Chukagai

The Western firms that arrived in 1859 had a problem. Their staff spoke English; the Japanese merchants spoke Japanese; nobody spoke both. But educated Chinese clerks could read kanji — the same characters Japanese uses — and many had already worked with British firms in Shanghai and Hong Kong.

So the trading houses brought their Chinese compradors with them, and the compradors brought families, cooks, tailors and carpenters. A Chinese quarter formed immediately west of the foreign settlement, and it has been there ever since.

Reading the gates

Ten decorated gates mark the district. The one everyone photographs is Zenrinmon, whose name means "good neighbours". The gate was raised in 1955 as a hope for post-war recovery and took that name when it was rebuilt in 1989. The four characters on the reverse read, roughly, "be humane, be a good neighbour."

The four cardinal gates carry the guardian beasts — the azure dragon east, the vermilion bird south, the white tiger west, the black tortoise north. At the centre sits Kanteibyo, a temple to Guan Yu, a third-century general worshipped as the god of commerce because he was famously incapable of breaking a promise. A small shrine to him stood here from 1862, and the first full temple was built in 1871. It has burned and been rebuilt more than once; the current hall is dense, gold, and loud with incense.

Guan Yu is the god of business here because he could not be bribed. A quarter built by middlemen chose the one figure in Chinese history known for keeping his word.

How to eat it

The mistake is to sit down at the first restaurant with an English menu. Chukagai is a standing-and-walking district: buy one thing, eat it, walk fifty metres, buy the next.

The essentials: butaman — pork buns the size of your palm, sold hot from stacked steamers; shumai, which in this city means Kiyoken, a company founded in 1908 whose boxed shumai has been sold on Yokohama platforms since the 1920s and is the single most recognisable food souvenir in the Kanto region; and tanghulu, fruit in hardened sugar, which exists mainly to be photographed and is genuinely good.

And one dish you will find nowhere else: sanma-men, a Yokohama invention — ramen under a thickened stir-fry of bean sprouts and pork. Chinese cooks made it as staff food and the city adopted it.