Yokohama’s Food Stories

In 1859 (Ansei 6), Yokohama opened as a port for international trade. The Ministry of Agriculture, Forestry and Fisheries writes that this port, the closest to Tokyo, became the front line where Japan took in foreign culture.

In the foreign settlement, people from across the sea began to make their lives. They did not give up the way they ate. They ate beef, baked bread, drank beer, and looked to the fields for vegetables no one here had ever seen. Right alongside that life, the people of Yokohama met new tastes, were sometimes puzzled by them, and in time made them their own.

The City of Yokohama’s tourism information calls the city “a treasure house of food firsts”: not only things that came in from overseas, but many that were born right here.

In newly opened Yokohama, the custom of eating meat took hold earlier than almost anywhere else in Japan.

It is said that in 1862 (Bunkyu 2), inspired by the beef dishes the foreigners of the settlement were eating, the owner of Isekuma, an izakaya in Yokohama, opened the first gyunabe restaurant. His wife was firmly against it, so he divided the shop in two, half izakaya and half gyunabe restaurant, and that was how it began. By preparing unfamiliar beef to suit Japanese tastes, he won a following, and in time the shop became a gyunabe restaurant through and through.

For sukiyaki, the meat is seared first and then simmered. For gyunabe, everything is simmered from the start in a sauce of miso or soy sauce. This “Yokohama-born gyunabe” caught on enormously, says the Ministry of Agriculture, Forestry and Fisheries, and became the very taste of bunmei kaika, the Meiji era’s embrace of “civilization and enlightenment.” There is Ota Nawanoren, founded in 1868 (Meiji 1), which still keeps the taste of those days, and there are Janomeya and Araiya. These long-established houses still hang the noren curtain of gyunabe in Yokohama today (Ministry of Agriculture, Forestry and Fisheries).

According to History of Naka Ward, by August 1869 (Meiji 2) a Western restaurant had opened in Suehirocho, in Kangai, just outside Kannai. Two years later, along Bashamichi Street and elsewhere, one Western restaurant after another appeared, still a rarity to the townspeople of the day.

In June of that same year, 1869, Machida Fusazo opened a shaved-ice shop on Bashamichi (today’s Tokiwacho 5-chome) and began selling ice cream. It is known as the first shop where a Japanese person sold ice cream.

At first, apart from the occasional foreigner who stopped by, Japanese people only stood in front of the shop and stared. Business did not go well. Customers finally came, it is said, the following year, during the grand festival of Iseyama Kotai Jingu shrine (History of Naka Ward). Even behind the cold spoonful everyone enjoys today, there was someone who lived through a summer when nothing sold.

The history of Bashamichi is told on the Bashamichi & Nihon-odori Avenue page.

In 1870 (Meiji 3), William Copeland, a Norwegian with American citizenship, opened Japan’s first beer brewery, the Spring Valley Brewery, on the Yamate hill.

Later the Japan Brewery Company bought the brewery, and in 1888 it launched a German-style lager, Kirin Beer. This is why Yokohama is called “the birthplace of Japan’s beer culture” (Yokohama City tourism information). In 1907, Kirin Brewery Company was founded to carry the business on. The Yamate brewery collapsed in the Great Kanto Earthquake of 1923, and in 1926 a new brewery was completed in Yokohama, today’s Kirin Brewery Yokohama Plant (Kirin Holdings).

Copeland rests in the Foreign General Cemetery in Yamate. Today the City of Yokohama, as “the birthplace of the beer industry,” is working with Kirin Brewery to share the city’s appeal through craft beer.

For the people of the settlement, bread was a necessity at the table. In 1888 (Meiji 21), at the foot of the Yamate hill in Motomachi, a bakery was born. This is Uchiki Pan, sometimes called “the shop where shokupan began,” shokupan being the soft white sandwich loaf of Japan (Yokohama City tourism information).

More than 130 years on, it still stands on Motomachi’s street, keeping this city’s breakfast tables supplied. Motomachi is introduced on the Motomachi & Chinatown page.

