Yoshidamachi

In the early Edo period, the land around today’s Isezakicho and Kangai was an inlet of the sea, spreading out from the mouth of the Ooka River.

The man who filled it in was Yoshida Kanbei, a timber and stone merchant from Edo. The work took eight years. It was completed in 1667 (Kanbun 7), and two years later the land was named Yoshida Shinden, “the Yoshida new fields.” Bounded by the Ooka River, the Nakamura River and what is now the JR line, it has the shape of a temple bell. The Yokohama City Central Library writes that these new fields, together with neighboring Kannai, formed the heart of Yokohama.

New fields they may have been, but until the port opened, this was still land of rice paddies, dry fields and a great deal of marsh. Even just before the Meiji era, much of it was said to be “half swamp, half paddy.” The priest of a temple in the new fields left word that at high tide the graveyard flooded, and no one could visit the graves. The Yoshida family’s headstones were the largest of all, so even when the tide came in, their tops could still be seen clearly above the water (History of Naka Ward).

When the port opened in 1859 (Ansei 6), the Yokohama-michi road was laid out, and houses began to line the embankments of the new fields. In 1864 (Genji 1), the last of the fields were filled in, and Yoshidamachi was born. The town takes its name from Yoshida Kanbei, who reclaimed the new fields (Naka Ward, Yokohama).

Just a short walk from Yoshidamachi stands Yoshida Bridge.

Opened in the same year as the port, the bridge marked the entrance to the overland road into the port district. The following year, 1860 (Man’en 1), a checkpoint was set up to protect foreigners, and in 1864 the checkpoint and its guardhouse were moved to the Yoshidamachi side (Naka Ward Historical Chronology). The land inside the checkpoint was Kannai, “inside the gate”; the land outside was Kangai, “outside the gate.” Yoshidamachi was a town born just beyond the gate.

Passage was strictly checked. One woman recalled that when she went with friends to a yose variety theater at night, what worried her most was getting through the checkpoint. Another recollection tells how, after dark, the great gate was shut and only the side gate remained open, and how, after the night hour of yotsu (around 10 p.m.), everything was closed (History of Naka Ward).

In 1869 (Meiji 2), Yoshida Bridge was rebuilt in iron to a design by the British engineer Richard Henry Brunton. It was the first iron bridge in Japan. People called it kane no hashi, “the iron bridge.” Bashamichi and Yoshida Bridge now joined Kannai and Yoshida Shinden with a single road, and the stream of people crossing the bridge flowed on toward what is today Isezakicho-dori. Around that time, it is said, cherry trees were planted along the riverbank near the bridge.

The iron bridge served for a little over forty years before it was replaced in 1910 (Meiji 43) by a reinforced concrete bridge. Today’s Yoshida Bridge spans the cutting of the Metropolitan Expressway between Bashamichi and Isezakicho. The ward’s 1985 history notes that when the bridge was rebuilt for the expressway, it was given a form without piers to keep the look of the iron bridge, and that at its foot stands the Yoshida Bridge Checkpoint Site monument, erected for the centennial of the port’s opening.

In the early Meiji years, Yoshidamachi, so close to Kannai, was quickly crowded with houses.

In March 1870 (Meiji 3), a great fire swept through Noge and Yoshidamachi, burning 250 houses (Naka Ward Historical Chronology). That same year, Kanagawa Prefecture declared that Yoshidamachi and Nogemachi were sure to prosper, but that guarding against fire was essential, and ordered that wooden-shingle roofs be replaced with tile within three years.

According to the town’s shopping street association, shops selling everyday goods gathered here after the port opened, followed from the Meiji era by dealers in secondhand clothing. Banks went up in the town, and beside Miyakobashi stood the headquarters of Shimizu-gumi (today’s Shimizu Corporation), which had helped build Yokohama since the port opened.

In the Great Kanto Earthquake of 1923 (Taisho 12), Yoshidamachi burned. Shimizu-gumi’s three-story building and the banks burned to the ground. The town rose again, only to be engulfed in flames once more in the Great Yokohama Air Raid of May 29, 1945 (Showa 20). The ward’s history says that Kangai was “utterly wiped out.”

