The Silk Road (Part 1)
Yokohama to Hachi-oji
CULTURE
2/21/20263 min read
I’m often reminded of how interconnected things in Japan are. Towns and events feel woven together, even when they’re separated by hundreds of miles.
Mary and I spent two weeks in Yokohama doing the kinds of things travelers usually do — eating at local restaurants, visiting museums, and exploring historical sites around the city.
By coincidence, we arrived during Yokohama’s annual illumination event, YORUNOYO (ヨルノヨ) — often translated as “Yokohama at Night.” It’s a large winter light festival designed as a city-wide nighttime art experience.
The event was created to promote Yokohama as a major night-view destination and to attract visitors during the colder months. Buildings, waterfront scenery, and music are synchronized across the harbor area, turning the entire city into part of the performance rather than just a backdrop. It’s remarkably beautiful.
The illumination season begins in early December — for example, YORUNOYO 2025 ran from December 4 through December 30 — with additional displays around Minato Mirai continuing into February. The event uses approximately 250,000 LED lights. Naturally, the lights are best experienced at night, which left our daytime hours free to wander through Yokohama’s streets.
And wander we did. What had originally been planned as a four-day trip gradually stretched into nearly two weeks as we kept discovering new corners of the city.
During one of our walks, we noticed a fenced-off kuwa (桑) — a mulberry tree. Mulberry leaves are the primary food for silkworms (Bombyx mori), making mulberry cultivation inseparable from silk production throughout Japan’s history.
Next to the tree stood a statue of a woman holding silk thread, honoring the women who worked in sericulture — silkworm cultivation — during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Young women made up a large portion of Japan’s silk workforce, and their labor played an important role in the country’s modernization and export economy. Yokohama, as Japan’s primary silk export port, became the natural place to commemorate that history.
Both stood near the Yokohama Silk Museum. The museum itself is small but historically meaningful, explaining how silk connected Japan to the wider world through Yokohama’s harbor. In many ways, it represents the endpoint of the silk chain.
The museum opened in 1959 to commemorate the 100th anniversary of the Port of Yokohama. It stands on the former site of a major British trading company involved in the silk trade, reflecting Yokohama’s importance as Japan’s main silk export hub during the nineteenth century. Inside, visitors can follow the entire journey of silk — from silkworm to global trade — through displays of cocoons, tools, textiles, and historical garments.
Unfortunately, we chose not to go inside that day, something we later regretted.
At the time, we didn’t think much about how silk moved from rural Japan to Yokohama. Without realizing it, we were standing at the end of Japan’s own Silk Road — unaware of where it began. Had we entered the museum, we might have discovered that the starting point of that journey was practically the next stop on our itinerary: Hachioji.
I didn’t yet know that what we were seeing in Yokohama would connect us, in a completely unexpected way, to a place less than an hour away — and to a much older story.
At first, it felt like just another small discovery — a tree, a statue, a museum. Interesting, but local. Self-contained.
But Japan rarely works that way.
What stood quietly in front of us in Yokohama was only the final link in a much longer chain. The silk that once passed through this port did not begin here. It began inland, in farming communities where mulberry trees were planted in neat rows and silkworms were raised in wooden houses — places most travelers never associate with global trade.
One of those places was Hachioji. At the time, we had no idea that our next destination would lead us back to the beginning of a Silk Road we hadn’t even realized we were standing on.
