Amelia Groom explores the cre­at­ive energy of Yoko­hama, Japan’s second city and emer­ging centre of con­tem­por­ary art, a city focused on using art to trans­form the exper­i­ence of city liv­ing for  vis­it­ors and res­id­ents. From the port fore­shore and canals to empty banks and ware­houses, through to private liv­ing spaces, Yoko­hama demon­strates the poten­tial for using a city’s exist­ing assets and infra­struc­ture in innov­at­ive ways.

For over 250 years Japan was com­pletely shut off from the rest of the world whilst under the mil­it­ary dic­tat­or­ship of Tok­ugawa Sho­gun­ate. 2009 marks 150 years since the coun­try first opened up to for­eign trade at the Port of Yoko­hama, and the City of Yoko­hama has been using the anniversary to imple­ment vari­ous new urban devel­op­ment ini­ti­at­ives under its Cre­at­ive City Yoko­hama initiative.

Over the last dec­ade this urban renewal pro­ject that is under the guid­ance of sev­eral dif­fer­ent local gov­ern­ment bod­ies (includ­ing the “Yoko­hama Cre­ativ­ity Centre”) has made Yoko­hama, a his­tor­ical port city just 40 minutes out of Tokyo, home to some of Japan’s most excit­ing cul­tural events and young artistic communities.

Rooftop Para­dise at BankART1929 | Photo by Kazuto Imura

While Yokohama’s cul­tural appeal had pre­vi­ously come primar­ily from the Yoko­hama Museum of Art as well as sev­eral theatres and con­cert halls, it was not con­sidered to have much cre­at­ive out­put of its own, nor did it provide any sup­port for young artists.

BankArt1929 exter­ior and cafe | Pho­tos cour­tesy BankArt1929

From the out­set, Cre­at­ive City Yoko­hama had an agenda to increase local arts related activ­it­ies, attract cre­at­ive indus­tries and tour­ism, exploit the city’s exist­ing cul­tural resources, pro­mote social inter­ac­tion in the city space and pre­serve the city’s archi­tec­tural leg­acy by find­ing ways to revital­ise its his­toric buildings.

The most sig­ni­fic­ant thing to come out of the ongo­ing pro­ject has been BankART1929, a con­tem­por­ary art organ­isa­tion and school that ini­tially opened in 2004 with the sup­port of the local gov­ern­ment in two aban­doned city bank build­ings and is now enjoy­ing a new base in the enorm­ous defunct ware­house of the Japan­ese ship­ping com­pany NYK, with sev­eral off­shoot facil­it­ies around town.

Kamak­ura Sum­iko, Asso­ci­ate pro­fessor of Tokyo Uni­ver­sity of the Arts and one of the advisers for Cre­at­ive City Yoko­hama in the early stages, recalled in a pub­lic talk earlier this year that the estab­lish­ment of Bank­ART was less about encour­aging appre­ci­ation of the arts than about improv­ing the over­all qual­ity of life in the city, and mak­ing it more attract­ive to visitors.

Steep Slope Stu­dio offers space to rehearse, cre­ate and con­verse with fel­low cre­at­ives | Photo from Yoko­hama Arts Platform

“‘Arts for art’s sake’, that con­ceited slo­gan coined at the end of the 19^th cen­tury, encap­su­lated the pre­val­ent wish for a break­down in social mores,” he said. “Art was not con­sidered as hav­ing a social func­tion, or of hav­ing any value other than its intrinsic worth. Our hope, on the other hand, was that the arts and cul­ture should play a more act­ive role in soci­ety, and that soci­ety should be more art-like.”

Rather than exist­ing as some­thing sep­ar­ate to daily life in the city, Bank­ART was to be focused on integ­rat­ing con­tem­por­ary art with the local com­munit­ies and wider soci­ety. Some of their earli­est shows included Food and Con­tem­por­ary Art and Art and Nat­ural Dis­asters, mak­ing evid­ent their desire to incor­por­ate things from all facets of life into con­tem­por­ary art. An integ­ral part of their set up is also their fant­astic café/bar space on the ground floor, which boasts an impress­ive pro­gram of events and where drinks are super cheap and the doors are open late into the night, ensur­ing they cater to a local cli­en­tele rather than just tourists.

Voin Pahoin is an art col­lect­ive ded­ic­ated to fos­ter­ing a com­munity. A private apart­ment is opened to the pub­lic on the fourth Sat­urday of every month — trans­form­ing it into a make­shift art salon. | Photo from Voin Pahoin

Besides Bank­ART, other points of interest in Yoko­hama include Steep Slope Stu­dios, an inter­est­ing new space offer­ing many artist res­id­en­cies, and ZAIM which is loc­ated in a con­ver­ted his­toric build­ing down­town and plays host to work­shops, per­form­ances, exhib­i­tions, lec­tures and other cul­tural events.

At the more grass­roots end of things, the Voin Pahoin col­lect­ive have been open­ing their apart­ment to the pub­lic once a month for the last few years, provid­ing a dif­fer­ent artist each time with a “one day res­id­ency” where they can do whatever they want with the domestic space. With an emphasis on eat­ing, drink­ing and social inter­ac­tion, their hos­pit­able make­shift salon has become a corner­stone for the local arts community.

Shichoshitsu cafe | Photo cour­tesy Koganecho Bazaar

Mean­while, The City of Yoko­hama recently embarked on an extens­ive urban renewal pro­ject in the notori­ous black-market and red-light dis­trict of Koganecho, which has now been com­pletely trans­formed into a cluster of afford­able artist stu­dios, gal­lery spaces and the like. The area is also home to the much loved Shichoshitsu (mean­ing ‘listen­ing booth’), a café/bar where vis­it­ors are free to explore the broad music col­lec­tion com­pris­ing over 10,000 albums, and enjoy reg­u­lar live per­form­ances and screenings.

Graf­fiti Research Lab (GRL) and Yokohama’s Boat People Asso­ci­ation tagged the fore­shore of the work­ing port with light graf­fiti, and took people on a canal cruise to exper­i­ence their city in a unique way, as part of CREAM | Photo from BoatPeopleAssociation.org

With the third Yoko­hama Tri­en­nale hav­ing taken place late last year, and the city is now also play­ing host to a new major fest­ival called CREAM, which con­firms the people of Yokohama’s unique skill at instig­at­ing innov­at­ive new uses of exist­ing city spaces. With BankART1929 and the Shinko Pier form­ing the main ven­ues, the art and media fest­ival is spread around with vari­ous satel­lite exhib­i­tions tak­ing place in the afore­men­tioned Koganecho dis­trict, and even the polar bear house of the city zoo (see my review of the fest­ival here).

As if tak­ing cue from Charles Landry’s argu­ment in The Cre­at­ive City that medium sized cit­ies are bet­ter placed than met­ro­pol­ises to use their cul­tural assets to cre­ate new oppor­tun­it­ies, Yoko­hama – which for many years was con­sidered little more than a dorm­it­ory city for Tokyo – has used its exist­ing assets in intel­li­gent and innov­at­ive ways to estab­lish itself as one of Japan’s most excit­ing new hubs for con­tem­por­ary art.