Digital Translations and Playable Space: Ready, Set, Yokohama!

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This is the first article in the Playing Inside: Board Games, Video Games, and the Indoors series, which explores the ways that board games, video games, and other types of indoor play impact and guide out understanding of the environment.

Today it’s easy to get from Tokyo to Yokohama. A train on the Keihin-Tohoku line, which leaves every six minutes from Shinagawa station, will get you there in half an hour. One hundred and fifty years ago, things were a bit more complicated. Those wishing to travel from Tokyo, the capital city, to the new international treaty port in Yokohama could travel by train, steam ship, rickshaw, or by foot. If you played the right game, you could even get there by telegraph.

That game was Utagawa Toyokuni IV’s Catalogue of the Trip to Yokohama Sugoroku (referred to hereafter as Trip to Yokohama), an 1872 board game that built on a long history of travel and playing with space to send players racing to one of the fastest growing, most exciting cities in Japan. I encountered it while exploring the University of California Berkeley’s Japanese Historical Map collection in graduate school, and it was an invaluable source for understanding the urban landscape of Yokohama and cities like it. When my career turned to teaching, I returned to Toyokuni IV’s game to show my students the Yokohama it had shown me. However, without specialized linguistic, cultural, and historical knowledge, the game was nearly impossible to play and, perhaps more importantly, no longer fun. In 2022, I worked with a team of undergraduates at the JapanLab at UT Austin to digitize the game and make its journey accessible to a modern English-language audience. We learned that digitizing a historical game required both technological skill and creative interpretation.

Catalogue of the Trip to Yokohama: Travel by Telegraph

The Trip to Yokohama was printed just after the opening of Japan’s first railway line between Tokyo and Yokohama. The rail line was part of a push by the new Meiji government to modernize Japanese society to compete with the encroaching empires of Europe and the United States. Yokohama, Japan’s largest port open to international trade, was the main gateway through which modernizing ideas and technologies were imported. Toyokuni IV’s game was one of many books, newspapers, and woodblock prints (including other games) that brought information about the exciting new city to curious Japanese consumers.1

Travel by game was a long-established tradition in Japan by the 19th century. Travel games (dōchū sugoroku) were commonly sold as souvenirs to help players memorialize or vicariously experience any number of trips.2 Trip to Yokohama used basic mechanics that were common to the genre. Movement across squares was determined by the roll of a six-sided die, and luck-based fast travel and skip turn mechanisms were written into special squares. Each square depicted a different location on the route from Tokyo to Yokoyama, illustrated by a small vignette.

Woodblock illustration of a red steam train on a track with a large cloud of smoke. There are telegraph lines next to the train. At the top of the square are three Japanese numbers in yellow circles with the location of the station they refer to written alongside.
Trains served an important role as part of the fast-travel system. The numbers in the yellow circles on the square indicate the numbers the player needed to roll to skip ahead to train stations further down the line.

Every form of travel the game represented was a new form of transportation technology. The basic instructions for the game told players that they were traveling via rickshaw, a human-powered cart invented in Yokohama in the 1860s. The fast-travel squares included: trains, steam ships, and the telegraph. Once in Yokohama, players partook of a mix of old and new experiences. Shrines and plays, cliched tourist activities even at the time, were as equal a part of the story of Yokohama as more novel foreign restaurants and international markets.

Woodblock print of a Japanese woman in a purple kimono with a wide yellow obi playing the shamisen. She is in a traditional tatami room.
In addition to Yokohama-specific locations, the game also featured traditional travel-associated locations, like an inn in Kanagawa that featured a woman playing a shamisen. If players landed on this square, they had to skip their next turn.

For those who can understand it, the image of Yokohama that emerges from Toyokuni IV’s game is that of a complex, hybrid city that defies easy categorization. Squares like the Yokohama train station, a British-designed and Japanese-built structure, challenge easy assumptions about the meanings of modern and traditional, Japanese and foreign. To travel by telegraph seems absurd, and yet in the game it is equally as plausible as travel by train. These contradictions are key to understanding nineteenth century Yokohama and the Japanese experience of modernity that I wanted to teach my students. But most of my students didn’t have the tools to understand the game, and this idea of Yokohama remained out of their reach. It was a problem that our JapanLab team had to grapple with to bring this complicated, not-easily-defined experience back to life.

