Koza: Gate 2 and the centre

Business Center Street came into being in 1950, for orderly trading.

The street begins in front of Gate 2 of the Kadena base and runs down to Route 330. Among the bars there is one, the Prince, that is the oldest ‘A-sign’ venue on the street: the big A stood for APPROVED, the permit that the American administration gave to venues where servicemen were allowed in, with strict inspections of hygiene and facilities, from 1953. Only three of those venues remain in the whole centre. From here start Chūō Park Avenue, which in 1950 was called Business Center Street, and the Ichibangai, which in 1975 was the first covered arcade in Okinawa.

Koza is the name the city bore until April 1974, when it merged with the village of Misato and became Okinawa City; it is the name everyone still calls it by. It grew up around Kadena Air Base, and Okinawan rock was born in its venues. Chūō Park Avenue was redeveloped in 1982 for a Japanese clientele and in 1987 received the Ministry of Construction award.

ℹ️ You get round on foot, at any hour, and it takes a good hour. The venues with live music open in the evening. The Music Town car park costs one hundred yen an hour, open all day, two hundred and thirty spaces. Two circular buses, the Goya and the Koza, run every forty-five to fifty minutes for a flat one hundred yen.

🚉 胡屋 · 4 min walk

Sources: en.kozaweb.jp · en.kozaweb.jp · okinawa-labo.com

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