Chinatown’s Street Names Are Newer Than You ThinkHomura-dori, Maebashi-cho-dori and the “Bathhouse Street”
Shanghai-ro, Kanton-do, Choan-do: the very Chinese-sounding street names of Yokohama Chinatown appeared on maps fairly recently.
Only one named street at first
A map of Yokohama drawn by a French engineer in 1865 shows only one named street in today’s Chinatown: Homura-dori, the bent road that is now Nanmon Silk Road and Kaiko-michi. The name stayed on maps until after the war. Half of it later became Maedabashi-dori (from about 1959), Nanmon-dori (from 1983) and Nanmon Silk Road (from 1994).
Japanese town names for the foreign settlement
After a great fire in 1866 burned two-thirds of Kannai, a 120-foot-wide firebreak avenue was built between the Japanese town and the foreign settlement; it is today’s Nihon-odori. In 1879, once roads and sewers were in place, the settlement got town names for the first time: Odawara-cho, Maebashi-cho, Owari-cho, Hakodate-cho, Ezo-cho and others from across Japan. Why Japanese place names were chosen for a foreign quarter is not clearly known.
Old names that survive
When the foreign settlement was abolished in 1899, the thirty town names were merged into Yamashita-cho. Traces remain: Kagacho Police Station near Chinatown, and the city bus stop Satsumacho Naka-kuyakusho-mae. Until recently, the main street was also called Maebashi-cho-dori and Kanteibyo-dori was called Odawara-cho-dori.
Alleys named only recently
Chinatown now has about 18 street names, including Choan-do, Shanghai-ro, Kanton-do, Fukken-ro and Soshu-shokei. According to the official Chinatown site, writing in the run-up to the port’s 150th anniversary in 2009, these names had appeared on maps only 15 to 20 years earlier. Before that, small alleys had nicknames: today’s Hongkong-ro was “Furoya-dori” (Bathhouse Street), after a public bath that operated until 1987, and Chuzan-ro was “Happy Avenue,” as the U.S. military called it.
Ichiba-dori, unchanged
Ichiba-dori (Market Street) has kept its name since the early Showa era. It is said to come from a morning market once held there.