Yokohama – Tokyo’s port, my trans-Pacific starting point

◄ Gundam at the Gundam Factory

In Fukuoka I saw a long line of people queueing to get into a shop called ‘Gundam Base,’ What on earth was that I thought? The answer is an enormously popular anime series about a transformer-like character called Gundam. Which in turn spins off a phenomenal number of Gundam ‘toys’ which the Gundam enthusiasts were queueing up to buy, although not too many, you were restricted to buying only one of each character.

▲ Just to get in to watch is 1650 yen (about US$11), if you want to be up on the head-high platform it’s twice as expensive.

▲ There were plenty of spectators – including me – down at ground level.

◄ Perched on a hillside not far from the Gundam Factory and just beyond Yokohama’s very active Chinatown, on the south-east side of the town centre, is the Foreigners’ Cemetery where the line up of very modern beer cans indicate William Copeland’s important role in modern Japanese life.

The cemetery wasn’t exactly easy to find and once I’d got there I had to walk almost a complete circuit of the cemetery before finally finding an entrance gate. Getting out was much easier, I exited from a ‘no entry’ gate back at the bottom of the hill.

◄ A number of graves note that they died in the Kantō Earthquake of 1 September 1923. If the graves had been Korean they might have died in the Kantō Massacre that followed immediately after the earthquake. The tremblor killed 140,000 people. The massacre another 6000?

There are a surprising number of European graves, many of them men with Japanese wives, who seemed to have been in Yokohama right through WW II, before they died in the late ‘40s and in the ‘50s. The variety of foreign nationalities was quite amazing.

The military areas included a British one (this is all well before WW I) which categorized the many names by ‘killed in action,’ ‘normal causes’ and ‘smallpox.’

▲ Launched in 1929, so its 100th birthday is coming up soon, the Hikawa Maru is also at the waterfront close to the Gundam Factory. It made many Yokohama-Seattle crossings pre-war, then operated as a hospital ship through the war, repatriated Japanese prisoners-of-war (including from Rabaul) after the war and then from 1953 to 1960 was back on that notoriously rough route to Seattle again. In its pre-war heyday Charlie Chaplin was one of the star passengers. An interesting vessel to wander around.

◄ Cosplay on the subway – I travelled back and forth across Yokohama a number of times on the convenient and easy to use subway system where there were often interesting fellow passengers like these cosplay enthusiasts.

My Yokohama wanderings also took me to the Red Brick Warehouses, fine old buildings on the waterfront. They did not take me to the Yokohama Museum of Art which is closed until next year for some sort of major redevelopment. Or to the Mitsubishi Minato Mirai Industrial Museum which I thought was closed Mondays when in fact it was open Monday and closed Tuesday and Wednesdays.

I did get to the top of the Marine Tower, a modern and very high lighthouse overlooking the waterfront and the Hikawa Maru. From there it was a short walk inland to Yokohama’s big and busy Chinatown, clearly doing great business and all very bright and noisy at night.

▲ On my first night in Yokohama, walking back to the hotel from Chinatown, I stopped for a beer in Marche Dix Jours, a nice looking (but very quiet) little French-influenced wine shop and café. Afterwards I had dinner at a place where I could not recognize anything on the menu, or from the pictures for that matter. But it was very pleasant and following that time-honoured food-ordering practice – ‘I’ll have the same thing they’re having’ – worked perfectly. They say the English are a nation of shopkeepers, well the Japanese must be a nation of bar and café owners and I have absolutely no idea how the economics works. My dinner – two glasses of red, two dishes (one of them seems to be baby squid on toast) – comes to about 4700 yen (US$35). There’s a guy on one side of me (I have his squid toast), an attractive young woman on the other, who has quite a few dishes and quite a few glasses of white, but they both leave. Then at the end of the bar are three guys who are getting through the dishes (I have one of their’s) so perhaps they’re making the business work, but they’re all that’s left when I depart. There is a woman on the street chasing up customers, she chased me up. Back towards the hotel there’s one of those multi-floor bar buildings with 32 places (I count the signs). An economics mystery.