Yokohama’s French Hill keeps memory of Japan’s hard, turbulent years

June 28, 2010

Yokohama’s French Hill keeps memory of Japan’s hard, turbulent years

The northern part of Yokohama’s Harbor View Park with an area of 57,700 square meters used to be called Mt. France or French Hill. Local people so called the site because it was once occupied by barracks for French troops.
France persuaded the Tokugawa shogunate government into agreeing to station a French unit in Yokohama in 1863, becoming the first country to do so for the purpose of protecting its own people and defending a foreign settlement in the newly opened port city. Shortly after that, a British unit also came to Yokohama and took their position at a neighboring site.
Japan could not obtain a withdrawal of French and British troops from the area until 1875. It was seven years after the Meiji Restoration of 1868, which ended two and a half centuries of rule by the Tokugawa government and paved the way for Japan to build itself as a modern state.
After French troops left Yokohama, France established a consulate and related facilities at the site in the 1890s. Yokohama City obtained the French Hill area from France in 1971 and made it part of Harbor View Park in 1972. At a corner near the northern gate to the park is a block of red old bricks used for the foundation of the consulate building. A promenade and stairways also lead visitors up to the grass-covered remains of the consul’s official residence, which burned down in 1947.
The introduction of French and British troops came four years after the opening of Yokohama amid increasing pressures from Western powers. The decision to open Yokohama to foreign countries triggered an antiforeign movement across Japan, which led to a series of incidents in which foreigners were assaulted, some of them fatally, by exclusivists.
Toward the end of the Tokugawa era, Japan sharply divided into two forces, one calling for opening Japan and the other demanding shutting out foreigners to maintain Japan’s independence. Their rivalry nearly threw Japan into a civil war. History shows a nationwide bloody conflict was averted by heroic efforts by young but talented samurai, notably Ryoma Sakamoto.
Sakamoto, born in Tosa, the current Kochi Prefecture, feared that a drawn-out armed conflict would only invite a foreign intervention. He stressed Japan should unite together and strengthen itself so that it may rank with Western powers in the future. Sakamoto successfully negotiated an agreement between the two major rival domains of Satsuma and Choshu to form a coalition against the Tokugawa government, but he was assassinated in 1867 at the age of 33. This year’s annual historical drama series on NHK, Japan’s public TV channel, depicting his turbulent life, has obtained a high audience rating of around 20 pct.
After the Tokugawa government was toppled in the first upheaval in Japan’s modern history, Japan tried to enhance its wealth and improve its military power by importing Western technologies. The Western civilization and the Emperor system were the two foremost values for Japan in the Meiji era.
The second upheaval came in 1945, when Japan surrendered to the allied forces in the Pacific War. A guiding principle for Japan in its postwar period was the U.S.-style democracy, which espouses free competition and individualism.
The imported democratic values helped Japan to achieve a high economic growth through the 1980s. But since around the turn of the century, Japan has been confronted with a host of new social and economic challenges amid the maturing of the economy and the aging of society. Japan now has to explore a new principle to guide itself. Heroes like Sakamoto should not appear any more to rescue Japan from today’s situation, but Japanese people at least seem to be aware of the need to find a new, original value to develop their life from now on.