Yokohama: The Ground Between the Warehouses

A ship could reach Yokohama without bringing its cargo all the way to shore. In the early port, vessels anchored offshore while smaller craft carried people and goods to two projecting wharves. At their landward end stood the customs establishment, where maritime arrival became business conducted on Japanese ground.^[1]

Beyond the landing place came another journey: between the waterfront, warehouses, shops, and the roads leading out of town. A treaty could authorize the purchase of goods without supplying a dry place to keep them or an unobstructed way to move them.

The district around today's Zō-no-hana waterfront and Nihon Ōdōri preserves the setting of that second problem. Here, the opening of a port became the making of a shared urban surface. Merchants could acquire rights over particular premises. They still depended on what happened outside their doors.

Yokohama's waterfront had already served as a diplomatic meeting ground in 1854, when the Treaty of Kanagawa was concluded here. Commercial opening followed in 1859 under a different set of agreements. The distinction separates the site remembered around Kaikō Hiroba from the trading town subsequently built beside it: a place used for receiving a mission had to become a place where people could remain and conduct business.^[2]

The American commercial treaty of 1858 named Kanagawa. The American consul Townsend Harris understood the intended location as Kanagawa's established town on the Tōkaidō, the main road connecting Edo with western Japan. The shogunate—the warrior government based in Edo—developed the trading ground at Yokohama instead. Its new facilities helped establish where the port would actually function.^[3]

The treaty's third article explains what a resident merchant was entitled to do. Americans could lease land, purchase the buildings upon it, and erect dwellings and warehouses. They could hire Japanese workers and buy and sell directly with Japanese people, without an official intervening in each bargain. Those provisions supported continuing residence and employment, not simply a ship's brief visit.^[4]

They did not make the place independent of Japanese administration. Land allocation and harbor regulations were to be arranged between the consul and local authorities, with unresolved disagreements referred upward. The Japanese authorities retained a right to inspect construction to prevent dwellings or warehouses from becoming fortifications. Customs duties remained part of the arrangement.

The town's geography gave those relationships a physical center. Japanese commercial streets developed on one side of the government offices and the foreign settlement on the other, with the customs establishment facing the landing places.^[5] People could occupy neighboring districts while doing business through different legal and administrative arrangements. The question was how their premises would connect to the same waterfront.

In June 1866, Japan and representatives of Britain, France, the Netherlands, and the United States agreed on a revised tariff convention. Its provisions went well beyond changing rates. One clause abolished the fee charged for a cargo permit while explicitly retaining the permit itself. Removing a charge did not remove the process through which a landing or shipment was authorized.^[6]

Another clause created a different relationship between arrival and payment. From July 1 at Yokohama, the Japanese government undertook to provide storage for imported goods, on an importer's application, without collecting customs duty immediately. Duty became payable when the owner removed the goods for entry into the Japanese market. Goods sent abroad again could leave without that payment. Storage charges were due in either case.^[7]

The warehouse therefore supplied time as well as shelter. Under the arrangement, an importer could bring goods ashore without deciding at once that they would be sold in Japan. The building held them between two possible destinations. This was the practical meaning of bonded storage: goods remained under customs control while payment was deferred.

For that interval to be useful, custody had to be dependable. The convention made the Japanese government responsible for goods while they remained in its charge. It also required precautions sufficient to make them insurable against fire. The text did not promise that fire was impossible, or that every importer automatically held an insurance policy. It connected the commercial option of waiting with a material obligation to safeguard what waited.

Warehouse regulations and charges were to be settled by agreement among the contracting parties. The same convention directed local governors and consuls to address loading arrangements, the hiring of boats and workers, and covered landing places.^[8] Trade required a sequence of services extending from the ship to a building. Agreements about prices and duties were only part of that sequence.

The clauses reveal why the shore mattered so much. A merchant's decision about a cargo could depend on a government warehouse, a hired boat, a landing shelter, and an agreed charge. Commercial freedom did not make those shared arrangements unnecessary. It made their reliability something worth negotiating.

