Yokohama’s Grand Hotel

Serendipity strikes. I came across the postcard below the other day of Yokohama’s Grand Hotel, a regular watering hole for foreigners back in the days when Yokohama had concessions. Then I happened to be reading a copy of Jack London’s Martin Eden which I’d never read before. About to attend a posh dinner the somewhat untutored Martin lets his mind wander back to his seafaring days:

‘Next his mind leaped to the Grand Hotel at Yokohama, where too, from the sidewalk, he had seen grand ladies. Then the city and the harbor of Yokohama, in a thousand pictures, began flashing before his eyes.’

London of course knew Yokohama well from his time in Japan covering the Russo-Japanese War of 1905 – Martin Eden was written roughly ten years later. And so…an excuse to put up the picture.