Painted Western residences and a brick church sit above the harbour on a sloping bluff.
What Yamate looks like
Yamate sits on a bluff above Yokohama's harbour, reached by streets sloping down toward Motomachi and the water. Pale stucco and timber houses with arched windows and green shutters stand behind clipped hedges and iron railings, mostly two storeys, with utility poles and overhead wires strung along the narrower lanes.
The , built in 1910, is in a Victorian style once common in the United States. is a long, cream walled mansion in a Spanish style, built in 1930 around its own courtyard. The , finished in 1926, has the low eaves and horizontal lines of the Frank Lloyd Wright buildings its architect had worked on. , a Norman style sanctuary clad in Oya stone, was finished in 1931.
runs along the edge of the bluff, a lawn and a rose garden behind iron railings looking out over the container cranes and the cable stayed Yokohama Bay Bridge. A bronze sundial stands in the park's sunken flower bed, and the red brick Osaragi Jiro Memorial Museum sits back across a garden pond within the same grounds. The climbs the slope just below the park, its headstones set in rows among the trees.
Daikanzaka drops from the bluff down toward Motomachi, a sloping street of smaller painted houses and shopfronts under a tangle of overhead wires. The sits near the bottom of the slope in a two storey stuccoed house with dark red window surrounds and arched windows, red patio umbrellas set out on the pavement below a cherry tree.
Shot in Yamate
The overlook at Harbor View Park looks straight out across the container cranes to the cable stayed Yokohama Bay Bridge. It is the park's signature view, railed off above the rose garden and the sunken flower bed.
Mare (まれ), 2015
Harbor View Park
Mare stands at this railing on the phone to her parents in Ishikawa, turning down the pastry shop job she has just been offered, in the NHK series Mare. The same observation deck appears in the Fuji TV series Night Doctor, episode 6, where a character stops to look down at the harbour. Street View
What Yamate can double for
Kitano-cho in Kobe, Hyogo
Kobe's own foreign residence district has the closest architectural match anywhere in Japan, the same run of Meiji and Taisho timber and stucco houses kept open as museum homes on a hillside. Both districts share the same shuttered windows, clipped hedges and narrow sloping streets. Kitano-cho's houses sit closer together on a tighter grid, so a wide shot needs careful framing to avoid the gaps Yamate's larger gardens leave between buildings. Try searching timber museum houses hillside now.
Pacific Heights has the same scale of painted timber houses on a hill above the water, with bay windows and shutters in a similar Victorian and Edwardian range of dates. The streetcar era grid behind the houses is laid out on the same wide, regular blocks a 1900s to 1920s Western port city would use. San Francisco's houses are taller and more ornately painted than Yamate's, so a close frame holds the match better than a wide one. Try searching painted timber hill houses now.
The former French Concession in Shanghai, China
The former French Concession is another treaty port district of European villas on tree lined streets from the same decades as Yamate's own houses, with a similar mix of consular and merchant residences. The Concession's villas sit further back behind plane trees than Yamate's do, and modern towers crowd most wider skylines. A tight street level frame with no rooftops in view holds the match best. Try searching tree lined concession villa now.
