Chinatown, Motomachi & Yamashita Park

After the port opened in 1859, Chinese merchants came to Yokohama along with the Western traders. From the place where they began to do business, Chinatown gradually took shape. This area, designated part of the foreign settlement when the port opened, gave up its settlement-era district names in 1899 (Meiji 32) and became Yamashitacho.

The town was once called Nankinmachi. In February 1955, a gate carrying the hope of postwar recovery was raised on the main street, and on it hung the name Chukagai, “Chinatown.” That was the beginning of the name used today. The gate was later rebuilt, and is now called Zenrinmon.

Today some 630 shops line the streets within an area about 500 meters square, about 200 of them Chinese restaurants (Yokohama Chinatown Development Association, 2022). At the entrances to the town stand ten paifang, ceremonial gates, among them gates named for the guardian deities of the four directions.

Kanteibyo, the temple of Guan Di, began in 1862 as a small shrine built on a back street. A full temple was built in 1871; it collapsed in the Great Kanto Earthquake of 1923, burned with the town in the air raid of May 29, 1945, and was lost on New Year’s Day 1986 to a fire of unknown cause. Today’s Kanteibyo, opened in 1990, is the fourth. Each time it burned, the people of this town built the temple again.

In 2006, Masobyo, the temple of Mazu, was opened. It stands on a site where the Qing consulate is said to have once been, and bricks from before the Great Kanto Earthquake, found during construction, were used in the structure at its entrance.

Lunar New Year (Shunsetsu), the Dragon Boat Festival, the Mid-Autumn Festival: on the days of these seasonal observances, which the Yokohama Chinatown Development Association introduces as the “three great Chinese festivals,” the town grows more festive still.

The name Motomachi is the history of the port’s opening itself. In 1860 (Man’en 1), to make way for the open port, some 90 households of Yokohama Village were moved across the Horikawa River. Because the original Yokohama Village had been moved here, the place came to be called Motomachi, the “original town.”

In time, as foreigners came to live on the hill of Yamate, Motomachi-dori became their daily route between their homes on Yamate and the trading houses of Kannai. Furniture makers and bakeries serving foreigners appeared, and a shopping street with an air of distant lands grew up.

The town was devastated by the Great Kanto Earthquake, and in 1945 the air raids again left it a burned plain. Even so, in 1947 the shopkeepers formed an association, and the town rose again. The gate built in 1985 as the symbol of the town is called the Phoenix Arch: a gate that bears the name of the undying bird.

A women’s magazine took the style worn by students of the girls’ schools on Yamate, named it “Hamatora,” for Yokohama Traditional, and introduced it to its readers; the fashion spread the name of Motomachi across Japan (according to Yokohama Motomachi Shopping Street).

Yamashita Park, along the sea, was made by filling in the water with rubble from the Great Kanto Earthquake. The sea was designated as a place to dispose of the rubble; work on the seawall began in 1925, and the park opened in 1930. Today’s seaside view rests on what the city lost. It is now a nationally Registered Monument (Place of Scenic Beauty).

Foreigners called the hill of Yamate, which looks down on the harbor, “the Bluff,” an English word for a cliff. Under an agreement of 1866, this hill was to be leased to foreigners; Western-style houses still remain here, and the seven that the City of Yokohama opens to the public are all free to enter.

The Foreign General Cemetery began in 1854. When a sailor of Perry’s squadron died, he was buried in the grounds of a temple on this hill, a place that answered Perry’s request for “ground within sight of the sea.” Today more than 5,000 people rest here.

From Harbor View Park (Minato-no-Mieru-Oka Koen) at the top of the hill, you can look out over the Port of Yokohama and the Bay Bridge.

As filming locations for Abunai Deka, the Yokohama police-drama franchise, the City of Yokohama’s official tourism site lists Yamashita Bridge, Berrick Hall in Yamate, the Hikawa Maru, Hotel New Grand, the area around Kaseiro in Chinatown, Harbor View Park and more. For the 2024 film Kaettekita Abunai Deka, the City of Yokohama made a map of filming locations, and the shopping streets of Chinatown and Motomachi joined in the tie-up. The city also introduces Yamashita Park as a “classic filming location.”