I take an early morning walk through Kannai to Sakuragicho, past the tall ship Nippon Maru in its berth, and toward the Pan Pacific Hotel where Satomi and I stayed for three nights last week.

I need to find a cash machine that will accept my card. No success at either Landmark Center or Queen's East. I need to call the states to check for messages and to arrange some money matters, but have no success with that either; my international calling card suddenly doesn't work, and I can't find one of the new IC (smart card) phones that seem to have much better international rates than the usual pay phones.

Leaving the Sakuragicho area on foot, I see a taxicab collide in a horrible crunch with a woman riding a bicycle. She gets up and appears to be bruised and limping a bit, but otherwise unhurt. Her bike is a wreck. The taxi cab driver stops to help her, and I see he is trying to give her money.

Katsumi is working today (though it is a national holiday here, the Emperor's birthday) so I go to his office, thank him again for the dinner and ask to make a few phone calls. I get my business on the phone taken care of and Katsumi suggests we go find some breakfast. He helps me find a suitable cash machine (near Yokohama station, on the fifth floor of a large department store), and we take a very long walk from Yokohama station back through Kannai, through the Yamate district and down to Motomachi (stopping again at Starbucks), then through Chinatown where I buy a replacement toy train for Julian, exactly like the one he lost here the previous week. We walk for two and a half hours, covering most of the city including two hilltop districts.

Yokohama is a very appealing city. Every time I come here (and this is, I think, my sixth or seventh trip here) I think how nice a place it would be to live, if only for a few years. The city is extremely cosmopolitan (second largest city in Japan by population, after Tokyo), has hilly and diverse districts (rather like San Francisco), and is quite convenient to Tokyo and to Haneda and Narita airports. And because Yokohama is on the water and does not have much of its own heavy industry (most residents commute to Tokyo to work), the air is relatively clean and the core of the city is not the imposing mass of large buildings that are found in most Japanese cities, even in cities a faction of Yokohama's size.

Much of the reason for Yokohama's unique character is its history of foreign influence. For hundreds of years (since the Tokugawa period) Yokohama was one of the few places officially allowed to trade with the outside world (variously including Britain, China, Portugal and the United States). In its more recent history, after World War II, Yokohama was where the US military set up its base of occupation. In fact, the US Army presence was still strong through the sixties, only tapering off after the close of the Vietnam War. During the first centuries of foreign influence (right up until the start of the 20th century), most residents of the surrounding areas were prevented from entering, and those who worked inside the port city (the central section of Yokohama is called Kannai, which literally means "inside the gates") were generally prevented from traveling elsewhere and spreading their influence. (There are two other such historic foreign port cities in Japan: Nagasaki in the South and Hakodate in the North. Nagasaki was primarily a Dutch port, while Hakodate served Russian traders. Fukuoka and Niigata apparently had important roles as well in trade with Korea and China respectively.)

In its most recent evolution, Yokohama (like many other older port cities) has abandoned its old waterfront in favor of new, larger port areas outside the city. Port cities worldwide have gone through this change, as cargo shipping has moved from low-tech dockside loading and unloading to newer container methods requiring large areas of flat and vacant ground. It is only recently that these cities, which include Seattle, have begun to rebuild their older waterfronts, tearing down or renovating old warehouses and creating tourism and shopping districts in their places. These rebuilding projects are large and expensive, and Yokohama's plans (including new waterfront parks, a conference center and cruise ship terminal, at least four mega shopping malls and a half dozen or so luxury hotels like the Pan Pacific) are ambitious indeed.

Katsumi shows me areas of the city I had missed on previous trips. In particular, he leads me on a walking tour of the upper city, away from the old harbor. There we visit a large Shinto shrine, a Buddhist temple, and an enormous park in Yamate that until twenty years ago had been the post-war headquarters (and golf course) of the US Army and Navy. During the Vietnam War, Katsumi tells me, the park site had been "tanks, tanks, and more tanks."

Katsumi is a fast walker (like me) and I estimate we've gone six miles, in addition to the two or more miles I've already walked in the morning. But I'm still planning a trip to Tokyo in the afternoon...