Bashamichi & Nihon-odori Avenue

In 1854 (Ansei 1), Commodore Perry and his party came ashore at Yokohama, and the Japan-US Treaty of Peace and Amity, also known as the Convention of Kanagawa, was concluded. The site is said to lie between today’s Kanagawa Prefectural Government Office and the Yokohama Archives of History. In Kaiko Hiroba, the plaza beside the Archives, a monument marks the place where the treaty was signed (History of Naka Ward).

In 1859 (Ansei 6), the port was opened. Near the middle of Yokohama Village, where the prefectural office stands today, the Unjosho was set up to handle trade and diplomacy. To its east lay the foreign settlement; to its west, the Japanese merchant town (Naka Ward Historical Chronology).

With the opening of the port, this stretch of shore became Yokohama’s first true wharf (Zou-no-hana Terrace). In 1867 (Keio 3), its breakwater was bent like a bow, and because the shape resembled an elephant’s trunk, it came in time to be called Zou-no-hana, “the Elephant’s Trunk” (Yokohama Convention & Visitors Bureau).

On June 2, 2009, 150 years after the port opened, the site was reborn as Zou-no-hana Park. The breakwater was restored to its Meiji-era shape, and what was uncovered during the work, the rails and turntable of the Meiji harbor and the remains of its stone-built revetments, was left in place (Port and Harbor Bureau, City of Yokohama).

In October 1866 (Keio 2), a fire broke out at a pork butcher’s in Suehirocho and burned most of the foreign settlement, the Unjosho, and many Japanese merchant houses. People called it the Butaya Fire, “the pork shop fire.” It was the first great disaster to strike Kannai.

The fire also reached the licensed quarter of Miyozaki-cho, established when the port opened. It is said that several hundred women, with nowhere to flee, lost their lives there, in the flames and in the waters of a moat that was still being filled in (History of Naka Ward). Today the site is Yokohama Park.

After the fire, it was decided that a broad street would be built between the settlement and the Japanese town to keep flames from spreading. In 1868 (Meiji 1), a district called Sakaimachi, “the border town,” was established on the land along the edge of the settlement, and no house could be built there unless its walls were thickly coated with earth or plaster against fire (Naka Ward, Yokohama).

The avenue was designed by Richard Henry Brunton, a British engineer working at the request of the British minister, Sir Harry Parkes. Designed in 1871 (Meiji 4), it was completed by 1877 (Meiji 10). About 400 meters long, it had a 12-meter roadway flanked on each side by a 3-meter sidewalk and a 9-meter planted strip: 36 meters in all, an extraordinary width for its day. The way the road was built, with crushed stone tamped hard and sewers of ceramic pipe, was used here for the first time in Japan (Agency for Cultural Affairs). In 1879 (Meiji 12), the street was named Nihon-odori (Naka Ward, Yokohama).

The Agency for Cultural Affairs describes what this tree-lined avenue was meant to say. Running in a straight line from the wharf known as the Elephant’s Trunk to Yokohama Park, the road was a symbol of welcoming those who came from the sea onto the soil of Japan.

At its far end, in 1876 (Meiji 9), Yokohama Park opened. As a park that foreign residents of the settlement and Japanese alike could use, it was called Higa Koen, “the park of them and us.” At its center, it is said, lay a grass cricket ground (Agency for Cultural Affairs).

In 2007, Nihon-odori and Yokohama Park were together listed as national Registered Monuments.

When the port first opened, Yokohama had no Bashamichi.

After the Butaya Fire, an agreement the shogunate concluded with the foreign powers included, at the foreigners’ request, a provision for roads for horse-drawn carriages, 60 feet (about 18 meters) wide. They were meant to encourage trade and to give residents of the settlement a place for exercise and recreation. Of the three roads built, the second is today’s Bashamichi, the “carriage road.” It is thought to have been completed in the autumn of 1867 (Keio 3) at the earliest (Bashamichi Shopping Street).

At one end of the road stood Yoshida Bridge, the overland entrance linking Kannai with Kangai. Near the other end was a landing for boats crossing to Kanagawa-juku, the post town on the far shore. The new road became the street that tied Kannai to the world beyond. The story of Yoshida Bridge and the checkpoint that once stood there is told on the Yoshidamachi page.

