Original article - http://www.asahi.com/national/update/0418/TKY200904180166.html
   
Dear Respected Readers,

Namaste :)

I am now staying at my brother's home in Kanagawa prefecture, which is situated next to Tokyo and its capital Yokohama city has the second largest population in Japan after Tokyo. This year Yokohama celebrates its 150 years of opening its port to the overseas, after Japan's 250 years of national isolation period.

Let me briefly explain you the story of Yokohama and its interesting linkage to India.

Way back, when the port was first opened, a large chunk of textile merchants came from Bombay (now Mumbai), and settled in the Yamashita-cho area. This area where they inhabited was once called as "Little India". They made lots of wealth and surely contributed to Yokohama's growth too, thus their brilliant skill of business became well known in the city. This fact made Bombay and Yokohama to be sister cities now.

Over the time the city experienced major hardships such as Great Kanto Earthquake (1923) and World War II (1945), due to which many of those Indian people either shifted their base to Kobe (another port city situated western part of Japan next to Osaka) or went back to India. However, recently the city is taking tremendous effort to call back those Indian businessmen back to Yokohama. Diwali in Yokohama is one of such events, organized by Yokohama Indian Cultural Exchange Committee (http://india.hamacco.net/).

This year in the heart of Yokohama like Minato Mirai, beautiful waterfront business area, 150 years anniversary events are being held one after another. If you have opportunity to visit Yokohama, you will see a couple of Giant Spiders at the event venues in front of Akarenga Souko (Red Brick Warehouses) Park. Those are 12 meters high and 37 tons weight, creation of European Art Group. 14 people are operating inside a spider to make its movement look natural..

Usually these spiders are within the cage but at certain occasion they come out to the city to play their drama!!
http://event.yokohama150.org/topics/vol_3.html

I hope you are lucky enough to meet those spiders when you visit Yokohama :)