TOKYO
Shinjuku District's
Shinjuku Station
Shinjuku Station, one of the world's busiest transport hubs. [Source]
Shinjuku at night, Tokyo. [Source]
As the success of the Shinjuku Station grew, commuter trains were added to extend routes to suburban areas. By the 1910s, Shinjuku Station became the terminal for the western part of the city accessible by buses, streetcars, and some train lines. In another part of Tokyo, the Tokyo Station was constructed in 1914. It was situated near the Imperial Palace and one of the busiest financial districts in Tokyo, making it one of the biggest platforms. Tokyo Station also became the official entrance to the capital and the largest terminal in Asia. It is iconically known as the site of technological innovations but this terminal was not as central to the city’s social and spatial changes as Shinjuku Station was [1].
Since the Edo period, Shinjuku have been a center of daily commute. Travelers ranging from samurai, townspeople, merchants, entertainers, prostitutes, beggars, and monks traveled through the Shinjuku area to reach the city of Edo. It wasn’t until 1885 when the Shinjuku Station was opened as a stop along Japan’s Railway Shinagawa line. This station was remembered to be associated with soil carts and the smell of manure for the Shinjuku area was rural and agricultural workers brought horses, cows, and crops through this station [1].
The urban designs of early Japanese train stations led to interaction between the functional purpose of this form of transport and the informal settings of commerce and play. This symbolized a Meiji-era modernization of new urban behavior. Jilly Traganou, an architecture and design historian, states:
“Thus, the double character of the Japanese modernization process can be detected in the dynamics of the station areas: productivity, control and efficiency as authorized by the state’s ideal, on one side; informality, escape, opportunism, initiated by private enterprises, or even by unauthorized endeavors, on the other [1].”
A present day traveler reminisces the beauty and uniqueness of the Shinjuku Station as she steps out of a taxi,
“A remarkably virtual-looking skyline, a floating jumble of electric Lego, studded with odd shapes you somehow wouldn’t see elsewhere, as if you’d need special Tokyo add-ons to build this at home. Logos of corporations she doesn’t even recognize: a strange luxury, and in itself almost worth the trip. She remembers this now from previous visits, and also the way certain labels are mysteriously recontextualized here” [2].
This description of the modern Shinjuku Station is a good example of how over time, the development of urban space is never stagnant and always changing. After the 1923 earthquake, urban planners drew a new plan to renovate several station plazas such as Shinjuku. The purpose was “to serve the “expand suburbs and accommodate growing traffic needs, by building more public and private roads and railways as well as new plazas in front of major stations.” But urban planners struggled to create architecturally unified streetscape [3].
References:
[1] Freedman, A., & Kawabata, Y. (2011). Shinjuku Station Sketches. In Tokyo in transit Japanese culture on the rails and road. Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press.
[2] Mansfield, S. (2009). Dream Messenger. In Tokyo: A cultural history. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
[3] Hein, C. (n.d.). Shaping Tokyo: Land Development and Planning Practice in the Early Modern Japanese Metropolis. Journal of Urban History, 447-484. Retrieved March 16, 2015, from http://juh.sagepub.com/content/36/4/447.full.pdf html