When the road opened, the shops along it vied to plant willows and pines before their doors. That was in 1867. The City of Yokohama regards this as the beginning of modern street trees in Japan (Road and Highway Bureau, City of Yokohama).

Shimooka Renjo, a photographer of the last years of the shogunate, set up his studio on this street.

In June 1869 (Meiji 2), Machida Fusazo opened a shop selling ice water on Bashamichi (in what is now Tokiwacho 5-chome) and began to sell ice cream. It is known as the first shop where ice cream was sold by a Japanese (Bashamichi Shopping Street). Apart from the occasional foreign customer, though, the Japanese only stood and stared, and business went poorly. Customers finally came, it is said, the following year, during the grand festival of Iseyama Kotai Jingu (History of Naka Ward).

In October 1872 (Meiji 5), gas lamps were lit. Set up from Oe Bridge along Bashamichi to Honcho-dori, they were the first gas lamps in Japan (Bashamichi Shopping Street). The work was undertaken by Takashima Kaemon, an entrepreneur also remembered for reclaiming the land around Takashimacho. Having won the license in competition with American and German capital, he put in his own fortune and finished the project on his own (Nishi Ward, Yokohama).

New things were born around Nihon-odori as well. In 1869 (Meiji 2), the Yokohama Telegraph Office was set up on what is now Nihon-odori, and at the end of that year a telegraph line to Tokyo opened: the beginning of telegraphy in Japan. At the end of the following year, Meiji 3, Japan’s first daily newspaper was printed on Kitanaka-dori in Kannai (History of Naka Ward).

In the late Meiji years, it is said, some seventy shops lined both sides of Bashamichi. Foreign customers arriving by sea crossed Bankoku Bridge from the wharf and came straight into this street. As the finest shopping street in Yokohama, it was lined eave to eave with handsome two-story dozo-zukuri buildings, thick-walled like storehouses, finished in black and crowned with onigawara ridge tiles.

Willows grew on both sides of the gravel road. In the evening, as the peddlers’ cries began, a man from the gasworks would come by with two poles on his shoulder, one with a hook at its tip, the other carrying a flame. “When the pale blue gas lamps come on, the curtain of night begins to fall,” someone once wrote. Sparks flew from the iron rims of the carriage wheels, and until around 1907 (Meiji 40), when night stalls lined the street, bats flitted among the willow branches (recollections quoted in History of Naka Ward).

In 1904 (Meiji 37), the head office of the Yokohama Specie Bank rose on a corner of the street. Specializing in trade settlement and foreign exchange, it later came to be counted among the world’s three great exchange banks. It was designed by Tsumaki Yorinaka. Today it is the Kanagawa Prefectural Museum of Cultural History (Kanagawa Prefectural Museum of Cultural History).

In the early Showa years, while Benten-dori drew many foreign customers, Bashamichi was a shopping street for Japanese. Close to Sakuragicho Station, it was also the daily route of office workers, and there were billiard halls nearby, it is said (History of Naka Ward). A 1936 survey found that 27 of its 76 shops had been founded in the Meiji era. It was a street of long-established houses.

The Great Kanto Earthquake left this town in ashes.

The prefectural office burned, the customs house collapsed, and the British Consulate General fell. The Port Opening Memorial Hall lost its interior (Naka Ward, Yokohama). On Bashamichi, too, all but a very few buildings, among them the head office of the Specie Bank, were reduced to a burned-out plain (Bashamichi Shopping Street).

About 300 people, bank staff among them, took refuge in the Specie Bank building, which had withstood the shaking. But the front gate had been shut, and more than a hundred people who could not get inside died within its stone wall (History of Naka Ward).

People fleeing the fire came one after another into Yokohama Park. By afternoon, it is said, they numbered 60,000. Water pouring from broken mains turned the park into a sea of mud. Immersing themselves in it, people barely endured the heat of the approaching flames. Even so, in the park’s southern corner, some fifty people were overcome by smoke and died. On November 1 of that year, a memorial gathering for those who lost their lives in the earthquake was held in this park (History of Naka Ward).

