Noge & Miyakobashi Shopping Street

At the end of the Edo period, Noge was a sheer cliff with a beach below it where white waves broke. Bamboo frames for growing nori stood along the shore, and oysters and clams were plentiful, it is said. The ground that now lies inside Sakuragicho Station was sea as well, and there was a rock called Ubajima, “Nursemaid Island,” so named because its shape looked like a nursemaid holding a child (History of Naka Ward).

Long ago this was Nogeura, the bay of Tobe Village. In 1860 (Man’en 1), the year after Yokohama opened its port, the town of Noge was born. But it had always been a narrow inlet. Much of the village land was taken for government offices and officials’ residences, the sea was filled in, and many who lost their livelihood moved away, or so the town’s elders have left on record.

In 1872 (Meiji 5), Japan’s first railway opened between Shimbashi and Yokohama. Its tracks and station were laid on land reclaimed from the sea at Nogeura. That first Yokohama Station is today’s Sakuragicho Station. In the Old Yokohama Station Gallery, on the ground floor of the commercial building next to the station, stand a Class 110 steam locomotive of the kind that ran in the line’s first days and a diorama of the first Yokohama Station.

As the town was laid out around the railway, the new land was given the names Sakuragicho, Hanasakicho and Miyagawacho, and the Noge Bridge over the Ooka River was rebuilt and renamed Miyakobashi. This was in the first years of Meiji. Just outside Kannai, Japan’s window on the wider world. From here, Noge set out on its path as “a downtown for the Japanese, at the entrance to the international city of Yokohama” (Noge District Community Development Association).

At the top of the slope, Nogeyama became, around the turn of the twentieth century, a hill where Yokohama’s merchants made their homes. As the custom of living apart from one’s shop spread, the residences of the raw-silk merchant Zenzaburo Hara, of Sobei Mogi, Senzo Hiranuma and others stood side by side. The ward’s history describes the scene as if it faced the foreigners’ houses on the far-off hill of Yamate. The Mogi family grew large-bloomed chrysanthemums and opened them to the public, and the “Nozawa chrysanthemums” became one of Yokohama’s famous sights.

None of the mansions remain. After the Great Kanto Earthquake, in 1926 (Taisho 15), Nogeyama Park opened on the site of the Hara residence and neighboring land. The ward’s history of 1985 notes that the stone walls and brick fences near the park entrance still give a faint sense of the days of the merchants’ hill.

After the war, in 1949, the park became the first venue of the Japan Foreign Trade Fair. In 1951, Nogeyama Zoo opened as the “Nogeyama Amusement Park.” When the amusement park closed in 1964, admission to the zoo became free. The City of Yokohama describes it as a zoo loved by generations of residents.

On neighboring Iseyama stands Iseyama Kotai Jingu, which in 1870 (Meiji 3) received a share of the divine spirit of Ise Grand Shrine and was designated the guardian shrine of all Yokohama.

In the air raids of 1945, Noge burned. After the war, Kannai, Isezakicho and the area around the port were all requisitioned by the U.S. military. In the very middle of Yokohama, there was no longer any part of town the Japanese could freely use.

On November 1 of that year, Kanagawa Prefecture, the City of Yokohama and the Yokohama Street Vendors’ Association opened the Yokohama Market along Noge’s streets to supply residents with daily necessities. Kannai’s main streets had been requisitioned, and Motomachi was far away. There was no other suitable place but Noge. The next day, for people starved of entertainment, six makeshift show halls went up on Nogeyama.

Noge became the largest street-stall district in Yokohama, drawing people in search of food and clothing. “Go to Hama, to Yokohama, and something will turn up. There’s work, and even white rice to eat.” Believing that, people stepped off the train at the end of the line, Sakuragicho. Demobilized soldiers, factory hands who had lost their jobs, people burned out of their homes. The ward’s history calls them “the very victims of the war.”

Years later, the townspeople looked back like this: when Kannai and Isezakicho had been painted over in American colors, Noge was where the Japanese could walk with their heads held high. It was truly Yokohama’s Japanese town (History of Naka Ward).

Out at dawn to the docks or a construction site, for a day’s wage of 150 to 200 yen. On days with no work, a meal for 10 or 20 yen at a stall in the alleys. People looking for work gathered at Sakuragicho Station and Yanagibashi. The public employment office in Sakuragicho moved to Kotobukicho in the 1950s. Noge and Kotobukicho are bound together in the history of the people who kept the port running.

In 1948, the Noge Promotion Association, a merchants’ group, was formed; an amateur singing contest was held on a makeshift stage, and fireworks went up. In the age of the street stalls, the town was trying to stand on its own feet again, as a town.

Along the Sakuragawa River near Sakuragicho Station, street stalls stood in rows. People called them Kujira Yokocho (Whale Alley), Kusuburi Yokocho (Smoky Alley) and Kasutori Yokocho, after kasutori, the rough liquor of those years. What they sold was mostly food. The ward’s history records that the thick smoke of grilling whale meat made the hungry all the hungrier. In a time when food was scarce, the alleys, in their modest way, kept the city fed.

