"When Yokohama was chosen by the shogunate as the site for the foreign settlement, the original habitants were forcibly relocated to the area at the foot of the Bluff. Originally named Honmura, it later came to be known as Motomachi, the ‘town of the orginal ones’. Most of these ninety families had been eking out an existence partly by farming and partly by fishing. Now along with the outside merchants they sought to provide specialized services to the resident foreigners. Some succeeded or made a fortune by hanging on their property till it inflated greatly in value, but most soon lost all they had and once again moved on.
Incidentally, there were some trades that were absolutely essential in those days that no longer exist today. Blacksmithing and carriage-making, of course, but also water selling. Getting decent water was vital in the early days - for supplying ships in the harbor, putting out fires, and because diseases like cholera and typhus were rife due to contaminated water. Drilling took place on Daikan-zaka, one of several slopes that link Motomachi to the Yamate Bluff, and in several other locations. The cholera epidemic of 1879 claimed many victims, but is was only in 1882 that Dr. A. J. C. Geerts, a Dutch sanitation engineer, was able to take the first steps towards creating a proper drainage system (...)
In the early 1890s one Katherine Baxter cut short her sampan tour of the city because of the ‘evil smell’ from open drains and landed at the entrance of Motomachi. She passed the time peering into the open shop fronts and watching ‘coopers, makers of idols, baskets, dolls, wooden pillows, and clogs, straw hats, raincoats and sandals, trifles of bamboo and paper, and weavers of towels’. She noted paper, books, and smoking apparatus, cheap jewelry, ornamental hairpins, switches of coarse black hair, and other articles of personal adornment. Then there were the restaurants, from which ‘proceeded the most horrible smell imaginable, that of pickled daikon’. Baxter had forgotten the ‘evil smells’ from the open drains (...)
In the early days 70 percent of the customers for the Motomachi stores were foreigners, and shop owners used to pick up people arriving on ships and take them directly here. However, from around the time of the 1960 Olympics, the majority of the shoppers became Japanese. The five-hundred-meter-long promenade is now a smart shopping district, with around 250 shops offering merchandise that is unique, fashionable and très expensive."
(Burritt Sabin, 'A historical guide to Yokohama', ed. Yurindo, Yokohama, 2002, p. 8-9)
(John Carroll, 'Trail of Two Cities', ed. Kodansha, Tokyo, 1994, p. 85-86)
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