What's the must-see thing in Yokohama?

Pick Sankei-en over Minato Mirai. The Minato Mirai skyline fills every postcard, but its malls look like malls anywhere in Tokyo, and Sankei-en shows you something Tokyo mostly lost. Hara Sankei was a silk merchant who got rich on the Yokohama export trade, and he had temple halls and farmhouses taken apart in Kyoto and Kamakura and rebuilt on his Honmoku estate. Get there at the 9am opening: the gravel crunches underfoot, wet moss smells sharp after rain, and herons stand in the pond below the Tomyo-ji pagoda before the tour buses show up around 10:30. Allow two hours. No train goes there, so take bus 8 or 148 from the east exit terminal at Yokohama Station and ride 30 to 35 minutes to Honmoku Sankeien-mae. From the stop it is a 10-minute walk, and a Suica card pays the fare.

Spend the afternoon on the waterfront, and do it on foot. The bus back from Sankei-en toward Motomachi-Chukagai drops you near Yamashita Park, where the Hikawa Maru, a 1930 ocean liner, is moored and you can walk its teak decks and art deco dining saloon. From the park, carry on to the Osanbashi Pier terminal: its roof is a rolling deck of wooden planks, free and open 24 hours, and at dusk you hear ship horns and smell salt off Tokyo Bay while the Cosmo Clock 21 Ferris wheel lights up across the water. You can pass on Yokohama Marine Tower, which dates from 1961, because the Osanbashi deck gives you nearly the same harbour view for nothing. The Red Brick Warehouse next door is mostly souvenir shops.

Eat dinner in Chinatown (Yokohama Chukagai), the biggest Chinatown in Japan, with more than 500 shops packed into a few blocks. Go in through Zenrin-mon gate, then head for Kanteibyo, the Guandi temple, where incense smoke drifts past gold and red carvings. If a menu worries you, order nikuman: a steamed pork bun the size of a fist, usually 500 to 700 yen, soft and hot enough to burn your fingers, and you can see what it is before you buy it. Walk past the tabehoudai all-you-can-eat touts on Chukagai Odori, since those set menus put volume ahead of flavour. The roasted-chestnut sellers will push free samples on you, and a polite no works.

If you're jet-lagged, the sequence writes itself: Sankei-en in the morning while you're up early anyway, the harbour walk after lunch, and Chinatown at dusk, all within about 2 kilometres of Motomachi-Chukagai Station on the Minatomirai Line. Late September is humid. At 8pm on 27 September 2026 it was 22°C, overcast and 86% humidity, feeling closer to 25°C, so pack a light rain jacket. A second day? Kamakura is about 25 minutes from Yokohama Station on the JR Yokosuka Line.