My Yokohama: The Local Travel Guide to Yokohama, Japan

Download or read book My Yokohama: The Local Travel Guide to Yokohama, Japan written by Cindy Liu and published by Japan Travel Guide. This book was released on 2024-06-07 with total page 178 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Just thirty minutes from Tokyo, and set along a spectacular bay waterfront, Yokohama hits different. It’s easygoing, free-swinging, even a bit decadent. Yokohama received Japan’s first foreign influences, and it was the origin of everything from Japanese jazz culture to the fashion aesthetic of Plastic Love. At the same time, Yokohama is more set in its ways than Tokyo, less mercurial, and more staidly Japanese. Sleepy 1960s soda shops that simply couldn’t stay in business in Tokyo still thrive in Yokohama, as do the octogenarians who patronize them. And for the cost of a hostel or a capsule in Tokyo, you can stay in a nice three-star hotel in Yokohama. Yokohama is a perfect introduction for a first-time visitor to Japan. It’s a lot more manageable than Tokyo, but it’s still a city of three million people with its own techno-urban vibe. It can also be a level-up for the visitor who’s already seen Tokyo and Osaka, and wants to go beyond the obvious destinations and to a city where tourists seldom tread. Yokohama is a beyond-the-obvious kind of city, and I’ll show you the beyond-the-obvious in Yokohama. Yes, there are the ramen museums and shopping malls that every guidebook knows about. But I’ll take you farther: to local shopping streets and markets, jazz clubs and listening bars where you’re almost forced to make new friends, tiny sushi bars and izakayas, hidden-away coffee shops, and long-forgotten attractions that only locals visit. We’ll explore the complex, layered, local Yokohama. The one that’s not in Tripadvisor. The one my Japanese friends and colleagues have described and shown to me over the years. The one that made me fall in love with Yokohama — My Yokohama.