Last week, I went to Yokohama with a friend to visit a teacher. We were meeting him in the afternoon, so we spent the morning looking around the city. I am interested in Japanese history, and Yokohama was one of the first ports that was opened to other countries at the beginning of the Meiji era. We visited a small museum called the Yokohama Archives of History. They display many things from that time: old photos of people and places, maps, and newspapers. I was excited to find an exhibit about James Curtis Hepburn. He published a Japanese-English dictionary in 1886 that used a new way of writing Japanese. I use the Hepburn system every day to type in Japanese, and it has become the official way to write names in Japanese passports. I didn’t know that this kind of romanization began in Yokohama. (144 words)

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