In 1953, some of the alley shops moved into the Sakuragicho Department Store, a cooperative building that opened in front of Sakuragicho Station. Each unit was about 3 tsubo (roughly 10 square meters), and nearly all were places to eat and drink. The stalls that did not move were removed, and Whale Alley and Kasutori Alley disappeared. The Sakuragicho Department Store itself was torn down in 1972, and its shopkeepers scattered to Chojamachi and elsewhere. Its site is said to be around today’s parking lot in front of Sakuragicho Station (Yokohama Shimbun, No. 33).

Yet Noge still calls itself a town of nonbe, cheerful drinkers. The Kanagawa Prefectural Tourism Association says some 600 places to eat and drink line its streets.

Even after the alleys were gone, some 60 street stalls still remained along Noge’s main street. Talks between the city and the stallholders went on for more than ten years. Things began to move after a new mayor took office in 1963, and the sixty-odd stalls agreed to move to a former unloading wharf along the Ooka River, between the Miyakobashi and Miyagawabashi bridges.

On October 9, 1964, Noge’s street stalls closed at the end of the day. The next day, October 10, the day of the opening ceremony of the Tokyo Olympics, a ceremony marked their removal. On November 21, the new building was completed. Shoe, bag and clothing shops opened on the ground floor, and cafés and places serving light meals on the second. Its official name is the Noge Miyakobashi Shopping Street Building.

The building stands in a place like no other: above the river and above the road. Making the most of those constraints, the two-story structure, about 90 meters long, curves gently like a bow along the flow of the Ooka River. The second-floor shops face the river, giving the building two faces, one toward the street and one toward the water. When you cross Miyakobashi from Yoshidamachi into Noge, this arc is the first thing you see.

It is often described as a building put up for the Olympics. But a researcher at the Yokohama Urban Development Memorial Museum who studied its history writes that the street-stall problem, left unresolved through the postwar reconstruction, was finally settled with the Olympics as the occasion. Nineteen years after the war. This was the last home of those who had lived through the street-stall years.

In 2016, the Noge Miyakobashi Shopping Street Building became the first postwar building to be registered as a historic building by the City of Yokohama. It faced the threat of demolition in 2014, but in 2017 it was transferred to the Yokohama Historic Assets Research Association, a public interest incorporated association, to be preserved and put to use. The same researcher also writes that a building people do not love is hard to pass on to later generations. We believe this building has been kept alive by the people who kept coming back.

Along the narrow second-floor corridor, small doors stand in a row. A 2011 article noted that you could hardly see into any of the second-floor bars, and that many seemed to be members-only. For a first-time visitor, it may have felt a little hard to step inside. Yet it probably also meant that many places had guarded their doors for regulars who sat in the same seat every night. Many had been open for twenty or thirty years, and one owner said the rent was low because the landlord was the City of Yokohama.

In a 2019 article, the mama, or proprietress, of a long-established bar said that stylish wine bars had moved in too, and that there were more young customers. New owners open new doors; the old bars keep their old doors and light their lamps. Both belong to the time of this building, which runs on from the street-stall days.

After dark, the signs hung at even intervals light up, and their glow trembles on the surface of the Ooka River.

In 1933 (Showa 8), 20-year-old Mamoru Yoshida opened the jazz kissa (jazz café) Chigusa in Noge. In the air raids of 1945, the café and its more than 6,000 records were all lost. Back from the war, Yoshida reopened in 1947 with well over a thousand records gathered from regulars and jazz musicians. In the 1950s, it is said, Toshiko Akiyoshi, Sadao Watanabe, Terumasa Hino and others who were playing at the U.S. military clubs in Yokohama came here to devour records just arrived from across the ocean, and learned from them.

Yoshida died in 1994, and in 2007 the café closed for a time because of redevelopment in the area. On March 11, 2012, people who loved Chigusa reopened it at another spot in Noge (Chigusa official website).

On April 13, 2002, Yokohama Nigiwai-za opened in Nogecho. Rakugo, manzai, street performance: it is a theater devoted to the popular performing arts.

The people of Noge have also tried to bring their town back to life through performance. In 1964 the train line was extended to Isogo, and Sakuragicho was no longer the end of the line; then the streetcars disappeared, and the shipyard moved away. In a Noge the crowds had begun to leave, Noge Daidogei, the town’s street performance festival, began in the spring of 1986 at the call of local shopkeepers. Volunteers, mostly people of the town, do everything from planning to running it, and in April 2026 it was held for the 51st time.

The fee for watching street performance is nagesen, money tossed by viewers according to how much they enjoyed the show. One of Noge Daidogei’s organizers has said that Noge adopted it because postwar Noge was a “black market” with no fixed prices (Yokohama Keizai Shimbun, 2004).