Yokohama

Yokohama enters the episode as a harbor city seen from Tiger Tanaka’s house, where James Bond is invited for a nightcap and sworn to secrecy. The city’s distant lights and nearby sea frame a meeting in which an open domestic space becomes the setting for a threat-laden confidence.

Setting

An hour after Tiger invites Bond to his house, the two men sit with a drinks tray as Yokohama’s lights glow deep orange along the horizon. A faint smell of the harbor and sea reaches the room through a wide-open partition leading to the garden. The city is not described through its streets or crowds; it is a distant band of light and an atmospheric presence at the edge of a private conversation.

Tiger’s House and the Meeting

The room’s partitions have been slid back to reveal a bedroom, a small study, and a passage, opening the square room toward the rest of the house and its garden. The design is presented as characteristic of Japanese homes, even those of modest salary-men, with the boundary between inhabitant and nature made deliberately thin. That openness also serves a practical purpose: Tiger explains that opening the house prevents listeners from overhearing secrets through thin walls.

Secrecy and Narrative Role

The conversation turns the hospitable setting into a place of explicit danger. Tiger says the matter is of the highest secrecy, asks Bond to swear not to divulge it, and warns that breaking the promise would leave him no alternative but to kill Bond. Yokohama’s calm glow and the open partitions therefore stand beside, rather than dispel, the threat: the house is welcoming in form, but the confidence shared there carries potentially lethal consequences.