(Voice actor) Ms.Marilyn Lo

“Shin” means new. “Juku” is short for “shukuba”, or an inn town. Inn towns were the towns developed for travelers to stay at and rest during their trips. Main routes connecting parts of Japan, starting from Nihonbashi, were built in the Edo period. Among those main routes were the Edo Five Routes. They were Tokaido, Nakasendo, Oshu Kaido, Nikko Kaido and Koshu Kaido. Shinjuku was a post town built on Koshu Kaido which connected Kai province (current Yamanashi prefecture) to Edo. The first inn town from Nihonbashi on Koshu Kaido used to be Takaido. However, because it was more distant from Nihonbashi compared to the other routes’ first post towns, many travelers found it inconvenient. So, townspeople got together and built Shinjuku, the new (shin) inn town (juku). Shinjuku was originally the land where the mansion of a lord of the Naito Family had been standing. A part of his land was used for this inn town. So, it was also called Naito Shinjuku. However, when the samurai era ended with the fall of Tokugawa regime, Shinjuku came into the possession of the newly established Meiji government. They established “Naito Shinjuku Laboratory” in a section of Shinjuku, to test foreign plants and animals to see whether they were safe to import to Japan. This was the origin of the Shinjuku Gyoen National Park. Popular fruits started here; strawberries. They developed domestic varieties from French imported strawberries. There are now huge varieties of strawberries in Japan, but their ancestor was born in Shinjuku. It was the Great Kanto Earthquake in 1923 that led to the large development of Shinjuku. Shinjuku was not damaged much from the earthquake, because it was on the hard ground of the Musashino plateau. And since railroads were already planned to be built there before the earthquake, Shinjuku became a convenient place. With the expansion of businesses such as department stores, theaters and movie theaters, Shinjuku expanded greatly as a downtown and red light district. Shinjuku has many faces. That diversity must be what brought about the special atmosphere of Shinjuku of today. Read about the historical path that Shinjuku followed.