Okinawa City Koza — American Town Jazz District

Koza exists because 30,000 American airmen need somewhere to spend Friday nights, and it's been serving that function since 1945 when the occupation forces bulldozed three farming villages to build Kadena Air Base. The district's main drag—officially called Chuo Park Avenue but everyone calls it Gate 2 Street—runs perpendicular to the base's pedestrian gate, which disgorges service members every evening around 18:30 when the duty day ends. By 21:00, the street is half Japanese locals, half American military in civilian clothes, and the bars switch their background music from Okinawan pop to whatever was on Billboard's top 40 three months ago.

The music scene developed organically in the 1970s when Okinawan musicians started learning rock and blues from vinyl records sold at base PX stores, then jamming with off-duty airmen who'd brought instruments from the States. That cross-pollination produced a distinctive sound—Okinawan scales and rhythms played on electric guitars with American song structures—that you still hear in venues like Mito, where 68-year-old Chatan Kenichi plays sanshin (three-string lute) through a Marshall amp while his son plays Louisiana-style slide guitar behind him. The district doesn't feel like Japan and doesn't feel like America; it's a third thing that exists because the other two collided here 80 years ago.