Shinjuku means “new station” in Japanese, because back near the start of the Edo period — call it the 1630s — it was the site of a new waystation along the Koshu Kaido, a major highway to the nearby capital city of Edo. These days it’s a ward, or administrative neighborhood, of the city of Tokyo. It’s home to the Tokyo Metropolitan Government Building, a bunch of skyscrapers built since the World War II air raids, a red-light district called Kabuki-cho, the gay-friendly Shinjuku Ni-chome neighborhood, and more electronic signage than the human brain can comfortably process.
When you’re booking a hotel in Shinjuku, you’ll often see recommendations that promise you’ll be “close to Shinjuku Station.” That makes it sound like you’re a block away from a small place. No, it means you’ll be a few blocks away from one particular entrance among hundreds to a very large place, Shinjuku Station, the busiest railway station in the world (and yes, that is in Guinness World Records). About 3.6 million people pass through the station daily. It boasts 52 platforms, God knows how many shops and restaurants, over 200 exits, and 15 acres of underground floor space — all of which can overwhelm travelers who aren’t used to metropolitan public transit. It’s also a major speed bump between you and your destination, especially if you’re lugging a bunch of heavy bags around. There are plenty of elevators and escalators, but even so you’ll often find yourself doing heavy lifting while dodging waves of hustling commuters. Knowing what I know now, it’s no wonder the Japanese invented the games Space Invaders and Galaxian. Here, “close to Shinjuku station” (East Exit B13), you’ll find the world-famous “3-D Cat” billboard meowing loudly at commuters and other travelers, along with talented street musicians, enough delicious street eats to support a thousand food tours, and a branch of the overstuffed Don Quijote store chain, aka “Donki.” Visit Donki for all your cheap souvenir and exotic Kit Kat candy flavor needs, as will every other tourist in Tokyo whatever time of day or night you happen to be there.
We took a break from all that chaos at Shinjuku Gyo-en, a 144-acre national garden. Here you’ll find traditional Japanese landscaping as well as an English garden, a French formal garden and other relaxation areas. We agree with the sentiment about Shinjuku Gyo-en Yasunari Kawabata expressed in his 1954 novel The Sound of the Mountain: “You can stretch out. It’s like getting out of Japan — I wouldn’t have dreamed that there was a place like this right in the middle of Tokyo.” Like Central Park in Manhattan, it’s a vast green space that makes living among the visual clamor and steely verticality of Shinjuku neurologically feasible.
Speaking of clamor, our next stop was Samurai Restaurant Time, an eyeball-pummeling tourist trap produced by the same folks who brought you the erstwhile Robot Restaurant. By night this joint’s a bikini bar called Gira Gira Girls, but its afternoon samurai show is almost family friendly. (We were, however, asked to do a complimentary shot during one intermission.) Don’t think you’ll learn much about Edo period history. Instead, you’ll wave a glowstick like a simpleton as dancers in samurai costumes do cartwheels and wave plastic spears at each other among projections, lasers, LED screens and all sorts of frenetic stagecraft. It’s a kitschy good time.
I was able to reschedule teamLab Planets for Saturday evening, which did require a long subway trip back toward Maihama. If you think of most art museums as collections of visual and sculptural art in beautiful but non-representational settings, teamLab is a collective of digital artists who create museums in which the setting itself is representational and sculptural. “Planets” is the group’s most popular exhibition among dozens worldwide. When you enter the Planets gallery, you’ll be asked to remove and store your shoes, as you’ll spend the first chunk of your visit wading through knee-deep water (which is, by the way, full of disinfectant, so relax). After drying your feet, you’ll have opportunities to walk over soft cushions, navigate a balance maze, slide down a ramp and so on, all while beautiful and sometimes interactive video clips are projected all around you. Step on a digital koi fish, and it might explode into flower petals or smaller aquarium fish. Interrupt a stream of falling water, and that might incite a musical tone or change the lighting in the room. Visitors explore the museum at their own pace, in no particular room order, and it feels custom-designed for the Instagram era. I’m told the attached ramen-ya is pretty good, too, but we emerged after that restaurant closed.
Instead, we bought dinner at a konbini (convenience store) near our hotel — which is fine, by the way! Everything you may have heard about Japanese 7-Elevens is true: Their food selection is incredible and the quality unimpeachable. We were even bigger fans of konbini chains FamilyMart and Lawson — especially the former, as it offers both Yogur Squash [sic], Amanda’s favorite new soft drink, and Famichiki, hotbox karage (fried chicken) as good as the best KFC you’ve ever eaten at a fraction of the price. I miss you, Famichiki. I miss you so much!
Sunday morning took us to the quieter Asakusa neighborhood, home of the Buddhist temple Senso-ji and its adjacent shopping street, Nakamise Dori. The temple was founded in the year 628 when, according to legend, two fishermen snagged a statue of the mercy goddess Kannon from the Sumida River and found themselves supernaturally unable to return it. The red, three-quarter-ton lantern hanging from the imposing Kaminarimon (“Thunder Gate”) is another Instagram standby. In addition to taking beautiful photos and snacking on street food, the thing to do here is pay 100 yen for your very own omikuji, a strip of paper similar to the fortune in a Japanese-American fortune cookie. (Yep, it turns out those cookies are in no way Chinese. They were created by a Japanese-American bakery in San Francisco and probably inspired by Kyoto’s tsujiura senbei cookies, which cradle omikuji.) If you like the fortune you receive, great! If not, no big deal, as you’re out only about two-thirds of a dollar and besides, you can dispel that unwelcome fate by tying your omikuji around a nearby rack. Threat averted!
That night we strolled through the PG-13 gaudiness of Kabuki-cho, especially a notoriously narrow, twisty, intoxicating-in-more-ways-than-one yokocho (pub crawl alley) known as Golden Gai. This neighborhood was once so unsavory that nearby Omoide Yokocho was nicknamed Piss Alley. There are bars here with signs banning foreigners, but you won’t have trouble finding dang good ramen, sushi, tempura or yakitori (meaning grilled food on skewers) to accompany the offerings at any number of tiny, niche bars.
That night we paid our first visit to a Japanese karaoke bar with private singing rooms, which was so much fun we booked another the night before we left Japan. That second time, as I waited in the lobby for Amanda to come out of a restroom, I observed three Japanese salarymen entering a karaoke room along with two young women in slutty-Halloween-style French maid outfits. That’s a thing in Japan: attractive, rented, female companions dressed as maids. I don’t believe the women are sex workers per se, just pretty young conversationalists who hang out with local and foreign quasi-incels and tell them how awesome they are for an agreed-upon price. For further details, talk to someone who wasn’t happily married and visiting Tokyo alongside his wife. Maid girls aside, the singing while drinking was a blast, and the cocktails were surprisingly potent and cheap.
The last neighborhood we visited on our first Tokyo-proper leg was Harajuku, famous for its flamboyant fashion and pop culture scene, plus the stunning Shinto shrine Meiji Jingu that offers expansive grounds around an evergreen forest. Both Senso-ji and Meiji Jingu are examples of a depressingly recurrent theme on our whirlwind tour of Japan: namely, they’re mid-20th-century reconstructions of sacred places destroyed by Allied bombers during World War II. However you might feel about the ethics of retaliatory bombing, and I’m not too certain how I feel myself, the fact is you’d be hard pressed to blame the Japanese for holding a grudge against American visitors. Yet we never caught a whiff of that, not even once. Ask yourself: Would we Americans be as friendly and welcoming to a wave of Saudi Arabian tourists who don’t speak much English?
Next stop: the geothermal resort town of Hakone! Our splurge hotel awaits!
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