Minami-ku, Yokohama — Area Guide & Where to Stay

What are the main landmarks in Minami-ku?

The ward keeps its landmarks close to the earth. On a flat hilltop the Santonodai Site preserves a prehistoric village, and beside it the Yokohama City Santonodai Archaeological Museum lays out the pit-dwellings and pottery dug from the terrace. The finds run deep.

Across Minami-ku the Kanagawa Prefectural Archaeological Artifacts Center stores excavated material from the wider region, while the Yokohama Civic Art Gallery hangs painting and sculpture for the neighbourhood. Older ground survives in the burial mounds of 瀬戸ヶ谷古墳 and 室の木古墳, low kofun raised on the slopes long before the city grew around them.

What is the history of Minami-ku?

People settled this ground early. The Santonodai Site shows a Yayoi-era village dug into a hilltop terrace, its pit-dwellings and storage pits mapping a farming community that worked these slopes long before Yokohama existed as a port. The kofun came next.

Burial mounds such as 殿ヶ谷古墳群 and 室の木古墳 mark the ridges where later generations laid their dead, and the excavated ground was gathered together only in the modern era, when Minami-ku was carved as a southern ward of Yokohama and its finds passed to the Yokohama City Santonodai Archaeological Museum.

Where is Minami-ku?

Minami-ku is a landlocked ward in the south of Yokohama, a run of low ridges and valleys in Kanagawa where hilltop terraces like the Santonodai Site rise above the built-up streets.