Billiards in Yokohama: A History

The first sound of ball striking ball in this country was heard not in Yokohama, but on a small island at the far western edge of Japan.

In the Edo period, the Dutch trading post on Dejima in Nagasaki already had a table. The City of Nagasaki places the arrival of billiards in Japan at the end of the 1790s, and relates that the tsūji, the official interpreters, took up the game out of curiosity and were soon beating the Dutch staff. In 1820 (Bunsei 3), the chief of the trading post, Blomhoff, invited the outgoing and incoming magistrates of Nagasaki to Dejima and entertained them with a game of billiards.

Dictionaries and the Nippon Billiard Association, on the other hand, date its arrival to “around the Kaei and Ansei eras (the 1850s).” The sources differ by some half a century, but in both accounts the story begins on Dejima.

Yokohama’s story begins a little later, when its port was opened.

When Yokohama opened as a port in 1859 (Ansei 6), foreign merchants and sailors arrived one after another. In February of the following year, 1860, Huffnagel, formerly a Dutch sea captain, sold the ship he had come in and used the money to open the Yokohama Hotel.

According to the recollections of a Dutchman who lived in the newly opened port, Huffnagel himself bought the only billiard table in the district.

That autumn, Spiess, a member of the Prussian (today German) mission, stayed at the hotel for about two months, and after returning home he described it in his account of the journey. A room with no window and no stove. A bed, a table, and two bamboo chairs, nothing more. The cold rain and wind of November, he wrote, cut to the bone.

Yet at the opposite end from the dining room lay a billiard room, and within it a bar for guests coming ashore from the ships. The table, “the only one in the place,” was well frequented, Spiess writes, and players staked a dollar or half a dollar on a game. In a port town with hardly anything that could be called amusement, that one table must have helped those who had come from distant lands through their nights.

This bar is also said to have been the first bar in Japan. The hotel changed hands several times, and its history ended when it burned in the great fire of 1866 (Keiō 2).

Around the same time, Japanese people too were catching sight of this curious pastime.

The <i>Yokohama Shishikō</i> (“Draft History of Yokohama City”), compiled by the city in the early Showa years, quotes <i>Yokohama Kidan</i> (“Curious Tales of Yokohama”), an eyewitness account of the newly opened port. In an inn run by foreigners there is a great hall of some fifty tatami mats, and in its center stands something like a desk, three ken long (about 5.4 meters) and some two ken wide. Its rim stands some two sun (about 6 cm) high, and there are holes at the corners. Players take turns striking balls with a stick, and it seems that whoever sends one into a hole wins—

Of the players’ skill, the writer noted that it was “truly astonishing,” and added that the game resembled <i>ana-ichi</i>, a Japanese children’s game of tossing coins or marbles into a hole. Meeting something for the first time, he reached for words he already knew. In that turn of the brush, the wonder of someone standing in the newly opened port still lingers.

The <i>Yokohama Kaikō Kenbunshi</i> (“Things Seen and Heard in the Opened Port of Yokohama”), a portrait of Yokohama just after the opening illustrated by Gountei Sadahide, likewise shows foreigners of the settlement gathered around a table, striking balls with sticks.

When, then, did Japanese people begin to take up the cue themselves?

<i>Dōkyūjō Nikki</i> (“Billiard Hall Diary”), published in 1928 (Showa 3) by a Tokyo society for the promotion of billiards, places the beginning in Yokohama. After the Meiji Restoration, it says, a table was installed at an English club in the Yokohama settlement, and the game was eagerly played among the foreigners who came there. A man named Fukuda, who worked as a boy at the club, picked up the game without anyone quite noticing, and together with a man known as Tsuru (鶴公), who had learned it in Nagasaki, spread it among the Japanese. That, the book tells us, was “how billiards first came to be played.”

Neither the name of the club nor the year is given. It is a record from the Showa era, and it includes hearsay. Even so, the picture of a young man who watched the guests’ play up close night after night, and slowly made the skill his own, says much about how a foreign culture passed from hand to hand in a port town.