In the reconstruction, Nihon-odori’s roadway was widened to 22 meters, and 68 ginkgo trees were planted along both sides over three years from 1927 (Showa 2). The avenue as we see it today began then (Agency for Cultural Affairs; Road and Highway Bureau, City of Yokohama).

In 1928 (Showa 3), the fourth Kanagawa Prefectural Government Office was completed. The Yokohama District Court was rebuilt in 1929, the British Consulate General in 1931, and in 1934 a new building for Yokohama Customs was finished. The burned Port Opening Memorial Hall, too, stood again, strengthened with columns and beams of reinforced concrete (Naka Ward, Yokohama; Agency for Cultural Affairs).

In the courtyard of the Yokohama Archives of History grows a tabu tree (Machilus thunbergii) called Tamakusu. It has stood here since Yokohama was a village of farmers and fishermen, and it is thought to be the tree that appears in the picture of Perry’s landing (Naka Ward, Yokohama). The ward’s history of 1985 describes the present tree as a descendant, several generations on, of the one that once grew in the front yard of a village house, and calls it “a living witness to Yokohama’s history” (History of Naka Ward).

Look back at the town from the harbor, and you will see three towers.

The names are said to have begun in the early Showa years, when foreign sailors entering the port likened the towers to the King, Queen and Jack in a deck of cards. It is also said that the sailors prayed for a safe voyage and steered into port by these towers (Kanagawa Prefecture).

Only a few places offer a view of all three towers at once: Red Brick Park, Nihon-odori and Osanbashi Pier. Legend has it that if you visit all three in a single day, your wish will come true; this is known as the Legend of the Three Towers of Yokohama (Yokohama Santo Monogatari). Each of the three spots has a marker set in the ground (Kanagawa Prefecture).

In the Great Yokohama Air Raid of May 29, 1945 (Showa 20), Kannai burned once again. Bashamichi, too, became a burned-out plain once more (Bashamichi Shopping Street).

After the war, nearly all of the government offices and trading-company buildings that had survived the fires in Honcho and along Nihon-odori were requisitioned by the Allied forces (History of Naka Ward). Requisitioned land is said to have covered 74 percent of Naka Ward (Naka Ward Historical Chronology). The Yokohama Customs building was requisitioned for eight years (Naka Ward, Yokohama). Postwar Kannai is also described on the Kannai & Isezakicho page.

The ballpark in Yokohama Park was where, in 1934, an all-star team of major leaguers including Babe Ruth and Lou Gehrig played an all-Japan team (Agency for Cultural Affairs). After the war it was requisitioned and called Gehrig Field; it was returned in 1952 (Naka Ward, Yokohama). After its return it was named Heiwa Kyujo, “Peace Stadium,” and in 1978 Yokohama Stadium was built on its site (Agency for Cultural Affairs).

At the Yokohama Takarazuka Theater on Bashamichi, spared by the war and never requisitioned, citizens hungry for entertainment are said to have formed long lines to see films (History of Naka Ward). In 1952, as the requisition of land around Bashamichi began to be lifted, the shops came back little by little. In 1954, the shopping street’s cooperative association was founded (Bashamichi Shopping Street).

In the years of rapid economic growth, the city’s bustle moved to the area around Yokohama Station. On weekends, it is said, Bashamichi became a street with almost no one on it apart from the cinemagoers (History of Naka Ward).

It was then that the people of Bashamichi chose to make use of their street’s history. In 1967, the former Yokohama Specie Bank building was reborn as the Kanagawa Prefectural Museum, and its dome, 19 meters high and lost in the earthquake, was restored (Bashamichi Shopping Street). In 1975, they signed a community design agreement with the City of Yokohama and decided to set the buildings facing the street back by 2.5 meters to widen the space for walking. The sidewalks were paved in red brick, and streetlights modeled on Meiji gas lamps were put up (History of Naka Ward). In 1976, the first Bashamichi Festival was held (Bashamichi Shopping Street).

The ward’s history of 1985 also records that at lunchtime, with traffic stopped on Nihon-odori, people who worked in the nearby government offices would work up a sweat playing sports there. A 2002 redevelopment greatly widened Nihon-odori’s sidewalks, and open-air cafés began to appear beneath the ginkgo trees (City of Yokohama).