The Port of Yokohama is the city-run seaport of Yokohama, Japan’s second-largest city, on the western shore of Tokyo Bay in Kanagawa Prefecture, with the Port of Kawasaki and the Port of Tokyo to its north. In 2013, the most recent year with a full published breakdown, it served 37,706 ships and handled about 271 million tons of cargo, including 2.89 million twenty-foot equivalent units (TEU) of containers. It formally opened to foreign trade on 2 June 1859 as one of the first ports opened after Japan ended its policy of seclusion, and it matters as both the birthplace of modern Japanese overseas trade and a working container port whose Minami Honmoku terminal was rated the most productive in the world in 2013. This tour follows the waterfront from the historic piers in Naka Ward out to the container islands.
Starting Point: Yamashita Park and the Hikawa Maru
Begin at Yamashita Park, the long promenade facing the harbour in Naka Ward. The ground under your feet is debris. On 1 September 1923 the Great Kanto earthquake destroyed much of Yokohama; the city police counted 30,771 dead out of a pre-quake population of 434,170. A Scottish adviser to the mayor, Marshall Martin, is credited with persuading the city to use rubble from the Kannai business district to reclaim the waterfront as a park, and Yamashita Park opened on 15 March 1930. It was requisitioned for military housing during the occupation in 1945 and returned to Japanese control in 1960. Across the road stands the Hotel New Grand, where General Douglas MacArthur spent his first night in Japan on 30 August 1945.
Moored alongside the park is the Hikawa Maru, an ocean liner built by the Yokohama Dock Company for the NYK Line. Launched on 30 September 1929, she sailed on her maiden voyage from Kobe to Seattle on 13 May 1930 and ran a regular route linking Yokohama with Vancouver and Seattle. Her art deco interiors earned her the nickname “Queen of the Pacific”; Charlie Chaplin travelled on her in 1932, and in 1940 and 1941 many Jewish refugees fleeing Nazi persecution crossed the Pacific aboard her. Across 1930–1941 and 1953–1960 she made 238 voyages carrying 25,000 passengers. Retired on 21 December 1960, she was berthed here as a floating museum in 1961, restored by NYK and reopened on 25 April 2008, and designated an Important Cultural Property on 17 August 2016.
Walk the length of the park and you pass two gifts that tie Yokohama to other ports: the Guardian of Water, a replica of a Donal Hord sculpture given by the sister city of San Diego in 1960, and the Indian Water Fountain, donated by the local Indian community in thanks for help given to Indian survivors of the 1923 earthquake. From the park pier, Port Service seabuses and excursion boats leave for the harbour and for Yokohama Station.
A Detour Up the Yokohama Marine Tower
Just inland of the Hikawa Maru rises the Yokohama Marine Tower, a 106 m (348 ft) lattice tower with an observation deck at 100 m. It opened in 1961 and doubles as a working light, flashing every twenty seconds in alternating red and green; it is billed as the tallest lighthouse in the world, a claim that depends on what counts as a lighthouse. The city bought and restored it, reopening it on 23 May 2009 for the 150th anniversary of the port, and after another closure it reopened on 1 September 2022. On a clear day the deck gives a view across the whole harbour and, to the west, as far as Mount Fuji.
Ōsanbashi Pier, Where the Port Began in 1859
Back at the water, the next stop is Ōsanbashi Pier, the port’s main international passenger pier and its oldest. The Treaty of Amity and Commerce of 1858 named Kanagawa as a port for foreign trade, and the port that opened in 1859 was built at Yokohama, a short way along the shore. The site had real advantages: proximity to Edo, as Tokyo was then called, natural deep water, and shelter from strong winds behind the Honmoku bluff. At first, though, the harbour offered only two small stone wharves on this spot, the French and English Hatoba. Both were too shallow for ocean-going ships, so barges carried passengers and freight out to vessels anchored offshore.
In 1894 the government funded an extended steel pier to replace the English wharf, designed by the British engineer Henry Spencer Palmer and able to take four ships at once. Built between 1889 and 1896, it survived the 1923 earthquake and the Second World War largely intact, was renamed South Pier under occupation control until 1952, and was rebuilt in 1964 in time for the Tokyo Olympics. Through the Meiji and Taisho periods the port grew rapidly as the gateway for raw silk exports, with Great Britain the main trading partner, and for technology imports coming the other way. Yokohama gained Japan’s first daily newspaper in 1870 and, in 1872, the country’s first gas street lamps and its first railway, running to Shinbashi in Tokyo.
