Kannai & Isezakicho

The names of this part of the city begin with a single gate.

After the port opened in 1859, checkpoints were set up to watch who came and went from the port district. One of them, the checkpoint at Yoshida Bridge, was moved to the Yoshidamachi side in 1864 (Bunkyu 4). The land inside the gate was Kannai, “inside the gate”; the land outside was Kangai, “outside the gate.” The two names, still in use today, were born then. The checkpoint was abolished in 1871 (Meiji 4), and at the foot of Yoshida Bridge the Yoshida Bridge Checkpoint Site remains.

Most of Kangai stands on Yoshida Shinden, land that Yoshida Kanbei reclaimed from an inlet of the sea in the Edo period. Where Kannai was the town of the port, the government offices and the trading houses, Kangai grew into a town where people lived, played and drank.

After the war, much of central Yokohama was requisitioned by the Allied occupation forces, and Kannai and Kangai alike all but ceased to function as a town. Even after the land began to be released, grass grew as tall as a person on vacant lots fenced with barbed wire to mark who owned them. People called them the “Kannai Pasture.” The ward’s history records that the pasture disappeared when the Kannai Daiichi Building went up in 1970.

Today, Kannai is changing a great deal. On the block of the former Yokohama City Hall, BASEGATE Yokohama Kannai opened in March 2026: a new district of offices, a university, live-viewing venues and Stadium Yoko-Bal Gai, a lane of places to eat and drink.

The administrative wing of the old City Hall, designed by Togo Murano, was not torn down. Now named “The Legacy,” the building opened on April 21, 2026 as the hotel OMO7 Yokohama by Hoshino Resorts. Part of “Sea, Waves, Ships,” the Taizan tile relief that once adorned the old City Council building, was moved indoors to the “Path of Succession,” where it is preserved. The new town has begun by holding on to what those before it left behind.

In front of Kannai Station, two more districts are being redeveloped (completion scheduled for fiscal 2029).

The name Isezakicho is said to have been taken from the surnames of three men who donated the cost of building the road: Nakamura Jirobei of the Iseya, Sagawa Giemon and Sasaki Shingoro. The town was established in 1874 (Meiji 7), and in 1928 (Showa 3) it held Japan’s first “hokosha tengoku,” a street closed to traffic and given over to pedestrians. In 1978 (Showa 53) it became today’s Isezaki Mall; its 1st and 2nd blocks are pedestrian-only around the clock. More than 130 shops line some 400 meters of street.

After the war, much of the shopping street was requisitioned, and fifteen years passed before all of it was returned. The karakuri mechanical doll clock, built in 1978, began moving again in 2021 after sixteen years of silence (on the hour and the half hour, from 10:00 to 21:00).

It was from this street that the folk duo Yuzu set out into the wider world (according to the City of Yokohama’s official tourism site).

A town born in 1928 (Showa 3). Its name comes from a line in the Meiji-era school songbook Shogaku Shokashu: “haru no yayoi no akebono ni,” at daybreak in the spring month of Yayoi. Together with neighboring Yayoicho, it is a town that took its name from a single song.

After the war, this area beside the requisitioned land took on a distinctive energy that reflected the turmoil of those years, and in time it also came to have the character of an entertainment district. Step one street back from the main road, and a sense of all that accumulated time still lingers.

In 1870 (Meiji 3), as rows of houses came to stretch across Yoshida Shinden, the area was given the auspicious name Fukutomi. In 1928 (Showa 3) it was divided into three towns: Higashi-dori, Naka-dori and Nishi-dori.

The postwar requisition reached almost all of Kangai, including Fukutomicho, Yoshidamachi, Chojamachi and Wakabacho. After the land was returned, the area became known as a nightlife district. It is also a town where, in 1979, local residents formed the Fukutomicho Street Association, put up streetlights and worked to make the neighborhood a brighter place.

Today Fukutomicho is also known as Yokohama Fukutomicho Koreatown. Around 1988, at the time of the Seoul Olympics, shops run by Korean owners increased rapidly. It is said to have begun as aging Japanese shopkeepers started to lease out their premises, and those spaces were passed on through introductions among acquaintances (Hamarepo.com, 2014). Korean restaurants and grocers dot the streets, and in recent years Chinese restaurants and food shops have also grown in number, and the area has begun to show the face of a broader Asian quarter (Yokohama de Kurasou, 2022).

Walk the streets lined with Hangul signs, and you will find yakiniku, hot pots and home cooking much as they are made in Korea. Since the port opened, Yokohama has built itself together with people from many countries. Another culture, rooted in everyday life just as it is: like Chinatown, this is part of what makes Yokohama a port town.

Its neon has also been chosen as a setting for films and television. In Abunai Deka, the Yokohama police-drama franchise, the exterior of a grand cabaret in Fukutomicho stands in for a venue in the story (according to the location guide on the City of Yokohama’s official tourism site).