Sakaemachi Arcade

This guide to Sakaemachi Arcade in Okinawa opens with Ushi, an ordinary vegetable seller in one of the market's narrow lanes, and traces the arcade's rougher origins as a scrappy postwar market rebuilt in the late 1940s on land once occupied by a girls' school destroyed in the Battle of Okinawa. It follows the market through decades as a maze of tin roofs and butcher counters easy to overlook, up to a 2004 compilation album that put local musicians, including several market shopkeepers, on record. You'll hear how that recording session set up a reputation nobody in the market expected. Catch it at the Yatai Festival, when the daytime storefronts are shuttered.