On November 26, 1866, a major fire crossed both the Japanese and foreign parts of Yokohama. An American diplomatic dispatch listed the customhouse, the United States consulate, and a bonded warehouse among the buildings lost. Its author, Robert B. Van Valkenburgh, had been away during the fire and drew on reports rather than presenting himself as an eyewitness.^[9]

The list brings the commercial arrangements into an uncomfortable proximity. The authorities who regulated cargo, the institution representing American residents, and a building holding goods under customs custody were exposed to the same spreading danger. Separate responsibilities had not produced separate environments.

The loss of a bonded warehouse is particularly striking beside the convention signed that summer. The agreement had treated protection from fire as part of making storage commercially usable. The dispatch shows the kind of loss against which that provision was directed. It does not settle which precautions had been taken, what goods were inside, or whether compensation followed.

Rebuilding also involved more than replacing the buildings named in the dispatch. Japanese officials appointed a commissioner to negotiate preventive measures with the foreign representatives. By the end of the year, another convention addressed the improvement of Yokohama's settlement, including its streets and open ground.^[10]

The site of negotiation had changed in character since 1854. The parties were no longer arranging a single reception on a prepared shore. They were deciding how an inhabited town should be altered so that its different activities could continue beside one another. The ground between properties had become part of the answer.

The post-fire convention specified a central avenue running from the waterfront to a public garden. Its stated purpose included preventing the spread of fire between the Japanese and foreign districts. The required width was 120 feet, with twenty-foot pedestrian ways on each side and rows of trees. This was the origin of the arrangement now identified with Nihon Ōdōri and Yokohama Park.^[11]

Width was doing several jobs. It gave traffic room, separated walking space from the central roadway, and interrupted the close succession of buildings through which fire could spread. The open land had a function even when no cart was passing along it. A strip that remained unbuilt could protect activities conducted in the buildings beside it.

The convention consequently reached beyond the road surface. It required buildings along the central street to be substantial, with tiled roofs and walls of brick, stone, or thick plaster, whether their owners were Japanese or foreign. The intended protection depended on the edges of the open space as well as its dimensions.

Other road clauses described connections along the waterfront, toward Yoshida Bridge, and beside the Ōoka River. The Japanese government undertook to complete the specified work within fourteen months and maintain it afterward.^[12] An obligation to construct a road was being distinguished from the continuing obligation to keep it serviceable.

The resulting avenue should not be imagined as the instantaneous execution of one finished drawing. The Meiji government inherited the project after the change of regime in 1868. Plans and estimates continued to develop. A later proposal reduced the central carriageway while retaining pedestrian provision and planting, linking cost to the division of the available space.^[13]

The enduring geographical relationship is clearer than a claim that every present measurement reproduces the first agreement. A central road connected the waterfront to open ground inland. Where government buildings had occupied the space between the two commercial districts, a wider public arrangement was being made. Its maintenance would require officials and property users to respect something that neither could treat as a spare building plot.

An agreed width did not produce a usable surface. Yokohama's low, relatively level ground made drainage an important part of the work. Richard Henry Brunton, the Scottish engineer employed for Japan's lighthouse program, became involved in the town's improvement after arriving in 1868. Surveying established relative heights before he prepared proposals for roads and drainage.^[14]

His specifications addressed a difficulty hidden by the simple instruction to lay stone. Material had to be selected, broken, placed in layers, and compacted. The proposed road was given a rounded profile so water could leave its surface. Angular stones would fit together differently from unsuitable gravel mixed with earth. The method, known as macadam construction, depended on preparation and arrangement rather than on scattering a generous quantity of stones over mud.

