ORIGIN OF YOKOHAMA’S YC&AC
The history of the YC&AC has always been recognized as starting one day in 1868 in the dining room of the Yokohama home of 23-year-old Scotsman JP (James Pender) Mollison, who was mad about cricket and who had only recently become a local resident. On that day, he and his cricketing friend Ernest Price and a few others founded the Yokohama Cricket Club (YCC) with Mollison as the president and Price as secretary.
YOKOHAMA IN 1868
1868 was the year that the Meiji Restoration took place and the Meiji period started (Mollison watched the Emperor’s procession from Kyoto to Edo [Tokyo] as he passed through Hodogaya!) Non-Japanese had only been residing and doing business in Yokohama since July 1 1859 and numbered only a few hundred. In 1868 Yokohama was seen as place with great potential because it was the gateway for doing business in Japan- a huge new market. However, it was no sporting paradise and life there was fraught with danger.
‘Life in Yokohama in the early days was singularly pleasant. Every type of sport was readily accessible.’
The sports club known today as the Yokohama Country and Athletic Club (YC&AC) played a major role in the creation of the idyllic sporting environment fondly remembered in these words describing Yokohama life in the 1890’s. The words could equally apply to today and to almost all of the time during the last 150 years of the YC&AC’s existence.
Almost every western sport seen in Japan today was first introduced to Japan by the non-Japanese in Yokohama and the YC&AC and the other sporting clubs that it later absorbed were the driving force in their early development in the country.
BADMINTON
Table tennis
Baseball
Cricket
Soccer Over – 35
Golf
