Harajuku

Before the boutiques and the cosplay photographers, Harajuku was a post station. The name joins hara, meaning open field or meadow, with juku, the old word for lodging and waystation. During the Edo period, travelers crossing the Musashino plain paused here between the capital and the western provinces. The stop was modest: an inn district at the edge of a great city, named for what lay underfoot.

The Meiji Restoration of 1868 transformed the neighborhood almost immediately. The new government carved out land nearby for a Western military training ground, and after 1945 the United States Army occupied Washington Heights, a residential complex that now underlies Yoyogi Park. American soldiers and their families brought record shops and a casual consumer culture that leaked into the surrounding streets. By the late 1950s, Harajuku had absorbed more of postwar California than of the old Musashino plain.

The 1964 Tokyo Olympics demolished Washington Heights and replaced it with the Olympic Village. The athletes left, but the area's cosmopolitan energy remained. In the early 1970s, young Tokyoites began gathering on Omotesando, the broad boulevard leading to the Meiji Shrine, to trade clothes, dance, and simply be seen. By 1980, Takeshita Street, a pedestrian alley barely wide enough for two people to pass, had become the proving ground for Lolita fashion, decora, and dozens of micro-styles that no other city had named yet.

Harajuku reached its widest English-speaking audience through Gwen Stefani, who in 2004 introduced four Japanese-American dancers she called the Harajuku Girls to American pop culture. The name landed in fashion journalism as shorthand for Tokyo street style, though many in the neighborhood found the reduction unsatisfying. The meadow-inn has outlasted every trend it has birthed. On any Sunday afternoon the bridge near Yoyogi Park still fills with people who dress as if clothing itself is an argument.