Yokohama Chinatown Audio Guide

Yokohama Chinatown: what does the audio guide cover?

1. 01

   Welcome to Yokohama Chinatown

   Welcome to Yokohama Chinatown, known in Japanese as 横浜中華街. You are in Yamashitacho, in Naka Ward, in the city of Yokohama in Kanagawa Prefecture. This is the largest Chinatown in Japan and the largest in East Asia, and if you count back to its forerunner, the Yokohama Shinden settlement of 1866, its story stretches over a hundred and fifty years. Here is the twist to keep in your pocket as you walk. The ground under your feet was not always a bustling street of restaurants. It began as reclaimed land, and the narrow lanes you wander today follow the line of old field paths. Over the next few stops we will trace how a patch of former paddy land became a community, a harbor-town crossroads, and a place that had to rebuild itself more than once. If you are arriving by train, Ishikawacho Station on the Keihin-Tohoku and Negishi Line carries the secondary name Motomachi and Chinatown, and Kannai Station is also among the stations serving the area. Take your time, look up at the gates, and let the street tell its own story.

2. 02

   Yokohama Chinatown: From Rice Paddies to Port Settlement

   Before Yokohama was a famous port, it was a village on a long, thin sandbar, about one and a half kilometers long and some 300 meters wide, reaching out from the Yamate plateau. Behind that sandbar lay an inlet. During the Edo period, people reclaimed such inlets as new fields, and in 1796 one of those reclamations, called Yokohama Shinden, took shape near the root of the sandbar. That is the land Yokohama Chinatown now stands on. Then came July the first, 1859, the day Japan opened this port to the world. By 1861, the area had been laid out as a proper urban district. Because it grew out of rice paddies, it was nicknamed the swamp settlement. The prime waterfront, called Kaigandori, was the place to be, and the Chinese who arrived here found conditions in the marshy district far less favorable, so they gathered there. The layout still whispers about this past. The streets now called Nanmon Silk Road, Kaiko-do and Chōan-do are said to be remnants of the old paths that ran between the paddies. So when you turn a corner here, you may be following the edge of a vanished field.

3. 03

   Yokohama Chinatown: Go-Betweens, Craftsmen and Temples

   When the port opened, Western merchants did not speak Japanese, and Japanese merchants knew little about Western languages or business. Chinese people who had worked in Western trading houses in Hong Kong, Guangdong and Shanghai could speak Western languages, and they could also communicate with Japanese people by writing in Chinese characters. So they became the go-betweens in the trade of raw silk and tea. Many of Yokohama's overseas Chinese came from Guangdong, a region with a long tradition of sending people abroad, and that is why Cantonese cooking is still so common here. They also traded in seafood: abalone and kelp from Hokkaido went to Hong Kong, and sugar came in from Taiwan. Beyond trade and restaurants, they worked in what were then cutting-edge fields: building Western-style houses, painting, making Western furniture and pianos, printing in European languages, and Western-style tailoring. Japanese residents lived nearby from early on, and new skills passed between the communities. The community also built a temple to Guan Yu, called Kanteibyo, and a Chinese cemetery with a shrine to the earth deity, called Jizoo-byo, along with festivals such as Qingming, the birthday of Guan Di, and the Spring Festival. And a phrase you may hear is the three blades: tailoring, barbering and cooking, the classic trades of Yokohama's Chinese community.

4. 04

   Yokohama Chinatown: Disaster, Rebuilding and the Gate That Named a Street

   This neighborhood's history includes hard chapters. In the Great Kanto Earthquake of 1923, major community buildings here collapsed, including the Chinese consulate, schools and the Guan Di temple. Of roughly 5,700 Chinese residents of Yokohama, about 1,700 are estimated to have died, a death rate near 30 percent, compared with about 6 percent for the city overall. Violence by vigilante groups against Chinese residents also occurred in the aftermath, and an army unit was sent to nearby Shinyamashita to protect them. More than forty Chinese people from Kobe came to help, and over about a month they recovered 982 bodies, which were cremated and buried at the Chinese cemetery. In 1945, the district was burned flat, yet the roughly 1,900 overseas Chinese living here began rebuilding almost at once. In 1946 they had already rebuilt the Guan Di temple and the Yokohama Chinese school. In 1955 they raised the gate called Zenrinmon, with the name Chinatown carved on it, a name that settled the many older nicknames, such as Tojingai and Nankinmachi. The postwar years brought a black market, bars serving foreign soldiers during the Korean War, and a street beside the temple that American soldiers nicknamed Happy Avenue. Later the community was strained by the split between the two Chinas. Then growth in the high-economic-growth years and the gourmet boom made it a signature tourist destination.

5. 05

   Before You Head Off from Yokohama Chinatown

   Yokohama Chinatown keeps reinventing itself. In the bubble years, buildings were renovated and raised higher, and the opening of the Bayshore Route and the Yokohama Bay Bridge in 1989 brought even more visitors. After the bubble burst, many long-established restaurants closed, and newcomers took over businesses or opened new shops. In 1993 an association of Chinatown community groups was formed, and it set about building new gates and improving the streets. So as you go on, try reading the neighborhood like a layered map. Notice the gates and what they announce. Notice how the streets bend, and ask yourself whether you are following the line of an old field path. Look for the small clues of the trades that once defined this community. There is much more to find: the stories behind the lanes, the temple, the old restaurants. Wander without a plan for a while, and see which story catches you first.