The Foreigners' Cemetery — Who Was the First to Be Buried Here?

On the heights of the Yamate bluff, white tombstones peer through gaps in the green trees, one here, one there. This is the Yokohama Foreigners' Cemetery. The first person to be laid to rest within its grounds was a sailor from Commodore Perry's fleet. In 1854, at the height of the Black Ships' arrival, a crew member of the USS Mississippi lost his life and was buried in a corner of this hill overlooking the harbor. That burial is considered the founding moment of the Yokohama Foreigners' Cemetery. A young sailor who gave his bones to foreign soil amid the great historical tide of Japan's opening to the world — his grave marker became the starting point of a vast cemetery where people of more than forty nationalities would eventually come to rest. In that quiet place, some five thousand foreign souls now sleep. Reading the inscriptions carved into the tombstones, one by one, the very story of how this city of Yokohama came to be slowly rises into view. Consider Edmund Morel — a British engineer invited to Japan to lay its very first railway. He directed the construction of the line connecting Shimbashi and Yokohama, yet fell to tuberculosis at the age of just thirty, and was buried here in this cemetery. It was 1871, the year before the railway opened. Though he never lived to see its completion, the work he left behind laid one of the cornerstones of Japan's modernization. Also inscribed here is the name of Alfred Gérard, a French businessman. He established a water house in Yokohama drawing on a source of fine natural spring water, and ran a business supplying fresh drinking water to ships in the harbor — a little-known benefactor who made his mark on the very foundations of Yokohama's water infrastructure. This cemetery is far more than a place of burial. Merchants, missionaries, physicians, engineers, sailors, diplomats — each crossed the sea to this harbor town and achieved something, or else was brought down before their purpose was fulfilled. The life of every last one of them has shaped an invisible stratum beneath Yokohama's international character. The five thousand stories resting beneath the stillness of that hill continue, even now, to sustain this city. Location: 96 Yamatecho, Naka Ward, Yokohama Founding: 1854 (burial of a sailor from Perry's fleet) Number interred: Approx. 4,800–5,000 Nationalities represented: Over 40 Notable interments: Edmund Morel (railway engineer), Alfred Gérard (businessman), and others Administration: Yokohama Foreign General Cemetery Foundation Public access: Open to the public on weekends and public holidays (donation basis)