Kotobukicho

In the Edo period, Yoshida Kanbei filled in an inlet of the sea to create the farmland of Yoshida Shinden, yet one marsh remained. It was finally filled in about 200 years later, in 1873 (Meiji 6). The new land was given seven auspicious names: Matsukage (pine shade), Kotobuki (long life and celebration), Ogi (folding fan), Okina (venerable elder), Furo (ageless), Bandai (ten thousand generations) and Horai (the isle of the immortals). Together they were called the Umechi Nanakacho, the Seven Towns of the Reclaimed Land. Kotobukicho is one of them.

Surrounded by canals and close to the port, the area drew timber merchants, workshops making textiles and porcelain for export, and wholesalers. In the Great Kanto Earthquake of 1923 (Taisho 12), Kotobukicho burned to the ground. Even so, it rose again, and by 1931 (Showa 6) it had become a distribution hub, important enough to host a branch of the Central Wholesale Market. Then came the Great Yokohama Air Raid of 1945 (Showa 20). Apart from a few buildings, the town was reduced to scorched earth, and after the war it was requisitioned by the U.S. military, along with the port facilities.

After the war, the Port of Yokohama was a gateway for military cargo and imported grain. However many hands there were to move the freight, it was never enough. Word spread across Japan that “in Yokohama, you can make a living,” and people looking for work gathered in Sakuragicho and Noge. There were not enough places to sleep, and it is said that even old barges, no longer in use, were converted into lodgings known as “floating hotels.” When the Korean War began in 1950, the work of loading and unloading at the port grew further still.

In the mid-1950s, the requisition of Kotobukicho was lifted. The Yokohama Public Employment Security Office moved here from Noge, and the steps of those looking for work turned toward this town as well. It was close to the port, and land was cheap. One after another, simple lodging houses (kan’i shukuhakujo) were built for people who worked by the day, and by around 1965 (Showa 40) there were more than 80 of them. It is said that the town took roughly its present shape in these years.

In 1968 (Showa 43), more than 7,500 people, including families, lived in the lodging houses. Around 1,000 of them were minors. Most of those who stayed there worked at the port. At its peak, the town was alive with more than 8,000 workers. Kotobukicho is still counted, along with the Airin district in Osaka and San’ya in Tokyo, among Japan’s three major yoseba, the places where day laborers gathered to be hired. The name doya-gai, used for districts of simple lodging houses for day laborers, also dates from this era.

Hands that carried the port’s cargo, hands that built its buildings and roads. Postwar Yokohama, and Japan in its years of rapid economic growth, were built upon those hands.

In 1965 (Showa 40), the City of Yokohama opened the Kotobuki Life Center and began offering advice on daily life and health, as well as after-school lessons for children. In March 1969 (Showa 44), residents formed their own Kotobuki District Residents’ Association. The newspapers called it “the dawn of Kotobukicho.” A children’s park, evening counseling and a clinic, classes for women, a children’s club, a baseball team. The ward’s history records that a night bank set up in the town came to hold more than 1,000 accounts.

In September 1974 (Showa 49), the Kotobukicho General Labor and Welfare Hall was completed. It was built to end the “open-air market,” where day jobs were handed out on the street, and to support people’s lives and welfare. An employment office, a clinic, a library, a public bath, and municipal housing. As the largest building in town, it stood at the center of people’s lives for more than 40 years.

As the times changed, the town changed too. From the start of the Heisei era, the population aged quickly, and today more than half the residents are 65 or older (53.4% in 2024). Once a town of day laborers, it has become a town where many people in their later years make their home, and where welfare support has become essential.

In an area of about 0.06 km² that includes Kotobukicho, there are 109 lodging houses. As of November 2024, 5,261 people live here. Almost all of them live alone.

In June 2019 (Reiwa 1), the rebuilt hall made a new start as the Yokohama City Kotobukicho Health and Welfare Exchange Center. A clinic and a library corner, rooms for residents’ activities, an open-air plaza. Okina-yu, the public bath on the second floor, is the town’s bath, carried on from the old hall. On its wall, scenes from the Fifty-three Stations of the Tokaido are fired into the tiles.

In the plan Naka Ward drew up for this district, the town it hopes to become is described in these words: “a town where people can say with pride, I live in Kotobuki, I grew up in Kotobuki.” Once a year, the Yume Kaigi, the “dream meeting” of the town’s people, goes to the cemetery at Kuboyama to pay its respects, so that the bonds with those who lived in this town are never broken.

In the 2000s, efforts began to give the empty rooms of the lodging houses a new life as places for travelers to stay. In 2011, the Kanagawa Shimbun reported that backpackers from overseas were gathering at such guesthouses. From here you can walk to Chinatown and to Yamashita Park. The lodgings that once supported the work of the port have come to welcome travelers from around the world as well.