The pier you walk on today was rebuilt again between 1988 and 2002. Its passenger terminal, the Yokohama International Passenger Terminal, came out of an international competition that drew more than 660 entries and was won by Foreign Office Architects, Alejandro Zaera-Polo and Farshid Moussavi. It can berth four 30,000-ton ships or two 70,000-ton ships at once, and its roof is a public, gently undulating deck with grass lawns. Liners such as the Queen Elizabeth 2 once embarked here, but 90,000-ton cruise ships are often too big and are obliged to use nearby container terminals instead.
Shinko Pier and the Red Brick Warehouses
From the root of Ōsanbashi, follow the waterfront promenade north to Shinko Pier, an artificial pier created when the city began reclaiming land for new harbour works in 1899. The job was finished in 1905. On it stand the two Yokohama Red Brick Warehouses, officially the Newport Pier Bonded Warehouse, planned by the architect and government official Tsumaki Yorinaka. Building No. 2 went up in 1911 and Building No. 1 in 1913, both as customs warehouses.
Iron embedded between the bricks helped them survive the 1923 earthquake better than most of the city, though repairs lasted until 1930. American occupation forces held them from 1945 to 1956, and once containers arrived their work dwindled; they stopped serving as customs houses in 1989. The city took them over in 1992, restored them between 1994 and 1999, and reopened them on 12 April 2002 as shops, halls and exhibition spaces.
Minato Mirai 21 and the Nippon Maru
Beyond Shinko Pier lies Minato Mirai 21, Yokohama’s business district, which is itself a former piece of the port. Mayor Ichio Asukata proposed it in 1965 as one of six major development plans, and construction started in 1983 on land once occupied by the Mitsubishi Heavy Industries shipyard, a Japanese National Railways freight yard and the Takashima and Shinko wharves. The name, chosen by public poll, means “Port Future 21.” Its tallest building, the Yokohama Landmark Tower, stands 296.3 m (972 ft) and was the tallest building in Japan from its opening in 1993 until Abeno Harukas in Osaka overtook it in 2014.
At the foot of the tower, in Nippon Maru Memorial Park, lies the four-masted barque Nippon Maru. Built by Kawasaki at Kobe and launched on 27 January 1930, she trained officers for Japan’s merchant fleet. She is 97 m (318 ft) long and carried 32 sails covering 2,397 m². Her rig was removed during the Second World War, reinstalled in 1952, and she kept sailing until a new ship of the same name replaced her in September 1984.
Under the Bay Bridge to Daikoku Pier
From here the tour takes to the water, or to the Shuto Expressway’s Bayshore Route, which crosses the outer harbour on two cable-stayed bridges. The first is the Yokohama Bay Bridge, 860 m (2,820 ft) long with a main span of 460 m, opened on 27 September 1989. The second, the Tsurumi Tsubasa Bridge, has an even longer main span of 510 m flanked by two side spans of 255 m.
Out in the harbour lies Daikoku Pier, an artificial island of 321 hectares. It holds seven container berths and the Yokohama Port Cargo Center, with a million square metres of warehouse space. Elsewhere on the harbour are Detamachi, the “banana pier,” equipped to receive fresh fruit and vegetables, and Mizuho Pier, whose seven berths are used by United States Forces Japan. During the occupation Yokohama was a major transshipment base for American supplies and personnel, especially during the Korean War; afterwards most local American naval activity moved to Yokosuka, the next port down the bay.
Honmoku and Minami Honmoku: The Container Berths
The final stop is Honmoku Pier, the core of the modern port, with 24 berths, 14 of them for containers. Next to it is Minami Honmoku (South Honmoku), the newest facility, with two 350 m berths dredged to 16 m. Its six large cranes serve post-Panamax ships loaded up to 22 rows of containers wide, and further berths have been under construction for vessels the size of Maersk’s E-class or larger.
It was here that the port set a world record. In 2013 the APM Terminals Yokohama facility at Minami Honmoku was recognised as the most productive container terminal in the world, averaging 163 crane moves per hour per ship from arrival to departure at the berth. That same year the whole port handled cargo valued at about 10.9 trillion yen. The city that grew around the 1859 wharves had about 3.7 million residents in 2023.
Standing at Minami Honmoku, the port’s history reads backwards up the shore: container cranes on the newest piers, warehouses on the 1905 pier, and the old passenger pier where barges once ferried silk out to ships at anchor. To follow the same bay north to Japan’s capital, read our guide to the Port of Tokyo or the wider Tokyo Bay guide, and for the mountain visible from the Marine Tower on a clear morning, see our profile of Mount Fuji.