Yokohama Chinatown

I traveled to Chinatown in Yokohama on Friday night. It is the end of Golden Week in Japan, so I had Friday off from work. Most natives had Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday off. Many travel home to visit family.

A friend from Hong Kong decided to take me after visiting a temple in Asakusa earlier in the day. Yokohama is forty minutes from central Tokyo -- comparable to Berkeley and San Francisco. Definitely grittier and less refined than its big brother city to the north, we took the JR line from Ueno (way-no).

A few things about this so-called "Chinatown": This isn't your average Chinatown in the United States filled with native Chinese. Most people and even many restaurants were Japanese! If anything, it felt like a theme park built for the Japanese that is supposed to feel like a Chinatown in the United States. Of course, trash was everywhere -- at least by Japanese standards, so there was some authenticity.

Instead of eating on the two main roads with overpriced restaurants built for Japanese tourists, we found a tiny cramped alley where the cooks and servers were Chinese. We had traditional Hong Kong noodles. This alley felt more like Chinatown II (Richmond District) and III (Taraval Street) in San Francisco. We had a different kind of noodles. Large lumps of dough were held by cooks over boiling water. Individual noodles were sliced from this dough using a special tool. The result: incredibly fresh, chewy noodles.