Ready, Set, Yokohama!: Recreating the Rush

The Ready, Set, Yokohama! Project was developed by a faculty led, student driven team. I was the faculty advisor and four UT students, Ella Barton, Robyn Fajardo, Kenneth Le, and Vishi Sant, made up the development team. Early on we realized that if we were going to try to recreate the experience of playing Trip to Yokohama as it had been played in the 1870s, a literal digitization of the text and mechanics would not be enough. If we wanted to recover the sense of wonder, of speed, and of fun that the original players felt, we would have to make the implicit historical context of the 1870s explicit.

What this meant in practice was that we added a significant amount of text to help players interpret the rich depictions of space and place in the game. To do this, we included a small narrative description of each location, inspired by what a traveler might have seen, smelled, or heard there in the nineteenth century. The descriptive text was followed by educational information, explaining what the location was known for and why it was significant. Alongside this new text, the coding team found ways to emphasize the original imagery, making each vignette a prominent part of the display and showcasing the original print that players could no longer lift or touch.

An illustrated male Japanese character dressed in 19th century clothing stands in the center of the screen. He points at the Nihonbashi square from the board game, which depicts a crowded bridge and intersection in Tokyo. To his right side is narrative text describing his experience at Nihonbashi.
A screenshot from the game Ready, Set, Yokohama! showing how descriptive and explanatory text is shown to the player. Because the game assumes that the players are male (by sending them to red-light districts and other male-centric spaces), the team created a male viewpoint character character to serve as the focal point of the narrative sections.

Our decision to make the implicit explicit had consequences. Toyokuni IV shaped the game’s depiction of Yokohama with his illustrations, but his sparing use of text left ample space for interpretation. He didn’t have to explain why telegraphs were chosen as a mode of fast travel; he was able to let his audience, steeped in the cultural assumptions of the moment and their own experience of the city, make their own sense of it. We, on the other hand, had to explain traveling by telegraph, which was easier said than done. Was it play on the already vicarious idea of travel by game? Was it meant to be absurd, a joke? Were trains, ships, and telegraphs linked in the public consciousness, therefore making it counterintuitively normal? Research can help us answer these questions, but not always definitively. We ultimately wrote about the telegraph as a technology of connection, with wires that were forging unprecedented links across space in the 1870s. For the telegraph and beyond, our interpretations became the definitive interpretations for our players. The team chose to prioritize accessibility, clarity of narrative, and a sense of shared experience, and as a result the possibilities of imagined Yokohama in the digitized game were to some extent curtailed.

In the end, recreating the exact experience of the original players of Trip to Yokohama was impossible. There is no technological process that can erase the time that has passed since its creation or bring the material conditions in which it was played back into reality. And yet, in both the analog and digital versions of the game, there is a sense of discovery, of rushing to an exciting destination, and of having fun doing so. By providing additional context, grounded in historical research and analysis, we were able to give a modern player a glimpse of what this game would have been like to play, why someone might have played it, and what they imagined nineteenth-century Yokohama to be.

[1] For a more thorough explanation of Yokohama’s media appeal, see John Dower, “Yokohama Boomtown,” MIT’s Visualizing Cultures, https://visualizingcultures.mit.edu/yokohama/index.html, accessed on 7/8/2025.

[2] For more information on these games during this period, see Katō Yasuko and Matsumara Tomoko, Bakumatsu to Meiji Esugoroku (Kokusho Kankōkai, 2002).

Feature Image: Utagawa Toyokuni IV’s board game Catalogue of the Trip to Yokohama Sugoroku (Furukawa Katsugoro, 1872) from the University of California Berkeley Japanese Historical Maps Collection.
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Jessa Dahl

Jessa Dahl is the Executive Director of the JapanLab for the 2025-2026 academic year and an Assistant Professor of History at Knox College. Her research is focused on the intersection of transnational and local spaces in Japanese treaty ports, and she is currently writing an urban history of the city of Nagasaki from 1858-1905. During her time as a postdoctoral fellow in the JapanLab, she explored new models of student and faculty collaboration in educational game development (Ready, Set, Yokohama!) and virtual heritage projects (The Crafting Yokohama Project), providing both enriching experiences for students and engaging resources for teaching Japanese history. She continues to explore ways to integrate digital humanities into the classroom, creating tools like this Twine-based digital project decision tree to introduce students and faculty to the many digital platforms available for showcasing innovative student work.

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