Guess!

Today I went to Yokohama with a friend for the day. Yokohama has one of the biggest Chinatown's in the world, and was the first port opened to other countries after Japan's period of isolation. After walking around Chinatown and having an awesome lunch and Chinese snacks, we went to a museum of Yokohama and Japanese history. Just as we started looking around the museum a volunteer approached us and asked my friend if we would like an English tour. At first he said the tour would take 2 hours, but after she asked for a shorter tour, he said it could be done in 30 minutes. Our private tour guide, another volunteer, came and we started the tour. It was so great to actually understand some of the exhibits! The first half of the tour was mostly about ancient Japanese history, but the second part was really interesting, about Japan opening up to other countries, the war, and the Olympics. As the tour went on, the guide got more and more comfortable, and was really excited when I asked questions. He was clearly very interested in the museum, and he began to ask us to guess about different items or facts. For example, he showed us some models of the first American ships that came to Yokohama Bay. He asked us how many people we thought worked on the ship. "200." "More." "500." "Less." "250." More." After guessing about 10 different numbers, he finally told us! The look on his face was great- he was so excited as we guessed! Anyways, it was a great and informative tour, and made the trip to the museum well worth it (seeing as how I could understand most of the exhibits)! The two most interesting things I learned today were
1). when foreigners first settled in Yokohama, the government built many foreign houses in a certain area because they wanted to keep all the foreigners together and not let them spread out. The area was surrounded by a moat and became a kind-of artificial island that contained the foreigners.
2). the 1964 Tokyo Olympics dramatically influenced modern Japan. As a result of the Olympics, Japan pushed modernization (for example, the bullet train to get people to and from Tokyo to watch the Olympics). If the Olympics didn't come to Japan, there wouldn't have been a need for such drastic modernization.