Eat the egg-custard ice cream Japan first tasted in 1869
Japan's first ice cream, 1869 recipe
Machida Fusazo sold Japan's first ice cream, called aisukurin, from an ice-water shop on Bashamichi in 1869. Yokohama Bashamichi Ice sells a recreation of that recipe from Red Brick Warehouse No. 2.
Why it's unique
This is where ice cream entered Japan. The 1869 recipe was eggs, milk and sugar, chilled with ice shipped down from Hokkaido, and the result was closer to frozen custard than to modern ice cream. It initially failed because a serving cost the equivalent of more than 10,000 yen.
The custard flavour sold today is a recreation of that original formula, so you can eat the thing itself in the city that introduced it, rather than reading about it on a plaque.
Before you go
Order the custard flavour, not the modern ones: that is the 1869 recreation. Residents buy the cheaper Takanashi-made version at a pharmacy on Bashamichi rather than at the Red Brick Warehouse shop.
The bronze that marks the story, Hongo Shin's Sun Mother and Child, donated by the Japan Ice Cream Association in 1976, was deliberately placed across the street from the actual shop site, so the thing you photograph is not the spot. Time a visit for 9 May, Ice Cream Day, when Bashamichi runs a giveaway.