Garapan

Garapan is the largest village on Saipan in the Commonwealth of the Northern Mariana Islands, on the island's west coast. Under Japan's administration of the South Seas Mandate from the 1920s it grew rapidly into a regional capital nicknamed the Tokyo of the South Seas, reaching about 14,000 residents by the mid 1930s, mostly Japanese, Korean, Taiwanese and Okinawan settlers. The 1944 Battle of Saipan devastated the town, which lay largely abandoned until redevelopment from the late 1960s turned it into Saipan's tourism hub, home to major hotels, American Memorial Park and Micro Beach.