Where should I stay in Yokohama?

Minato Mirai is the right base for a first visit: book in the blocks between Sakuragicho Station and Minatomirai Station. The Cup Noodles Museum and the red-brick Aka Renga Soko warehouses are within a 15-minute walk, and the Minatomirai Line reaches Motomachi-Chukagai, the Chinatown stop, in about 5 minutes. The InterContinental Yokohama Grand is the sail-shaped tower on the water, and it and the Yokohama Royal Park Hotel, high up in Landmark Tower, charge roughly ¥27,000 to ¥47,000 a night; ask for a bay-side room. After dark the Cosmo Clock 21 Ferris wheel cycles through its colours, and on a still night you can hear ship horns from Osanbashi Pier through the glass. The trade-off is atmosphere. Minato Mirai went up on reclaimed dockyard land from 1983 onward, so after 9pm its plazas feel like an empty mall concourse, and dinner there means a tower restaurant floor unless you walk 12 minutes over the tracks to the izakaya lanes of Noge.

Kannai and Bashamichi are the value pick, and plenty of repeat visitors like them better: both the JR Negishi Line and the subway Blue Line stop here, one station past Sakuragicho. Business hotels such as the Richmond Hotel Yokohama Bashamichi, along with the APA and Toyoko Inn branches near Kannai Station, charge about ¥13,500 to ¥20,500 for rooms of 12 to 16 square metres. Bashamichi still has gas lamps and stone paving that recall the Meiji-era port, and the Yokohama Archives of History opened in 1981 inside the old British Consulate on Nihon-odori. Chinatown is a 10-minute walk, and on a humid evening the smell of pork and ginger from the nikuman steamers drifts toward Yamashita Park. For one splurge, the Hotel New Grand has faced that park since 1927, and its original lobby staircase is still in use. The catch is that Kannai empties after the offices close, so pick a hotel on the Bashamichi side of Kannai Station, not south of the tracks.

Skip Yokohama Station on a first trip. More than 2 million passengers a day move through it across six operators, and the underground passages between the JR, Keikyu, Sotetsu and Tokyu gates confuse Japanese visitors as readily as anyone else. A hotel there, like the Yokohama Bay Sheraton, makes sense if you land late at Narita, since the Limousine Bus and the Narita Express both terminate at or stop in that station. Shin-Yokohama is the other trap: it is the Tokaido Shinkansen stop, about 20 minutes from the harbour on the Blue Line, and worth a night if your morning starts with a 7am bullet train to Kyoto. The cheapest listings around Ishikawacho and Kotobuki-cho start near ¥3,000 ($19), and most are converted day-labourer lodgings with 3-tatami rooms and shared showers. TTDI rates Yokohama 8.3/10 for solo-traveler safety (see the TTDI Solo-Safety Index), so the problem is comfort, not danger.

Kannai weekend rates rise when the BayStars play at Yokohama Stadium, which opened in 1977 and sits beside Kannai Station, so check the home schedule before booking a Friday or Saturday between late March and September. On night one, the route from the airport matters more than the view. From Haneda, the Keikyu Line reaches Yokohama Station in about 25 minutes, and a change onto the Minatomirai Line brings you to Minatomirai Station 2 stops later. The harbour air stays close in late September: this week an overcast evening read 22°C with 86% humidity, and a hotel with a covered walkway from the station beats a cheaper one 10 minutes away in the rain. Both bases work well for day trips. Sankei-en, the 1906 garden in Honmoku, is roughly a 35-minute bus ride from Sakuragicho, and Kamakura is 25 minutes from Yokohama Station on the JR Yokosuka Line.