Shinjuku has two faces. North and east of Shinjuku Station lies the vast entertainment district that encompasses the neon canyons of Kabukicho. With its densely packed buildings, each one housing numerous bars, clubs, and shops, Kabukicho really is a town that never sleeps. Meanwhile, to the west and south of the station, one finds a completely different landscape: a forest of skyscrapers occupied by city government offices, luxury hotels, and commercial buildings.

Until the middle of the Edo period, Shinjuku was nothing but a hayfield along the Koshu Kaido, the highway connecting Edo with Kami-Suwa, a castle town in the mountains to the west. Back then the center of Tokyo was Nihonbashi. There were 44 post-station towns along the Koshu Kaido until 1699, when a forty-fifth stop was added. That inn town grew into the place known today as Shinjuku - which literally means "new inn." Travelers who set out from Nihonbashi in the morning would make their first stop at Shinjuku, which grew into an agglomeration of businesses and amusement spots that soon made up Edo's foremost pleasure quarter. Kabukicho is known today as a place that can meet every basic human need around the clock, and that character had already been established by the Edo period.

Shinjuku continued to develop as a transportation hub in the Meiji period (1868-1912). Although Shinjuku Station was largely leveled by the air raids of 1945, the east side of the station, including two department stores that had survived the bombing, quickly resumed operations immediately after the war, and Kabukicho was reborn as a new entertainment district. The revival of the east side of the station was followed in the mid-1950s by the launchings of three large department stores on the west side of the station. From then on, both sides of Shinjuku bustled with foot traffic.

But it was in the 1970s that the area around the station's western entrance began to develop in earnest. The appearance of the first skyscraper, a large hotel, in the early 1970s, ushered in a flurry of construction projects. This boom resulted in the office buildings, luxury hotels, and other towers that make up the forest of skyscrapers now covering what once was just a hayfield. In 1991 the Tokyo Metropolitan Government moved its offices here. These now span over 20 high-rise buildings holding a total of 120,000 workers.

Just as the area around Shinjuku Station's east entrance preserves the unique ambience of an inn town in all of its disarray, the area around the west represents the new face of Shinjuku; a place born of a departure from tradition. Visitors to Shinjuku can easily glimpse both of these faces.