After the war, people returned to the burned-out ruins and began building shacks from scorched corrugated iron and half-burned timber. But nearly all of Kangai was requisitioned by the U.S. military, and Yoshidamachi was no exception. The town lost one side of its street and became a katagawa-machi, a “one-sided town” (History of Naka Ward).

Even so, the town did not stop. Soon after the war, through the efforts of the head of the neighborhood association and the hands of Shimizu-gumi, a local company, the shopping street largely took shape again, and a reconstruction festival was held. In 1948 (Showa 23), the festival of Osannomiya (Hie Shrine) was revived, and Yoshidamachi, too, sent out its mikoshi, a portable shrine. That same summer, sunken boats and debris were hauled from the river between Yoshida Bridge and Miyakobashi, and cherry trees and willows were planted along the banks, as before the war.

In 1950, the magazine Gekkan Yokohama described Yoshidamachi like this:

“There are only seventy-nine households at present, but everyone is burning with the will to work together and make the town better” (quoted in History of Naka Ward).

At Osannomiya’s annual festival in September, Yoshidamachi’s neighborhood mikoshi still makes its way through the streets.

Walk along Yoshidamachi’s street and you will notice a run of three- and four-story buildings with a certain family resemblance. Shops on the ground floor, homes above. These are bōkatai kenchiku, “fireproof belt buildings,” put up in the years of postwar reconstruction.

As Japan’s towns rose from the burned-out ruins, there was an idea: line up buildings that would not burn, like a belt, and stop fire from spreading. In Yokohama, about 400 such reinforced concrete buildings, with shops below and homes above, were built, and roughly half of them are said to remain today.

The ward’s 1985 history notes that Yoshidamachi’s jointly built blocks had apartments from the third floor up, and that they were the forerunners of the town’s modern buildings. In 2026, the City of Yokohama described Yoshidamachi as “a distinctive streetscape lined with fireproof belt buildings built during the postwar reconstruction of the 1950s.”

In 1987, the people of Yoshidamachi concluded an agreement on how to shape their town. The City of Yokohama’s guidelines call it “a town with traditions dating back to the opening of the port, set between Isezakicho and Noge,” and name art and jazz as its defining character.

The Kanagawa Prefectural Tourism Association describes Yoshidamachi as a town where galleries, photo exhibitions and other art spaces line the street by day, and where more than forty bars and cafés open at night. In the words of the shopping street association, it is “a town of art, music and cocktails.” Along a small shopping street only about 250 meters long, more than seventy places to eat and drink stand side by side, long-standing establishments mingling with places run by young owners (2022).

In 2000, the people of the town closed the street to traffic and started the Yoshidamachi Art & Jazz Festival. With paintings, photographs and handmade goods laid out on the pavement and live jazz in the air, the festival reached its nineteenth edition in 2018 (Yokohama Keizai Shimbun).

Since around 2010, the Yoshida Machijū Beer Garden, which turns the whole street into a beer garden, has been held from spring to autumn. In August 2011, a Bon dance around a yagura tower raised in the street was organized to mourn the victims of the Great East Japan Earthquake and to pray for recovery. Today it has become a town event in which more than thirty shops take part together, and it has grown to include events on themes such as wild game and disaster preparedness.

In 2026, the Yoshidamachi Meitengai Association received the Ministry of Land, Infrastructure, Transport and Tourism’s Machizukuri (Community Development) Award, in recognition of how young shop owners have led the way in bringing the town to life while making the most of its postwar fireproof belt buildings (City of Yokohama).

One block behind Yoshidamachi Hondori runs a small alley. Its entrance is on the Miyakobashi side, beside Fukutomicho Nishi Park, under an arched neon sign.

Once known as Oishinbo Yokocho, “Gourmet Alley,” this lane was named Noraneko-dori, “Stray Cat Street,” in August 2018. The shopping street invited names from its members, and the name was chosen by vote from thirty proposals. It is said to come from the many shop owners with strong personalities, and from the stray cats that really do live here. The sign was designed by students of Joshibi University of Art and Design (Kanagawa Shimbun, 2018).

Bars like hideaways, small restaurants with a character all their own. Not chains, but places each run by its own owner, opening their doors as night falls.