More than living up to its name, this 296 meter building is Japan’s tallest after Tokyo Tower, hosting offices, a hotel, restaurants and shopping spaces. One of the world’s fastest elevators will rush you to the 69th floor in just forty seconds, where you’ll enjoy spectacular views from the Sky Gar...
The Yokohama Raumen Museum is another food theme park, this one devoted to one of Japan’s true obsessions, the now world-famous noodle soup called ramen. The museum’s odd spelling of ramen is intentional, an old fashioned pronunciation that sounds nostalgic to Japanese visitors.
The museum docu...
A wealthy silk trader named Tomitaro Hara built Yokohama’s beautiful Sankeien Garden in 1906. Slightly eccentric but very public-minded, Hara took the pen name Sankei, later bestowed on this garden. In his later years, he invited first young artists and later the general public into his garden, an...
This eight-floor spa and hotel facility was opened in 2005 and offers visitors a variety of indoor and outdoor hot-spring style baths, from traditional cypress tubs to a rooftop garden where you can soak your feet in a hot footbath while enjoying the famous night view. The eighth floor also has an ...
This new zoo, opened in 1999, is widely considered one of the most beautiful in the world. There are about 60 species on display here, including the extremely rare okapi, a member of the giraffe family that serves as an unofficial mascot for the zoo. Zoorasia was the first zoo in Japan to successf...
The Osanbashi Pier is Yokohama’s oldest pier, originally built to accommodate new international trade following Japan’s opening to the world in the 19th century. Extensively rebuilt between 1987 and 2002, today the Terminal has been reborn as part of the high-tech Minato Mirai 21 waterfront restora...
Like much of Yokohama's modern waterfront, Yamashita Park is built on reclaimed land. The long, narrow park was built using debrisfrom the Great Kanto earthquake of 1923, which devastated the city. Opened in 1930, the park is a pleasant stripof green affording good views of the Bay Bridge and ocea...
Billing itself as an “Aqua Museum,” this amusement park and aquarium occupies its own small island at the tip of Yokohama Bay. The aquarium is a good one, with an undersea viewing tunnel that shows off some of the huge collection of over 100,000 fish. In addition to the aquarium there are also som...
Yokohama is a port city, and one of the best ways to appreciate its charms is from the sea. The Yokohama Royal Wing, an excursion boat sailing from the Osanbashi International Terminal, lets you see the waterfront at its best, from old town Yokohama to the ultra-modern lights of Minato Mirai and t...
This is another of Yokohama’s narrowly themed museums (along with a tin toy museum and the Anpanman Children’s museum, among others) but for anyone with even a passing interest in dolls, the museum is just astounding. Bisque, papier-mache, china, cloth and celluloid dolls all crowd side by side her...
Yokohama Daisekai is an eight-floor food theme park in Yokohama Chinatown, attempting to recreate the atmosphere of Shanghai in the roaring Jazz Age of the twenties and thirties.
The elevator first carries you to the eighth floor, where you’ll find the “Tower of Time,” a clock tower surrounded...
Yokohama Chinatown is Japan’s largest Chinese enclave, though the roughly 2,000 Chinese living here are vastly outnumbered by the 18 million tourists who pass through each year to browse the tiny shops and eat in one of the district’s 200 restaurants.
Chinatown’s fortunes are tied directly to the...
