Yokohama is a big city in Japan, right next to Tokyo on the coast. It sits on Tokyo Bay, and it is one of Japan's biggest ports — ships from all over the world come in and out. In numbers of people, Yokohama is actually the second biggest city in Japan, after Tokyo itself, though many people outside Japan have never heard of it, because Tokyo is so close and so famous. The two cities almost touch; a train ride between them takes about half an hour, and many people live in Yokohama and work in Tokyo. Yokohama matters in history too. For a long time Japan kept foreign ships away. In the 1850s Japan opened Yokohama to foreign trade, and it grew from a small fishing village into a busy port very fast. Because of that, the city has an old foreign feeling in some streets — it has the biggest Chinatown in Japan, old Western-style houses on a hill, and a famous waterfront with a big wheel and tall towers. Today people also say Yokohama when they mean the port or the sea trade there: 'It shipped from Yokohama.' When you use it in a sentence, treat it like any city name: no 'the', capital Y.