In 1889 (Meiji 22), at the Grand Hotel in the settlement, the manager Louis Eppinger is said to have created the Bamboo, Japan’s first original cocktail (Yokohama City tourism information). That hotel fell in an instant in the Great Kanto Earthquake of 1923 (History of Naka Ward). The building is gone, but the name of one cocktail remains.

Western vegetables were essential on the settlement’s tables. Even the Western-type carrots we now eat without a second thought, the City of Yokohama writes, first came into Japan through Yokohama and Nagasaki when the ports opened at the end of the Edo period.

To mark the 150th anniversary of the port’s opening, the City of Yokohama gave the name Yokohama Kaikosai, “port-opening vegetables,” to 14 Western vegetables whose cultivation spread from Yokohama to the rest of the country in the wake of the opening. Some of the vegetables on tables all over Japan set out on their journey from the fields of Yokohama.

With the opening of the port, Chinese people began to live in one corner of the settlement. According to History of Naka Ward, many shops at first kept two trades: an eatery in the morning and evening, import business at midday. In time importers of food and textiles appeared, and as tailors and furniture makers set up on their own, the eateries, too, came to stand as a trade in their own right. The ward’s history calls this “the beginning of today’s street of restaurants.”

This area, once called Shitamachi, the “lower town,” was a Chinese town in its own right. Chinese restaurants lined the main streets and the back streets alike, and many Japanese people stopped in too. In the back streets were tailors, rattan craftsmen, barbers and embroidery shops. The ward’s history records that this town was one of Yokohama’s sights, and a town that “filled the bellies of the citizens.”

In the Great Kanto Earthquake of 1923, every building in the town fell. The ward’s history records that of the roughly 5,000 Chinese people living here, about 2,000 lost their lives. In the air raid of May 29, 1945, the town was burned to the ground once more.

Even so, the postwar revival of Yamashitacho began in one corner of this town, because there was food there. A newspaper in November 1945 described fruit and fried foods laid out in barracks on the burned ground, and tempura and curry rice bowls selling like hotcakes at 20 yen each in barrack eateries. The ward’s history describes Yamashitacho in those days as a town that whetted the citizens’ appetites, and satisfied them. It was just the same in burned-out Noge.

In February 1955, a paifang gate, today’s Zenrinmon, was raised at the entrance to the town, carrying the hope of postwar recovery. The town, until then called Nankinmachi, came to be called Chukagai, Chinatown, after the name displayed on this gate. Today some 630 shops stand within an area about 500 meters square, about 200 of them Chinese restaurants (Yokohama Chinatown Development Association, 2022).

Bean sprouts, napa cabbage, pork and the like are stir-fried, simmered in broth, thickened, and ladled over soy-sauce ramen. Born in Yokohama, it is a bowl the people of Kanagawa have loved for generations.

There are several stories of how it began. The Ministry of Agriculture, Forestry and Fisheries says that in prewar Chinatown, pork noodle soup was a common dish but a pricey one, so noodles made with vegetables came to be cooked as a meal for the staff. Yokohama City tourism information writes that it is said to have been devised by the second-generation owner of a long-established Chinese restaurant in Naka Ward.

The name, and how to write it in kanji, have their theories too. One says it is written 生馬麺, meaning noodles topped with fresh, crisp ingredients. Which story is true, we cannot say. But in every one of them stands a cook in a corner of the kitchen, working out how to make a bowl that was cheap, warm and filling.

In 1908 (Meiji 41), Kiyoken opened for business at the first Yokohama Station, today’s Sakuragicho Station. Its inspiration, it is said, was the shumai served in Nankinmachi as tsukidashi, a small starter. It was in 1928 (Showa 3) that Kiyoken’s Shiumai, as the company spells it, made with dried scallop and delicious even when cold, went on sale at the station (Ministry of Agriculture, Forestry and Fisheries; Kiyoken).

