Eat Okinawan food in the factory ward that Okinawa built
A 1927 Okinawan quarter, mapped by residents
Tsurumi Ward holds an Okinawan migrant quarter around Nakadori and the Shioda district. Okinawans came from the late Taisho era for landfill work on the Tsurumi River estuary and for earthquake reconstruction; after 1945, US administration of Okinawa meant they could not return, and a labour camp hardened into a permanent community. The Tsurumi Okinawa Kenjinkai dates to 1927.
Why it's unique
This is the oldest continuously settled Okinawan migrant quarter on the Japanese mainland, and it is still a working neighbourhood rather than a themed street. The food is cooked by and for the community.
Tsurumi is also the city's South American centre, with roughly 44% of the Brazilian nationals registered in Yokohama living in this one ward, so the industrial belt reads like nowhere else in the country.
Before you go
Chase the hand-made map of 19 Okinawan restaurants around Shioda, compiled by a residents' group with opening hours and recommended dishes. It is handed out at the listed shops, a rice shop, the local post office and a credit-union branch. The ward also publishes an Okinawa Town Tsurumi Map, revised March 2025, free at the ward office and community centres.
Go on an ordinary weekday evening in Shioda, when it reads as a neighbourhood. For the festival, the Tsurumi Uchina Festival is in early November at Irifune Park: about 50,000 people, an Eisa summit, a mass sanshin performance, and stalls sent directly by villages in Okinawa. The 1980 Kenjinkai Hall on Nakadori is due to relocate by 2027 with no new site chosen, so do not plan around its current address.