Writing of Tokyo’s earliest billiard halls, the same <i>Dōkyūjō Nikki</i> also records that a man who set up a table in Kudan had bought it from a foreigner in Yokohama, and that from the late 1870s into the mid-1880s Tokyo’s billiard equipment came from the trading houses of the Yokohama settlement, passing through several hands along the way. Tsuru, who had learned the game in Nagasaki, eventually opened a billiard hall in Kanda, Tokyo.

Tables and cues that had crossed the sea came ashore at the port of Yokohama, and from there were carried on to Tokyo and to every corner of Japan.

In 1873 (Meiji 6), the Grand Hotel opened on Kaigan-dori. Its advertisement in an English-language travelers’ handbook published in 1891 proudly presents its reading room and billiard room, “lofty and spacious,” as places where guests could take their ease.

Billiards, known then as <i>tamatsuki</i>, was also putting down roots in the streets where ordinary Japanese lived. In 1879 (Meiji 12), Kanagawa Prefecture taxed it as one of the “various game halls,” alongside archery ranges, small-bow parlors and shooting galleries, and its 1887 regulations on game halls likewise counted billiards among the businesses of that kind.

<i>Yokohama Hanjōki</i> (“Yokohama in Its Prosperity”), published in 1903 (Meiji 36), writes that game halls for billiards, ball-rolling, blowguns, shooting and the like stood eave to eave around Isezakicho, some hundred and twenty or thirty of them across the city. Beside the bustle of the playhouses and storytellers’ halls, one imagines, the click of ball on ball rang out.

In 1917 (Taisho 6), the Port Opening Memorial Yokohama Hall, built to mark fifty years since the opening of the port, opened in Honcho. Besides a public auditorium, it held a library, a guest room for dignitaries, a social room, a dining room, a bar and more, and among them was a billiard room. It was where Yokohama’s leading figures in politics, business and culture gathered, and billiards was one of a gentleman’s accomplishments. Badly damaged in the Great Kanto Earthquake and later restored, the hall still stands on Honcho-dori as the Yokohama Port Opening Memorial Hall, together with its clock tower, known as Jack’s Tower.

In the early Showa years, writes the <i>Naka Kushi</i> (“History of Naka Ward”), the route that commuters walked from Sakuragicho Station along Bashamichi to their workplaces passed billiard halls, among other places. In a list of Kannai’s principal buildings around 1935 (Showa 10), the name “Shinseisha Billiards” appears near the entrance to Bashamichi, alongside banks and shops.

The war took much from billiards, too. The Nippon Billiard Association’s chronology covers 1943 to 1946 in a single line: “War, then defeat; the billiards world is destroyed.”

Even so, the <i>Naka Kushi</i> records that around 1944 and 1945 (Showa 19 and 20), as the war neared its end, there were billiard halls and milk halls near Itsukushima Shrine in Hagoromocho, on the back streets behind Isezakicho. Soon after, in the air raid of May 29, 1945, the Kangai district suffered heavy damage.

After the war, under the 1948 Act on Control of Entertainment Businesses, billiard halls came to be classed, together with mahjong parlors and pachinko parlors, as businesses regulated under that act. What changed this was an amendment in 1955 (Showa 30). In a plenary session of the House of Councillors, the committee chairman explained the reason for the amendment: “By its very nature, billiards is a kind of sport, and in no way a contest staked on chance.” With the law promulgated on July 20 of that year, billiard halls were removed from the scope of the act.

It was the day when a pastime that had begun as a game for stakes in a newly opened port was recognized, a century later, as a sport of skill.

The <i>Naka Kushi</i>, published in 1985, describes Wakabacho, on the back streets of Isezakicho, as a neighborhood “with many bowling and billiard places as well.” In December of the following year, 1986, the film <i>The Color of Money</i> (released in Japan as “Hustler 2”) opened in Japan, and a billiards boom swept the country. The chronology of the Japan Professional Pocket Billiard Association notes for 1988: “In the Kanto region, where carom reigns, pocket billiards begins to take root.” In Yokohama too, where carom had been the mainstream, pocket tables grew in number.

In time, the fever of the boom cooled. In 2019, in Hiyoshi in Kohoku Ward, two halls that had been loved by students and locals for some seventy years closed their doors, one after the other. One of them, it was reported, had drawn lines that lasted late into the night in the days of the boom.