Yamate (The Bluff)

When the port opened, Yamate was a hill neither quite wilderness nor quite woodland, with perhaps a field here and there, as the ward’s history puts it. In older times it belonged to Kitagata Village in Kuraki District. Seen from the harbor, it rose as a sheer cliff. The foreigners living in Yokohama called this hill “the Bluff,” an English word for a cliff (Naka Ward, Yokohama).

At the end of 1866 (Keio 2), the shogunate and the foreign powers concluded an agreement on remodeling the Yokohama settlement and on a racecourse, a cemetery and other matters, and it was decided that land in Yamate would be leased to foreigners. Leasing began the following year, and little by little, houses rose on the hill. In 1884 (Meiji 17), names were given to 26 neighborhoods within the settlement, among them Yatozaka, Shiokumizaka, Jizozaka and Yamate-hondori. In 1899 (Meiji 32), when the settlement system came to an end, the 26 neighborhoods were brought together as one: Yamatecho (Naka Ward, Yokohama: Town Names of Naka Ward and Their History).

From the last years of the shogunate, British and French troops were stationed on the part of the hill with the finest view. The barracks were finally vacated in 1875 (Meiji 8) (History of Naka Ward).

Until the early Taisho years, Yamate was a quiet residential area. It was a long walk to the next house; in the daytime all was hushed, and almost the only person you might see in the street was an amah, a nursemaid minding a child. It was like walking through a forest. The ward’s history has preserved words like these from people who lived on the hill.

In the early Meiji years, schools and churches opened on the hill one after another. In 1871 (Meiji 4), three women missionaries built the Mission Home at No. 48 Yamate, and the next year an English school for Japanese women opened there; it would become Kyoritsu Girls’ School. In 1875 (Meiji 8), a school for girls begun by Mrs. Hepburn built a schoolhouse at No. 178 Yamate and moved in; it would become Ferris Jogakuin. The ward’s history goes so far as to say that education for women in Japan was born here, on Yamate (History of Naka Ward).

In the same years, missionaries built church after church. It was an age when foreign ways of thinking took root on this hill, planted by the hands of the foreigners themselves.

The two sanctuaries you see on the hill today were both rebuilt after the earthquake: that of Yokohama Christ Church in 1931 (Showa 6), and that of the Catholic Yamate Church in 1933 (Showa 8). Both are recognized as Historic Buildings of Yokohama City.

In 1870 (Meiji 3), at the edge of the hill, foreign residents opened Yamate Park, the first Western-style park in Japan. Modern tennis in Japan began here, and it was here that the Himalayan cedar was first planted in Japan before spreading across the country. For 80 years it was a park for foreigners only; since the war, it has been a place where the people of Yokohama exercise and take their ease (City of Yokohama).

The Great Kanto Earthquake brought down and burned the houses, schools and churches on the hill without mercy. Along Yamate-hondori, only three or four buildings remained. What was left, the ward’s history records, was a desolate hill strewn with ruins of stone. Among the buildings lost to fire were the consulates of many nations, hospitals, hotels, the Gaiety Theatre, schools including Ferris and Kyoritsu, and churches (History of Naka Ward).

It was not only foreigners who died. Many of the Japanese who worked in foreign households, too (cooks and houseboys, amahs, the craftsmen who kept the gardens), lost their lives. People who had lost their homes took shelter in Yamate Park, which the fire had spared (ibid.).

Many of the foreigners moved away, to the Kansai region or to Shanghai. Yamate’s recovery, it is said, was not the work of the whole town at once, but went slowly, one house at a time. In 1929 (Showa 4), Ferris’s new school building went up, and little by little, homes returned to the hill (ibid.).

Most of the Western-style houses open to visitors in Yamate today were built in this era of reconstruction. One is an apartment house thought to have been built to bring back foreigners who had left Yokohama; another was built with parts of a house that had escaped both collapse and fire. The white walls and windows of the Western-style houses are also a portrait of the people who, after the earthquake, chose to make their lives here once again.

