Kanagawa Prefecture

• 1. Introduction

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  Kanagawa Prefecture sits just south of Tokyo, yet its story reaches far deeper into Japanese history than the sprawling metropolis next door. With a population of 9,221,129 as of the 1st of April 2022, it ranks as Japan's second-most populous prefecture, packed into a geographic area of just 2,415 square kilometres. What kind of place manages to be that crowded, that small, and still contain ancient temple towns, volcanic resort peaks, and two of the most consequential ports in the country's modern history? The answers wind through a feudal capital, a dramatic opening to the West, and a catastrophic earthquake that reshaped the region. Kanagawa is also home to Yokohama, Japan's second-largest city, and the historic city of Kamakura, once the de facto capital of the entire country. Understanding how those two cities ended up in the same prefecture means tracing a long arc from medieval warlords to American naval officers to the present-day headquarters of the U.S. 7th Fleet.

• 2. Seat of the Shogunate

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  Kamakura served as the capital of Japan from 1185 to 1333, the seat of the Kamakura shogunate and the largest city in the country during that period. Before that, the imperial dynasty is believed to have governed this region from the 5th century onward, though the plains were sparsely inhabited through most of the ancient era. In medieval Japan, the territory that became Kanagawa was divided between the provinces of Sagami and Musashi. Kamakura sat in central Sagami, and its rise to power as the shogunate's base gave the entire region an outsized role in national affairs for nearly a century and a half. During the Edo period, authority over the land was split: the western part of Sagami Province fell under the daimyo of Odawara Castle, while the eastern portion was governed directly by the Tokugawa shogunate in Edo, which is now Tokyo. That administrative division between western castle lords and eastern central authority left a geographic imprint on the prefecture that is still legible in the landscape today, where the mountainous west and the flat urbanised east feel like entirely different worlds.

• 3. Perry and the Open Ports

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  Commodore Matthew Perry landed in Kanagawa in 1853 and again in 1854, and it was there that he signed the Convention of Kanagawa, forcing Japanese ports open to the United States. The pressure did not stop with that agreement. After several more years of foreign insistence, Yokohama, already the largest deep-water port on Tokyo Bay, was opened to foreign traders in 1859. From that moment, the city grew steadily into the largest trading port in Japan. A few kilometres away, Yokosuka, positioned closer to the mouth of Tokyo Bay, developed along a parallel track as a naval port. It now serves as headquarters for the U.S. 7th Fleet and for the fleet operations of the Japan Maritime Self-Defense Force. The Meiji government built the first railway line in Japan in 1872, running from Shinbashi in Tokyo to Yokohama, making the new port directly accessible from the capital. Foreign residents settled in Yokohama City through the Meiji period and ventured west to visit Hakone. The region had, within a few decades of Perry's arrival, woven itself into an international network of trade, diplomacy, and military presence that it never fully shed.

• 4. The 1923 Earthquake

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  The epicentre of the 1923 Great Kanto earthquake lay deep beneath Izu Oshima island in Sagami Bay. The destruction it caused across Tokyo, Yokohama, Chiba, Kanagawa, and Shizuoka was immense. At Manazuru Point, the sea pulled back as much as 400 metres from the shore before surging back in a wall of water that swamped Mitsuishi-shima. In Kamakura alone, the combined death toll from earthquake, tsunami, and fire exceeded 2,000 people. Odawara suffered perhaps the most concentrated devastation: ninety percent of its buildings collapsed immediately, and subsequent fires consumed both the rubble and whatever had remained standing. Yokohama, as the prefecture's largest city and busiest port, bore an enormous share of the regional loss. The earthquake did not end Kanagawa's trials in the twentieth century. In 1945, American bombing heavily damaged Yokohama, Kawasaki, and other major cities, with total casualties across those attacks numbering more than several thousand. After Japan's surrender, General Douglas MacArthur, the Supreme Commander of the Allied Powers for the Occupation of Japan, landed in Kanagawa before moving to other areas. The U.S. military bases that arrived with the occupation, including Camp Zama, Yokosuka Naval Base, and Naval Air Facility Atsugi, remain in the prefecture today.

• 5. Mountains, Bays, and Terrain

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  The Tanzawa Mountain Range contains Mount Hiru at 1,673 metres, the highest point in the prefecture. Other peaks in the range, including Mount Hinokiboramaru at 1,601 metres, Mount Tanzawa at 1,567 metres, and Mount Omuro at 1,588 metres, cluster in the mid-range heights that define the western interior. Mount Hakone, a volcano in the western region, produced a massive explosion around 3,000 years ago that formed Lake Ashi. The prefecture stretches 80 kilometres from west to east and 60 kilometres from north to south, and roughly 23 percent of its total land area carries a natural park designation. Those parks include the Fuji-Hakone-Izu National Park and the Tanzawa-Oyama Quasi-National Park, alongside several prefectural parks. The eastern side of the prefecture is flat, heavily urbanised, and dominated by the port cities. The Tama River forms much of the boundary between Kanagawa and Tokyo. The Sagami River cuts through the middle of the prefecture, and the Sakawa River drains through a small lowland called the Sakawa Lowland, passing between Mount Hakone to the west and the Oiso Hills to the east before emptying into Sagami Bay. The Miura Peninsula separates Tokyo Bay from Sagami Bay, giving the prefecture a coastline that faces two distinct bodies of water.

• 6. A Region on the World Stage

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  Nissan Stadium in Yokohama served as the final venue of the 2002 FIFA World Cup, then hosted the FIFA Club World Cup from 2005 to 2007, and was a venue for the 2019 Rugby World Cup. The Enoshima Yacht Course and Lake Sagami both hosted events at the 1964 Summer Olympics in Tokyo, and the Yokohama Cultural Gymnasium served as a volleyball venue at the same Games. The Hakone Ekiden relay race covers 108.0 kilometres, mostly along National Routes 1 and 15, and runs on the 2nd and the 3rd of January each year. In 1945, Kanagawa was the fifteenth most populous prefecture in Japan, with a population of about 1.9 million. Rapid post-war urbanisation within the Greater Tokyo Area drove that figure upward sharply, and by 2006 the prefecture had become Japan's second most populous. The population is now estimated at 9.1 million, and the prefecture carries a population density of 3,800 people per square kilometre. Kanagawa has formalised sister relationships with nine places around the world, beginning with Maryland in the United States in 1981 and extending to Aguascalientes in Mexico as recently as 2013. Shin-Yokohama and Odawara stations on the Tokaido Shinkansen place the prefecture on Japan's primary high-speed rail spine, connecting it to Tokyo, Nagoya, Osaka, and other major cities.