Yokohama
October 7, 2004
Oktoberfest, Chinatown, and Gardens
Sun’s Japan Software Center is in Yokohama, one third of my team is based here, and so I get to visit occasionally. Yokohama is a fairly new city, grown in just over a century, and thanks to its harbor quite internationally minded. This time my local coworkers and I take some time out to tour the town together. Well, parts of it at least - the city is home to over 3 million people and therefore a bit larger than one can explore in a day.
The Sun
office is located in the Landmark Tower, the tallest building in Japan, part
of the new Minato-mirai area on the waterfront. It’s near an amusement park
with a giant ferris wheel, which is equipped with two sizable clocks and visible
from the Sun conference rooms, so that employees can see when meetings drag
on too long. In the photo, the Landmark Tower is the one on the left.
Past the amusement park
is another section of new shopping centers and restaurants, and here we encounter
a random bit of German tradition: An Oktoberfest tent, complete with Bavarian
flags, an imported band in lederhosen, and beer stalls. There are also marketing
booths of the German embassy and, strangely, the city of Hamburg (Hamburg is
on the opposite end of Germany from the real Oktoberfest). We plan to come
back the next evening, but it turns out that the event shuts down early that
day because of an incoming typhoon.
Next stop: Yamashita
Park with the soon-to-be-world-famous girl in red shoes. Apparently there are
efforts underway to make this girl as well-known as the mermaid in Copenhagen,
but they hadn’t reached me before this trip. For those of us who haven’t heard
of her yet: She was adopted by an American, was supposed to go with him to
the U.S., but couldn’t because of tuberculosis and instead died in an orphanage
in Japan. There’s a well-known song about her which assumes that she did leave.
From there,
a few steps to the largest Chinatown in Japan - all very colorful, as clean
as you’d expect in Japan, and the food somewhat Japanized and pricey, but good.
A train and a bus ride away: Sankei-en,
a pleasant garden with several traditional Japanese buildings that were collected
and moved here (mostly from the Kyoto area) by a wealthy silk merchant. As
always, it’s nice to walk around in this environment and peek into the buildings.
Modern Business Hotels
Japan has for quite a while had “business hotels”, relatively low-cost hotels that provide traveling salary-men with the necessary facilities to sleep and take a shower, but not much else. Many of them are several decades old, poorly maintained, and haven’t heard of non-smoking rooms. But there are two such chains that kindly provide far better facilities near Sun offices: The Tokyu Stay next to Sun’s Japanese headquarter in Yoga, and the Toyoko Inn near the Yokohama office. Both have new buildings, well-separated non-smoking rooms, laundry machines and kitchen in the rooms (Tokyu Stay) or coin laundries and free breakfast in the lobby (Toyoko Inn), and above all free broadband Internet access in every room. The rooms are small, the bathrooms plastic, but they’re clean and functional. And cheap: ¥7140 at the Toyoko Inn, from ¥8715 at the Tokyu Stay. The Toyoko Inn chain has quickly spread across Japan, and I take advantage of its Kyoto and Osaka branches as well on this trip. Toyoko Inn, by the way, gets its name from Tokyo and Yokohama - the chain started with a hotel between the two cities and simply uses the first kanji character of each name: 東京 + 横浜 -> 東横.