Yokohama Audioguías

Yokohama was a fishing village in 1853, and then Japan ended its isolation and everything changed. When the harbor officially opened to foreign trade on June 2, 1859, the transformation began at a speed that never quite left the city. Within a decade Yokohama had Japan's first railway station (1872), first foreign-language newspaper (1861), first gas streetlights (1870s), and the largest Chinatown in Japan, established in the year the port opened. The city was largely destroyed in the Great Kanto earthquake of September 1923, which killed over 30,000 residents, and firebombed in 1945, and rebuilt both times faster than anyone expected.

The port area Minato Mirai 21, developed from the 1980s onward on former shipyard land, now hosts the Yokohama Landmark Tower (296 meters) rising from water that was tidal flat forty years earlier.

But the more interesting ground is older: the Yamate district, known as the Bluff, contains Victorian-era residences built by early foreign residents on a cliff above the harbor. The Sankei-en Garden, a private estate opened to the public in 1906, relocates historic buildings from Kyoto and Kamakura into a single garden setting in a way that sounds improbable and actually works.