Yokohama

Yokohama was a village of a few hundred people on a shallow bay when Commodore Perry's squadron anchored off the coast, and the Convention of Kanagawa was signed nearby in 1854. The shogunate chose the village, rather than the post-station of Kanagawa on the main highway, as the foreign settlement it had agreed to open, and the port began trade in 1859. Raw silk from the hills of Kanagawa, Gunma and Nagano poured through it, and foreign merchants, missionaries and engineers made it the place where much of modern Japan arrived: the first Japanese daily newspapers in English and Japanese, gas street lighting, an early photographic trade, ice cream, beer brewing and, in 1872, the country's first railway, which ran to Shimbashi in Tokyo.

The 20th century twice destroyed the city. The Great Kanto earthquake of September 1923 and the fires that followed levelled almost the entire built-up area and killed more than 30,000 people in Yokohama alone. Rebuilding produced Yamashita Park, laid out over the rubble, and the brick and stone civic buildings of Kannai. Air raids in May 1945 burned much of what remained, and after the surrender the Allied occupation took over the port and large tracts of land for years.

Industry and container shipping drove postwar growth, and the population passed Osaka's to make Yokohama the largest municipality in Japan. From the 1980s the Minato Mirai 21 project rebuilt a shipyard and railway yards into a new harbour centre, crowned by the Landmark Tower in 1993.

Yokohama's self-image is of the open, outward-looking port — the hama-kko, the child of the harbour, as against the Edokko of Tokyo — and much of its culture came in by sea. The Chinese community that settled after 1859 built Japan's largest Chinatown, with its own temples, schools and clan associations, while the Yamate bluff kept churches, a foreign cemetery and streets of Western houses that are now museums.

Music is the clearest inheritance. Jazz arrived through the port and the postwar occupation, and the bars of Noge still carry it; the city holds a large jazz festival each autumn and has long supported classical music at the concert halls of Minato Mirai. Contemporary art has a major platform in the Yokohama Triennale, which takes over the art museum and warehouse spaces.

Sport matters: the DeNA BayStars fill the baseball stadium in the middle of the old settlement, and the Yokohama F. Marinos play at the country's largest stadium, which staged the 2002 World Cup final. The festival calendar mixes imports and tradition — Lunar New Year dances in Chinatown, harbour fireworks in summer, and the anniversary of the port's opening in June. Manners are standard Japanese ones, with the extra courtesy of a city long used to foreign visitors.

About 3.7 million people live in Yokohama's eighteen wards, making it the most populous single municipality in Japan, though it is thoroughly bound to Tokyo: hundreds of thousands commute into the capital each morning, and the city has long been called a bedroom of it. That said, the port remains one of Japan's busiest, and Nissan has its head office in the city, alongside technology, shipping and engineering firms drawn to the waterfront.

Most residents live away from the harbour, in the hilly wards inland and in planned suburbs such as Kohoku New Town, reached by the Tokyu and subway lines. Housing is cheaper than in central Tokyo, which keeps young families arriving, but the population has begun to level off and, as across Japan, is ageing. The city runs a large public hospital and university system and a well-used network of local buses on the hills the trains do not reach.

The daily rhythm is commuter-shaped: crowded morning trains, quiet residential streets in the middle of the day, and an evening surge into Noge, Isezakicho and the station basements. Weekends belong to the waterfront, when families, cyclists and wedding parties fill the promenade, and Chinatown is at its busiest. Earthquake preparation, the cost of maintaining ageing suburbs and the future of port land are recurring local concerns.

Chinese food is the city's signature. Yokohama's Chinatown grew out of the treaty port and serves Cantonese, Shanghainese, Sichuan and Taiwanese cooking, but the dish most associated with the city is shumai — small steamed pork dumplings, often made with scallop, sold hot from shop fronts and boxed with rice as one of Japan's best-known station bentos. Sanma-men, ramen topped with stir-fried vegetables in a thickened sauce, is another local Chinese-Japanese invention.

The city's own ramen style, iekei, appeared in the 1970s: thick straight noodles in a broth of pork bone and soy sauce, topped with spinach, sheets of nori and braised pork, with the richness and saltiness adjusted to order. Shops serving it have spread across Japan, and the Shin-Yokohama museum devoted to ramen keeps the regional styles side by side.

Because so much Western food entered Japan here, Yokohama also claims a set of yoshoku dishes — Japanese versions of European cooking. Spaghetti Napolitan, made with ketchup, and seafood doria, a baked rice gratin, are both credited to the kitchens of the Hotel New Grand, and gyunabe, the beef hotpot that introduced many Japanese to eating beef in the Meiji era, spread from the port's early restaurants. Motomachi's bakeries and cafés continue the same inheritance, and beer brewing in Japan began commercially on these hillsides.