Around Yokohama Station

Today’s Yokohama Station is the third to bear the name.

In 1872 (Meiji 5), when Japan’s first railway opened, Yokohama Station stood where Sakuragicho Station is now. In 1915 (Taisho 4), a second station, a red-brick building with a tower, went up near the Takashimacho intersection. In the Great Kanto Earthquake of 1923 (Taisho 12) it burned, and only its outer walls were left standing. It had served for just eight years. The bricks of its foundations can still be seen on the site.

Then, in 1928 (Showa 3), the third station building was completed on its present site. In those days the East Exit was the front door, and a streetcar stop stood before it. The present East Exit station building opened in 1980 (Showa 55); in the same year came the free passage linking east and west, and the underground shopping street Porta.

In the Edo period, the area around the West Exit was an inlet called Sodegaura. Filled in from the Meiji into the Taisho era, it was requisitioned by the U.S. military after the war and became a gravel yard; people, it is said, even called it “the desert left behind Yokohama Station.”

In 1956 (Showa 31), the Yokohama Station Meihingai arcade opened here: the beginning of today’s Joinus. In 1961 came Nishiguchi Gobangai, in 1964 the Diamond underground shopping street, and in 1971 Sotetsu Movil, home to five cinemas. Within the decade from 1955 (the Showa 30s), land once used to store building materials had become a lively shopping district (from Nishi Ward’s “Tekuteku Sketch,” City of Yokohama).

In June 2020, the JR Yokohama Tower opened at the West Exit. The City of Yokohama is pressing ahead with Excite Yokohama 22, a plan to remake the area around the station on a large scale. Six companies run thirteen lines into this station, and the people of Yokohama call the area around it “the Yokohama of Yokohama.”

Walk a little north from the West Exit of Yokohama Station, and at the top of a slope lie traces of a post town on the old Tokaido road.

Opened in 1601, Kanagawa-juku was a post town beside Sodegaura, a scenic stretch of shore. It gave its name to the prefecture and the ward of Kanagawa, and it was the ground from which the town of Yokohama later grew. Almost everything from the post-town days has been lost, but on the slope of Daimachi, something of that time still remains.

Partway up the slope stands the ryotei Tanakaya, founded in 1863 (Bunkyu 3). Before that it was the inn Sakuraya, which Utagawa Hiroshige depicted in “Kanagawa: Dai no Kei” (View of the Embankment), from The Fifty-three Stations of the Tokaido. After the death of Sakamoto Ryoma, his wife Oryo worked here as a nakai, serving the guests.

When the port opened in 1859, the Yokohama Road was built in haste to lead from the Tokaido to the open port at Kannai. This road connects the age of the post town with the age of the port.

North of the West Exit of Yokohama Station, in Tsuruyacho, Kanagawa Ward, is the Ohashi Boxing Gym.

Its president, Hideyuki Ohashi, is a former world champion who won the WBC strawweight title in 1990 and the WBA strawweight title in 1992. After retiring, he opened this gym, and here in his home city of Yokohama he has brought up the boxers who followed him.

This is the gym of champion Naoya Inoue. He has won world titles in four weight classes, and now, at super bantamweight, holds the four world titles of the WBA, WBC, WBO and IBF at once (as of October 1, 2026, according to the gym’s official website). His younger brother, Takuma Inoue, also of this gym, is the WBC world bantamweight champion.

A champion at the very summit of world boxing came out of a gym in this town, and he still trains here. This, too, is a face of Yokohama, and one the city is proud to show the world.

A short walk from the West Exit of Yokohama Station stands a ramen shop where the line seldom ends. This is Yoshimuraya, whose sign names it the head house of Iekei ramen.

It was founded in 1974 in Shin-Sugita. Its founder, once a long-haul truck driver, had the idea of combining Kyushu’s pork-bone broth with Tokyo’s soy-sauce ramen, and so a bowl was born: a rich pork-bone and soy-sauce broth with thick, straight noodles. The standard toppings are spinach, chashu pork and nori (according to the Kanagawa Prefectural Tourism Association).

Because so many of the shops, including those that branched off from the original, carry the character ie (家, “house”) in their names, the style came to be called Iekei, “of the house line.” Born in Yokohama, this bowl has spread across Japan, and today there are Yokohama Iekei ramen shops across the sea as well, in cities such as Singapore and Los Angeles.

Nor is there only one line. Some shops, like Sugitaya, were granted menkyo kaiden, full mastery, by Yoshimuraya itself; apart from that line there is also a separate lineage, the Ichi-kei, which traces its roots to Ichirokuya. Hamarepo.com, a local Yokohama web magazine, has drawn the Iekei shops centered on Yokohama as a single family tree (as of January 2020).