Yokohama was a fishing village of 100 households until the 1859 treaty port forced Japan open. Walk the foreign settlement, the Bluff consulates, the silk warehouses and the earthquake-scarred waterfront that built modern Japan.
One of two head temples of Sōtō Zen, founded 1321 in Noto and relocated to Tsurumi in 1911 after fire. The 700-tatami Daisodo hall and Butsuden sit on a wooded 150,000 sq m campus. Free entry to grounds; guided tour ¥400 with reservation. Open 08:00–17:00.
Founded 1258 by the Hōjō Sanetoki branch of the Kamakura shogunate, with a rare surviving Pure Land garden pond restored to its 1320 layout. The adjacent Kanazawa Bunko is Japan's oldest surviving warrior library, holding medieval sutras and Hōjō documents.
Covers 30,000 years of the Tsurumi and Tama river basins, from Jōmon pit dwellings through Yayoi rice paddies to Edo villages. The attached Ōtsuka-Saikachido site preserves a reconstructed Yayoi moated settlement of the 2nd century BCE on its original ground.
The old Kanazawa Kaidō linked Kamakura to the Musashi plain; Sugita's plum grove was celebrated in Edo woodblock prints and drew Tokugawa retainers on pilgrimage. Stone route markers and the Myōhō-ji temple gate survive along the surviving stretch.
Housed in the 1904 Yokohama Specie Bank headquarters, a neo-baroque stone pile that survived the 1923 earthquake with its dome burned off and later rebuilt. Galleries trace the treaty port, the silk trade and Yokohama's postwar Occupation years. Open 09:30–17:00, closed Mondays.
Opened 1854 for a sailor from Perry's squadron and holding roughly 5,000 graves from 40 countries, including engineer Edmund Morel who built Japan's first railway. Open to visitors weekend afternoons 12:00–16:00, March to December, donation ¥300.
Built on the ground where the 1854 Convention of Kanagawa was signed with Commodore Perry, inside the 1931 former British Consulate. The courtyard camphor tree survived the 1866 great fire and the 1923 earthquake. Open 09:30–17:00, closed Mondays.
Japan's first railway opened here on 12 June 1872, running to Shimbashi in 53 minutes. A preserved section of the original brick platform base and a monument to the line stand outside the station's east exit, with the 1872 timetable reproduced in bronze.
The Bluff was leased to foreign residents from 1867. Seven preserved houses survive, including the 1909 Berrick Hall, the 1930 Ehrismann Residence by Antonin Raymond and the former British House of 1937. All are free and open 09:30–17:00, closed the second Wednesday.
Raw silk was Yokohama's dominant export from 1859 to the 1930s, at times over 60 percent of all Japanese exports. The museum traces sericulture, the Yokohama silk inspection system and the merchant houses that financed Minato Mirai's ancestors on this quay.
The 1 September 1923 quake killed over 26,000 in Yokohama and burned nine-tenths of the city; the 29 May 1945 firebombing killed some 8,000 more in 70 minutes. Memorial stones and the Ishikawa relief-camp marker stand among the park's tulip beds.
Norwegian-American William Copeland founded the Spring Valley Brewery on the Amanuma spring in 1870, the ancestor of Kirin. Nogechō's postwar lanes still trade in tiny standing bars, several occupying stalls laid out during the Occupation black market.