Yokohama summary

Written and fact-checked by The Editors of Encyclopaedia Britannica

Below is the article summary. For the full article, see Yokohama.

Yokohama, Seaport city (pop., 2020: 3,777,491), east-central Honshu, Japan. Located on the western shore of Tokyo Bay, it is the country’s principal port and second largest city and is part of the Tokyo urban-industrial complex. It was a small fishing village when U.S. naval officer Matthew Perry visited in 1854 to negotiate Japanese trading possibilities. In 1859 it was opened for foreign settlement and trade. Yokohama was destroyed by earthquake and fire in 1923 and severely damaged by U.S. air raids in 1945 during World War II, but it was rebuilt both times. It produces textiles, chemicals, ships, machinery, petroleum products, and automobiles.

Japan Summary

Japan, island country lying off the east coast of Asia. It consists of a great string of islands in a northeast-southwest arc that stretches for approximately 1,500 miles (2,400 km) through the western North Pacific Ocean. Nearly the entire land area is taken up by the country’s four main islands;