Urasoe City Mayor Tetsuji Matsumoto announced Thursday that the city and the local supermarket and department store operator San-A have signed a contract for a lot of reclaimed land on the coast off Camp Kinser.

According to the contract, a newly established San-A affiliated real estate company will build a large-scale commercial facility on the land. The new facility will host a San-A shopping mall with 78,150 square meters of floor space, which is slightly more than the 78,000 square meters of the AEON Mall Okinawa Rycom in Kitanakagusuku that opened at the end of April on the former Awase Gold Course site.

In addition to the shopping mall, the plans call for con constructing a hotel with about 200 guest rooms on the site. The facility is expected to be the largest of its kind on Okinawa.

The company is planning to start construction as soon as possible and have the mall open by 2019. The hotel construction is scheduled to begin after the mall is completed with aim to have the hotel open in 2022.

A San-A spokesman explained the company reasoning for the foray stating, “The area is close to Naha City, and the access from the airport and Naha Cruise Ship Terminal to the area is easy.” The landfill at the site is already completed. The value of the San-A site was reportedly set at ¥4.303 billion.

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