In 1950 the “Shiumai Girls” took their place on the platforms of Yokohama Station, and Shiumai became known across Japan as a souvenir of Yokohama. The Ministry of Agriculture, Forestry and Fisheries notes that Yokohama spends more on shumai than any other city in Japan. A small dish from Chinatown came by way of a station platform to become the taste of this city.

Kiyoken’s story is also told on the Around Yokohama Station page.

In 1927 (Showa 2), four years after the Great Kanto Earthquake, the Hotel New Grand opened facing Yamashita Park.

Its first executive chef, Saly Weil, was once asked by a banker staying at the hotel, “I’m not feeling well. Could you make me something that goes down easily?” He topped butter rice with shrimp in cream sauce, covered it with gratin sauce and cheese, and baked it in the oven. The hotel tells us that this dish, thought up on the spot, was the beginning of doria.

On August 30, 1945, Douglas MacArthur, Supreme Commander for the Allied Powers, arrived at this hotel. According to the hotel’s records quoted in History of Naka Ward, lunch that day was Alaska pollock with carrots, onions and potatoes, and frozen whale meat cooked like a steak. In a year when food was scarce, we imagine it was the very best the kitchen could offer.

The hotel then entered its years under requisition. Its second executive chef, Shigetada Irie, learned that American soldiers were eating boiled spaghetti tossed with salt, pepper and tomato ketchup; he refined the idea and created spaghetti Napolitan. To delight the officers’ wives, the pastry chef of the day set ice cream and fruit beside a custard pudding and devised pudding à la mode (Hotel New Grand).

In the midst of the occupation, the cooks kept thinking up dishes to please the guests before them. Doria, born for a single banker, in time spread throughout Japan, the hotel tells us.

For Yamashita Park and the hotel, see the Yamashitacho page; for the Western-style restaurants born in postwar Noge, see the Noge & Miyakobashi Shopping Street page.

When the war ended, the center of Yokohama was requisitioned by the U.S. military. Along the Sakuragawa River in Noge, street stalls stood in rows, and people called the place Kujira Yokocho, Whale Alley. The billowing smoke of grilling whale meat, the ward’s history says, stirred the appetites of people who had too little to eat.

The port needed all the hands it could get to load and unload cargo. “Go to Yokohama and you’ll be able to eat”: on the strength of that rumor, people gathered from all over Japan. The town where they worked and lived is described on the Kotobukicho page. Something cheap and filling, something to give you the strength to work again tomorrow: the tables of this port town were always there for the stomachs of such people.

For Whale Alley and the bars of Noge today, see the Noge & Miyakobashi Shopping Street page.

In 1974 (Showa 49), a man who had been a long-haul truck driver hit on the idea of combining Kyushu’s pork-bone broth with Tokyo’s soy-sauce ramen, and opened Yoshimuraya in Shin-Sugita. A rich pork-bone and soy-sauce broth, with thick, straight noodles. Because many of the shops that branched off from it also carried the character ie (家, “house”) in their names, this bowl came to be called Iekei, “of the house line” (Kanagawa Prefectural Tourism Association).

From master to apprentice, and from apprentice to the apprentice’s apprentice: born in Yokohama, this bowl has branched out like a family tree, across Japan and across the sea.

For the Iekei lineage and its head house, see the Around Yokohama Station page.

More than 160 years after the port opened, Yokohama’s food stories are still being written.

Fukutomicho, next to Isezakicho, is also known as Yokohama Fukutomicho Koreatown. From around 1988, the time of the Seoul Olympics, shops run by Korean owners grew in number. Korean restaurants and grocers dot its streets, and in recent years Chinese restaurants and food shops have increased as well, so that the street has begun to take on the character of a wider Asian quarter.

In Izumi Ward, away from the city center, lies Icho Danchi, a housing estate of about 3,600 homes that stretches across into the city of Yamato. Because the Yamato Resettlement Promotion Center, which received people who came from Indochina, once stood nearby, many people from abroad came to live here; today, Kanagawa Prefecture says, three in ten residents are of foreign nationality. Many people with roots in Vietnam and China live here, and within the estate are restaurants serving the tastes of home and shops stocked with Asian ingredients.