Brunton's published plan was exact about the layers: each should be no more than two inches thick and should be consolidated before the next was added. He argued that the same material could make a good or a poor road according to how it was laid. His predicted durability was an engineer's estimate, not a surviving measurement of years without repair.^[15]

Even obtaining the stone connected Yokohama to somewhere else. A Japanese record of discussions with foreign representatives in 1871 identifies Shimoda as the source for stone needed both for road work and for improvements to the Ōoka River. Asked about progress, the Japanese side explained that a vessel assigned to carry stone had been damaged and needed repair before it could be used.^[16]

That recorded interruption gives the work a more precise history than a general account of imported technology. An engineer's specification could require suitable material; a quarry could supply it; a ship still had to deliver it. The road beside an international harbor depended on a coastal shipment of its own.

The several kinds of work were connected but not interchangeable. A treaty could assign responsibility. A survey could reveal levels. Stone could be cut to meet a specification. None of those acts by itself moved a damaged vessel out of the way of the supply schedule. The town's improvement proceeded through such dependencies, rather than arriving with a single foreign machine or a new government title.

Keeping a road usable also required deciding what could occupy it. A regulation issued for the settlement in 1867 addressed building materials obstructing passage. It instructed that the Japanese carpenters working on foreign houses be ordered to move those materials promptly into their employers' premises.^[17]

The chain of responsibility is revealing. The materials served a foreign resident's construction project, but the instruction reached the people handling them through Japanese authority. The remedy did not prohibit the building. It changed where the work's supplies could wait.

The next clause barred coffee shops and tea stalls from occupying the public way, regardless of whether their operators were Japanese or foreign. Existing obstructions were to be removed. A street could bring customers within reach of a business while remaining ground that the business was not entitled to enclose for itself.

These demands exposed a tension within the growth of the port. More building could produce more material beside the road. More customers could make a roadside selling place attractive. Activities encouraged by commercial expansion could compete with the movement on which other businesses depended. The regulation was addressing a relationship between uses, not simply contrasting commerce with official interference.

A prefectural notice in 1870 returned to encroachments. It referred to buildings extending beyond leased ground, scaffolding and boards, and projecting signs. It also complained that heavier carriage traffic exposed pedestrians to injury where the usable road had narrowed. These were the notice's stated concerns; it does not supply a systematic accident record.^[18]

The edge of a roof eventually received its own instruction. In 1873, building regulations required eaves to remain within the occupier's property boundary. The line between a building and the public way was to be respected above ground as well as at the wall.^[19]

This was a different scale of planning from the broad avenue. One concerned a corridor through the town; the other concerned the reach of a roof, a sign, or a stack of timber. Both affected whether a road existed as usable common space rather than merely as a line on a plan.

In her account of arriving in Yokohama in 1878, Isabella Bird noticed the results at the scale of a passenger. After visiting the consulate, she traveled in a kuruma, a person-drawn carriage, along Main Street. She described a firm paved surface, sidewalks, curbs, gutters, lamps, and shops. Her account is a traveler's impression, not an inspection of every street or a statement that all earlier requirements had been fulfilled.^[20]

It nevertheless shows the different works becoming available as one experience. A passenger encountered movement along a street; the surface, drainage, and clear edges helped make that movement possible. Bird names Main Street rather than identifying her journey with the central firebreak project. Her description is most useful at this smaller scale: one passage through a town whose separate works had become part of the ordinary business of moving.

Her account also places merchants, missionaries, Chinese commercial agents, and Japanese men and women in the traffic. It is written from her own position as a foreign traveler, with judgments about the people carrying passengers that cannot stand for their experience. The same roadway connected people whose uses of it—and authority over it—differed.

Yokohama's port-opening district is therefore legible at several connected thresholds. Small craft brought cargo to the wharves. Customs procedures determined how it could enter storage or circulation. Warehouses allowed goods to wait. Beyond them, roads had to carry traffic, drain, remain clear, and sometimes provide separation from fire.

The agreements that authorized trade reached into each of those requirements without completing any of them by themselves. What emerged on this shore was a town in which a private commercial right repeatedly depended on a public arrangement outside the property. The history is still present in the relation between the landing ground and the streets behind it: the warehouse needed a door, but commerce also needed the ground beyond the door to remain usable.