Won't You Be My Yokohama?

For weeks, I had been anticipating the bike ride through the diverse streets of Yokohama, Japan's second-largest city that is about 30 minutes south of central Tokyo by train. It quickly became one of my favorite spots in the country, for reasons that were surprising even to me.

Yokohama has two very distinct sections: the glitzy, European-style fashion center by the waterfront and the poverty-stricken, cramped corridors home to thousands of migrant workers. Both are equally captivating.

The train station that the group of about 15 students and a professor met at is Sakuragicho (sakura means "cherry blossom" -- my Little Run friends will remember learning the song in fifth grade). It opens up to a spacious plaza right near the harbor, where you can see Landmark Tower (one of Japan's tallest buildings) and a colorful amusement park with a huge digital clock in the middle of its ferris wheel.





As we rode through the promenade, we crossed a bridge that spanned a man-made waterway that trickles through the city and circled modern shopping centers and stores that are a hot spot for well-to-do Japanese splitting their time between Tokyo and this prettier metropolis.

Through the nearby park, where cherry blossoms bloom in the springtime (the same time they do at the Washington, D.C., mall), you can catch a panoramic view of not only the Pacific Ocean but the seemingly infinite ships and tankers that line the harbor, and the cranes that load materials onto them. It fits right with Japan's blanket theme of duality. Here we have a calm, grassy area and dark-blue waterworld, sprinkled with industrialization's footprint. There is something distinctly beautiful about the fusion of both worlds.





We then turned off the side of the long park and biked through the pretty nearby streets, winding up some hills and eventually carrying our two-wheelers up a steep, stepped path to a lookout. A couple of decades ago, water actually rose and flooded the area where we stood, which was at least a couple of hundred feet up. From there, we could glance out over all of Yokohama, to see the natural beauty, the modernization, the cascading orange-and-white cranes, the less-developed housing and the mountains in the distance.



From there, we strolled through another beautiful, yet much smaller, park with a tiny fountain in the middle, lined with incredibly close-cropped, dark-green trees, and with an old Japanese sundial off to the side. No idea why that was there.

We also rode around a path that looked down upon a traditional-style archery dojo, which is actually public and will teach anyone for a few thousand yen. It was dead silent except for the wsheeoow and THUMP of the whizzing arrows every 30 seconds or so.

Another unexpected and historical site was the foreigners' cemetery, a graveyard perched high above the main drag of the city where hundreds of non-Japanese are buried. Most of them are British citizens from a hundred-or-so years ago, who died in battles, but a few were from the late 20th Century. The city itself is home to huge Chinese, Korean and Thai populations -- as I discovered in great length later on.

But our next stop was one of the richest parts of Japan, a downtown shopping area whose wide streets stretch through miles of high-priced clothing and jewelry stores, chic cafes, electronics vendors and dessert parlors.



At this point, after spending about 45 minutes walking through the fashionistas and Japanese Rockefellers, we were faced with what may be one of the starkest contrasts in the country. We had just seen the richest part of Yokohama; three blocks south and we were in the poorest.

The Yokohama ghettos are practically a cultural case study. Thousands of migrant workers from Korea, China and Thailand have moved there seeking work, many of them laboring at the harbor. The streets are dirtier, the buildings are less kept -- even some of the vending machines are cheaper, with one selling drinks for 50 yen, about half the normal price, though the beverages were all colorful knock-offs.

It's maybe the one place I've been to in Japan where I didn't feel totally safe. Nothing happened to us or anything that was cause for alarm, but the safety taken for granted in virtually every other part of the country is in absentia here, mostly because the inhabitants aren't homogeneously Japanese. As we biked into the area, a man drinking with his friends said to us in Japanese, "Safety first, safety first!"



(Above: A man, possibly ashamed to be living in a poor area, shields his face from my camera in the middle of an alleyway in the Yokohama slums.)

The neighborhood, perhaps unsurprisingly, is also home to the headquarters of the yakuza, the Japanese mafia. Our guide, my sociology professor, told us that he spoke with a young yakuza member once who was testing out his English, and when the professor asked him if he ever runs into trouble with the police, the man replied that the police and the yakuza work together. Kind of scary -- not the corruption, because even the United States isn't a stranger to that, but rather the openness with how obvious the criminal-police relationship is.

Remember how I mentioned Japanese duality before? Yokohama speaks to this facet in so many ways.

From that neighborhood, we biked to the city's Chinatown, which is the largest in Japan -- so big that my two friends and I got hopelessly lost even though we had directions of where to go.







But it was a fun time. Chinatown has oodles of tasty treats, cheap toys, funky fashion, rickety rickshaws -- come to think of it, not too far off from New York City's version. Interestingly, though, most people were Japanese and not Chinese, despite the heavy Chinese presence in Yokohama.

The sun was setting, and it was time to speed back to the promenade and return our bikes. But if Chinatown was any premonition, we were doomed to get lost again.

It didn't even make sense. Our professor headed the line, while an older student/tour guide picked up the rear -- it was a foolproof plan. Somewhere along the way, the professor and about four students pulled ahead, and the caboose yanked away another handful, stranding eight students and me in the middle with no idea of where the hell we were in Asia.

If you know me, you know I have a terrible sense of direction. But if you know me, you also know I love an adventure.

My friend James and I decided to keep heading straight up the street we were on, because it felt right, and it was pretty at night. (Look, if we're gonna get lost, we're gonna have a fun time with it.) We figured out which way was Sakuragicho, and we headed there -- all in a night's work. Along the way, I captured this gem:



After we returned the bikes, about half of us headed over to what my professor calls "the real Japan." This may have been the most profound part of the trip for me. We walked about a third of a mile into another neighborhood, densely populated by both Koreans and Japanese, that is virtually untouched by the globalization that covers the rest of the country.

When you go to Tokyo, or Osaka, or even some of the suburbs and rural parts of the country, globalization is everywhere: the giant shopping complexes, the Hello Kitty/short-skirt-high-stocking/dyed-hair-with-dolled-up-makeup fashion statements, the somewhat artificial lifestyles. It's all fun, and it's all Japan, but frankly, it's all a bit weird.

This part of Yokohama had none of that. It was just people of different origins living their lives. Parts of the neighborhood were astonishingly beautiful in their simplicity.





I titled this post "Won't You Be My Yokohama?" in part to play off the Barenaked Ladies song, but also because I feel that should I decide to return to Japan someday to live here, I would like to live in Yokohama. It's a city that certainly deserves more than a cursory bike ride, but that's why I'm here for four months.