Crafting Yokohama
In the 1880s, Yokohama was one of the fastest-growing cities in Japan, a showcase of Meiji modernization and gateway to an international market. Much of the infrastructure of the treaty port period has since been lost to earthquakes and postwar urban development. In this project, we used cutting-edge techniques in virtual heritage to recapture the environment of two areas of old Yokohama, Noge Hill and Bentendо̄ri.
Treaty port Yokohama was an international boom town, a major trading hub that millions of yen in imports and exports flowed through each year, and a showcase city for the new modernizing initiatives of the Japanese state. It was also a popular travel destination for domestic and foreign tourists, each looking to experience the excitement of interacting with another culture. While there are a wealth of woodblock prints and photographs remaining from this period, they depict a city frozen in time. Drawing on the rich historical resources remaining from this period, the Crafting Yokohama team used Audacity, Autodesk Maya, and Unity to create interactive scenes that allow us to step back into the streetscapes of the treaty port city during its peak.
A video of the Bentendori and Noge Hill Scenes made by Jack Mahoney.
This historical model of Yokohama is evidence based. It relies on existing visual and textual sources, including city maps, contemporary accounts, woodblock prints, photographs, and architectural drawings to determine the structure of the environment. Noge Hill and Bentendо̄ri were selected by the team both for their historical significance and for practical modeling concerns. Noge Hill was well-known stop for foreign tourists, famous for beautiful sakura trees and teahouses. Bentendо̄ri was a shopping street in the heart of the city, where Japanese and foreign consumers could peruse luxury goods from all over the world. The modular nature of Japanese architecture allowed the team to spend additional time creating secondary assets like lanterns, rickshaws, and crates, designing soundscapes specific to each scene, and pulling figures from era-appropriate woodblock prints to help bring the streets of their recreated city to life.
Student team members:
Eunbee Chu, Irwin Gutierrez, Blake Herrera, Jack Mahoney, Evan Matthews, and Eri Pilon
Faculty advisers:
Dr. Jessa Dahl, treaty port history adviser
Dr. Tom Chandler, virtual heritage and 3-D modeling adviser, Monash University
Michael Neylan, 3D artistic effects and technical adviser, Monash University
