The site is marked with a small plaque and a commemorative tree - a small, ratty-looking tree, but …
The city has a large, famous, busy and well-visited Chinatown. I took pictures of it, then I got the hell out of there. Too many people.
General Douglas McArthur’s first Occupation Headquarters was in the Hotel New Grand, just across the street from Yamashita Park. He used that site before he moved his HQ to the Daiichi Mutual Life Insurance Building in downtown Tokyo, across the street from the Imperial Palace Outer Gardens. From 1945 to 1960 the park hosted U.S. military housing. The housing was removed and relocated after the 1960 Treaty of Mutual Cooperation and Security between the United States and Japan was signed in Washington, D.C. by President Dwight D. Eisenhower and Japanese Prime Minister Nobusuke Kishi.