Harbor View Park — Why Did It Become a Watchtower?

Harbor View Hill became a place of watch because of its geography — a vantage point from which the entire port lay open to the eye. From the top of this hill, one could easily track which ships were entering, which were departing. In the early days after Yokohama's opening to the world, this was a position of extraordinary importance. In 1862, not long after the port had opened, the British military established a garrison here. Officially, the purpose was to protect their own citizens living in the settlement below. But behind that justification lay something more calculated — the strategic value of a place that looked down over the harbor. As a military position, this hill was simply too well-situated to be left unoccupied. In time, French forces established their own base in an adjacent section of the hill. The Yokohama of the treaty port era was a front line — a place where the great powers pressed against one another, each competing for the advantages of trade. Behind the beauty of that harbor view, the cold arithmetic of international politics was always at work. As the years passed and the Second World War came to its end, it was the American military that took possession of this ground. Like so many places across Yokohama, the hill became somewhere ordinary citizens could not freely enter — closed off, held apart from the city that surrounded it. Then, in 1962, it was opened to the public as Harbor View Park. Nearly a century after the port first opened, the hill at last passed out of soldiers' hands and was reborn as a place where anyone might feel the wind, and look out to sea. Now, as you look toward that hill from the observation floor, you may see roses in bloom according to the season, and people strolling at an easy pace — a scene of quiet, unhurried peace. Yet within that tranquil hill, memories of more than a century of tension and release lie quietly at rest. The history that Yokohama has lived through is inscribed, as surely as anything, in the layers of that hillside. Location: 114 Yamatecho, Naka Ward, Yokohama Opened: 1962 (Showa 37) Area: Approx. 5.7 hectares History: British military garrison from 1862; later occupied by French forces Postwar: Requisitioned by U.S. forces; subsequently returned Designation: Park administered by the City of Yokohama