Yokohama

John: The port of Yokohama is not far from where Commodore Perry showed up in 1853 with a fleet of American gunboats and demanded that Japan open itself up to the world. Our ship, also filled with Americans, arrived more peaceably. But we were also determined to trade; I bought this reproduction of a nineteenth century Japanese wood block print showing an American vessel in Yokohama harbor, sometime in the 1870s or so:

Yokohama is now a very large port; odds are that everyone reading this blog owns something that was once on the docks of the port of Yokohama. And it's a big, interesting city--more modern and lively in many ways than either Kobe or Kyoto, though I can't say that I'm basing this on vast experience, since we were only in these places for a couple of days. But like a lot of people on the ship, we found Japan surprisingly difficult to navigate in some basic ways. ATMs, for example, are very hard to find. And they frequently don't work with American debit or credit cards. Many businesses don't take credit cards of any kind--it's a very cash-oriented society. It's hard to find restaurants that aren't either noodle shops or American chains (as is often the case around the world, the chain you come across the most frequently is KFC). Nothing against noodle shops--we enjoyed several--but we hoped for more variety. it was in some ways easier to navigate in Ghana, where debit and credit cards are accepted in places you wouldn't expect, and where ATMs can be seen in distant villages.

We made several stops: to a craft market, an amusement park (in Asia, these are typically right in the middle of the city, which is nice), and to the Landmark building, which does indeed stand out in the skyline and is the tallest building in Japan:

Yokohama, as seen from the ship as we approached. The Landmark building is the tall one in the middle.

It's built with that wide base in the hopes of surviving the major earthquake that is sure to hit here sometime. The Semester at Sea voyage last spring was diverted to Taiwan because of the earthquake and tsunami then, and while there was no evidence of destruction anywhere that we went, I did see a couple of signs in English urging people to remember the victims of the earthquake. We didn't feel any tremblers while we were in Japan, but there are sure to be more of them in the future.

The Landmark building has an observation deck on the 69th floor that is reached by the world's fastest elevator; it goes up to 750 meters a second. It's very cool, and features some great views in all directions.

On a clear day, you can see to Mount Fuji, the signs said.  But it was not a particularly clear day, and it began to rain in the evening. Then in rained all the next day, heavily at times, canceling the baseball game that I was planning to attend, and generally putting a bit of a damper on what was our last day in a foreign country. We cannot complain, though--we've had remarkably good weather for the entire voyage, and have already seen and done so much that we've been into the bonus round for a while now, as it were. 

Our main outing of the day was to the International Doll Museum. It turns out that the exchange of dolls was a very big thing early in the twentieth century, and there were regular clubs and conferences where Japanese and American people shipped or gave each other dolls as gestures of friendship and peace. That wasn't enough to stop WWII, but the legacy here apparently is that there were a lot of dolls from all over the world that formed the basis of a very nice and well-curated museum. Maeve discovered an affinity:

Maeve really does look like a kewpie doll

Impressed by dolls, filled with noodles, drenched in rain, we headed back to the ship, which pulled out that night to begin our long journey back to the U.S. The Pacific Ocean is big! bigger by far than the Atlantic, and it will take us eleven days just to get to Hawaii, where we stop for a single day before heading to San Diego, where we disembark to make our way to Charlottesville on our own. We've come a long way, but we still have a long way to go to get home.