Roadside Station Kadena

Kadena Town background; since we are beginning the whole book here I need some real detail about the history of Okinawa and American occupation. • 82% (find that stat) of Kadena Town is the base. In 1945 the American forces came ashore at Kadena and the township just north of it, at Sunabe and Toguchi beaches. Japanese military workers had cleared an airfield that the Americans rapidly took over and kept improving, which became today’s Kadena Air Base. Today the US military occupies most of the town of Kadena; almost all of the Kadena Air Base flight line on one side of a slim strip of businesses and neighborhoods and then a long stretch of the ammunition storage base. Most of Kadena Town’s coastline belongs to the base. • For years Roadside Station Kadena’s museum featured a topographical diorama of the area, detailed down to the orange striped pylons marking the flightline’s landing approach; it was removed in the 2022 renovations and replaced with more modern exhibits. The museum is organized and maintained by Kadena’s Town government.

• The Roadside Station opened in X. Originally the observation platform was just the roof of the building but in 2022 the museum expanded over the parking lot to the edge of Highway 58. Now the observation platform goes to the very edge of the property before the highway. I have visited Kadena Roadside Station a few times over the last ten years, and I have not seen anyone use these coin-operated binoculars. Perhaps people do. What I have seen is many hobbyist photographers who bring their own equipment and take photographs of departing and landing planes with foot-long zoom lenses. • Beneath the platform is an atrium with food stalls and tables. The result is a peculiar sort of attraction: an anti-military museum and observation platform over a food court visited by many military servicemembers. There’s also a tourist shop selling the kinds of local delicacies and souvenirs common to Roadside Stations all over Japan. Reflections on this contradictory marriage of purposes: links to reviews of the food stalls, my images of servicemembers there. Say something about how military base tourism is a thing in Okinawa though not one really promoted by the national tourism promotion institutions. Share the bike ride tour. Okinawa is home to most of the WWII memorials that attract international visitors. Alongside Hiroshima and Nagasaki. • The decibel meter. Share the youtube link. Noise pollution, quote from a couple of sources. How the sounds are familiar to me. If you have been to an airshow or heard a flyover, if you were in New York in the days after 9/11, you will recognize this sound. • What is it that we’re looking at? A parade of aircraft, assiduously documented by whom, staff, hobbyists at the observation platform? I remember reading that this has partially to do with a kind of surveillance and mapping; someone thinks it’s important to keep track, partly because of the crashes in the past. And something else, can’t remember what, need to find that ancient source. It is a municipal duty, was the suggestion. • Photograph postcards available for all the planes you might see there. You can take them home with you. • A notable view from the platform before the flight line begins: the garden. • link to Histreet, another municipal museum.