In 1854, when Perry’s fleet came for the second time, Robert Williams, a 24-year-old sailor aboard the Mississippi, died in a fall. Perry asked for a place to bury him, and for a cemetery for Americans. The shogunate offered a corner of the grounds of Zotokuin temple in Yokohama Village, which is said to have met Perry’s condition of “a place within sight of the sea.” This was the beginning of the foreign cemetery on Yamate (Yokohama Foreign General Cemetery).

After the port opened, as more foreigners died in Japan, the cemetery was extended up the hill. From 1870 (Meiji 3), a committee formed by the consular corps took over its care; today it is looked after by the Yokohama Foreign General Cemetery Foundation, a public interest incorporated foundation. It covers about 18,500 square meters. By retracing the burial records, many of which burned in the earthquake, it is now known that more than 5,000 people rest here (ibid.).

Morel, who gave his all to building Japan’s first railway. Wirgman, whose cartoons opened a path for Western-style painting in Japan. Copeland, who opened the first brewery in Japan on the Yamate hill. Marshall Martin, who after the earthquake called on the foreign landowners one by one to win them over, and saw the replanning of Yamashitacho through (History of Naka Ward). Beside those whose names are remembered lie others who never went home again, whose names have not come down to us. Many of the foreigners buried here, the foundation writes, have since lost every tie to family or home.

During the war, the cemetery was placed under watch, and with little care possible, it fell into ruin. One of those who looked after the cemetery left a recollection that there were times when the bereaved could only watch a burial from outside the fence (History of Naka Ward).

The cemetery is cared for not by the state or the city but by the foundation, sustained by donations from those who visit. Close to 90 percent of the cost of its upkeep and management, it is said, is covered by donations collected on the open days (Yokohama Foreign General Cemetery).

Harbor View Park stands where, in the years after the port opened, British troops were stationed at the top of the hill and French troops below it (City of Yokohama).

After the war, much of the Yamate hill was requisitioned by the U.S. military. Even the roads linking the requisitioned houses were requisitioned, the ward’s history says, and Japanese could not pass along them (History of Naka Ward).

After the requisition was lifted, the land was prepared in answer to local wishes, and in 1962 (Showa 37) the park opened. On opening day, it is said, the melody of “Minato ga Mieru Oka” (The Hill Where You Can See the Harbor), sung by Hirano Aiko, drifted through the air (City of Yokohama). In the years that followed, France-yama, the former site of the French Consulate; the British House, once the British Consul-General’s residence; the Osaragi Jiro Memorial Museum; and the Kanagawa Museum of Modern Literature all became part of the park.

The ward’s history looks back on this course of events: a hill with a fine view, yet one that had been all but closed to the city’s people, before the war and during it, ever since foreign troops were stationed there at the end of the shogunate, had at last become a place for them to enjoy. It was, the history says, the birth of a new Yamate (History of Naka Ward).

From the observation deck you can take in the harbor and the Yokohama Bay Bridge. In the English Rose Garden in front of the British House, the Fragrance Garden laid out in a sunken flower bed, and elsewhere, some 1,950 rose plants of about 330 varieties grow (City of Yokohama).

In 1870 (Meiji 3), William Copeland, a Norwegian-born American citizen, opened the first brewery in Japan, the Spring Valley Brewery, on the Yamate hill. The Japan Brewery Company, which later bought the brewery, launched Kirin Beer in 1888 (Yokohama City tourism website). This is why Yokohama is called the birthplace of Japan’s beer culture. Copeland now rests in the foreign cemetery on the same hill.

The Western-style houses change their dress with the seasons. In June, for Harmony of Flowers and Tableware, flower artists and ikebana masters adorn the rooms and tables with flowers and vessels. From mid-October the houses are wrapped in Halloween decorations, and on the last Sunday of October a stamp rally and other events lead visitors around the houses and Yamate Park (Yokohama Yamate Western-Style Houses).

In autumn, British House Yokohama hosts a rose concert for the Autumn Yamate Rose Week (November 15 in 2026). Somei-yoshino cherry trees also grow in Harbor View Park.

Every year from December 1 to 25, each Western-style house chooses a country as its theme and conveys that country’s history and culture through its Christmas decorations, talks and concerts (Yokohama Yamate Western-Style Houses). For one month, in homes where people from across the sea once lived, you can meet the ways faraway countries celebrate winter.