新宿

The name Shinjuku joins two Japanese characters: shin (新), meaning new, and juku (宿), meaning inn or lodging place. The Tokugawa shogunate established the Koshu Kaido road in the early 17th century to connect Edo with the Kofu basin to the west. By 1698, the post town at Naito Shinjuku had failed due to its proximity to the city, and a revised charter issued in 1699 re-established it as a fresh waystation. That re-founding gave the settlement its name: the new lodging, in contrast to older inn districts closer to the castle.

The juku character has deep roots in Japanese administrative geography. Post towns along the major Edo-period roads were called shukuba (宿場), and they provided regulated lodging, horses, and porters for travelers carrying official documents. Shinjuku's inn district served travelers heading southwest toward the mountains, including samurai on official journeys and merchants carrying inland goods. The Naito domain, a daimyo estate of roughly 135,000 square meters, occupied a large swath of what is now Shinjuku Gyoen national garden.

The Meiji era dismantled the post-town system after 1868, and Shinjuku became a commercial district by default. Train service began in 1885, and the area grew as workers commuted into the expanding capital. The 1923 Great Kanto Earthquake devastated eastern Tokyo more severely than the west, and thousands of residents relocated to Shinjuku, pulling commercial activity with them. By the 1930s, Shinjuku had a reputation for cafes, theaters, and tolerance for unconventional social life.

Today Shinjuku Station handles an average of 3.5 million passengers per day, the highest recorded daily volume of any railway station in the world. The east exit opens onto Kabukicho, Japan's largest entertainment district; the west exit faces skyscrapers built from the 1970s onward, including the Tokyo Metropolitan Government Building completed in 1991. Golden Gai, a cluster of roughly 200 tiny bars northeast of the district, preserves the physical scale of post-war drinking culture. The name Shinjuku spans 300 years: from a necessity of Edo-era road travel to a shorthand for the extremes of modern Tokyo.