#8 The Next Station is…Shinjuku

Stepping outside of the train doors, absolutely crammed into our little metal cars, I am floored by the sheer amount of absolute humanity bustling around me at Shinjuku Station. There are people heading all directions in this concrete and steel maze, little yellow raised lines for the blind and color-coded patterns sprawling out in every direction. You can hear birds above the hum of people shuffling and light conversation, but they aren’t real birds. They have speakers hidden throughout the subway station to help guide the blind (and poor lost tourists) to an exit.

As a little country boy raised in a town of around 4,000 people, it’s safe to say that crawling through this man-made maze was a novel experience. Sure, I’ve been to New York, Chicago, Dublin, and London (to name just a few of the bigger cities from previous travels), but I’ve almost always had a friend or a guide who knew more than I did to help get me from point A to point B, a city slicker to help shepherd me so I could frolic in my flannel through the midnight streets. But here, the only guide I had was my Google Maps trying to help me crawl out of this labyrinth with directions that only sometimes made sense. And even the greater metropolitan of New York was only half the size of this madman’s etch-n-sketch.

For my fellow stat nerds out there, here are some interesting tidbits about Shinjuku Station you might be interested in as laid out by Emma Steen in Time Out Tokyo:

1. Shinjuku Station holds the Guiness World Record for being the busiest station in the world (about 3.5 million people pass through it a day)
2. It has about 36 platforms in just that one single station
3. It has twelve different lines running through it with about five different railroad companies operating those lines
4. It has over 200 different exits

And here’s my own personal input: while all the signs have English on them, you’re really going to want a navigation app running because getting out of there isn’t always so simple. Or, better yet, follow the crowd. Eventually, most of those people are aiming to leave the station, so eventually you’ll find the right path. And anyone is better than being trapped in the subterranean liminal space with only kanji for landmarks.

Even with all the signs, the color-coded directions, and the birds to tweet me to the exit…I still got lost. More specifically, I got lost trying to meet up with some friends who have been to Tokyo a time or two. They didn’t know how to communicate to me where to go and I didn’t know how to communicate to them where I was. So, I wandered. I got lost in the Lumine shopping building. I found my way out to Kabukicho and wandered the streets for a bit, then got lost trying to find my way back to the west concourse in that luggage-laden hellscape.

Eventually, we were able to meet up when I made the bold suggestion of trying to find a spot outside the station to rendezvous, and there in lies the secret: find a landmark elsewhere, cause God help you and your whole party if you try to figure that stuff out underground. All of this, of course, goes hand-in-hand with the reality of trying to dodge and weave between other tourists and the hassled-looking locals who really cannot miss this next train, and they must pick their way around clueless folks like yourself to not be late for work.

But, once you’re finally there, taking in the Tokyo city air, it seems like it all might have been worth it. If you’ve been on the Shogun band wagon, then you know how the winding streets and freedoms of “Edo” would become emblematic of this now multi-faceted cityscape. The buildings aren’t as tall as New York City or Chicago, which makes sense considering the seismic shenanigans taking place beneath the Pacific Rim, but they seem to stretch out into infinity. At night, with their LED and neon signs pulsating, the black leather and chains of the Shinjuku underworld coming up to drink and flaunt their quirks in the face of conformist culture, it all almost feels like a scene from Blade Runner or like a real-world Cyberpunk.

Narrow, grungy alleys crisscrossing like a drunk puzzle in the Golden-Gai Yokocho? Check. 3D cats spouting love while people bustle to capture a selfie with this animated megafauna? Check. Hustlers or “touts” who try to lure you into their bars with promises of “big titties” and “cheap drinks.” Check and double-check. Word to the wise…don’t listen to these latter individuals. At best, you’re leaving with a much lighter wallet. At worst, you ain’t leaving with a wallet at all. And you will be approached. Trust me. Maybe because I was alone, maybe because I look the way I do, but regardless, I was approached around twelve times by different men (and a couple of women) trying to lure me into their establishments.

My philosophy living in America applies to Japan as well: if you don’t use my name, I don’t know you. The best you are getting out of me as a daijoubu desu in this country, and that’s only so I can keep up the pretense of being polite.

But Shinjuku isn’t all sleaze. I will be honest; it is the first place in Japan where I could feel a little bit comfortable. Not only was it filled with other gaijin (foreigners), but even a lot of the local people dressed kind of like how I dressed back home. Black clothes, lots of metal, band T-shirts, and loud and exuberant voices. All the comforts of home. Which seemed so out of place in Japan, with its emphasis on wa and doing your best not to disturb the people around you.

Most places in Japan are stunning beyond imagination, but only Tokyo feels so completely unique depending on what part of the city you happen to be visiting. The Meji Jingu shrine in Shibuya was a stunning, massive complex rich with history, tradition, and elegance. Likewise, at Yogogi Park (which was at the height of hanami season when we arrived), families were spread out among the sakura blossoms with their little picnics and games. Meanwhile, in Harajuku, middle school girls got pictures in front of pictures with their favorite idols while smiling parents herded their little ones away from the micropig cafés and bought little sweets for the whole family to share. Goth Lolita fashion fought for street space alongside the “long, longer, longest potatoes.” And then in Akihabara, every flavor of obsession was catered to, whether that was girls dressed up as maids, about a thousand variety of trains, electronic data boards from defunct Russian electronic companies, retro and new arcade machines, or (as was the case for me) floor upon floor of manga.

Tokyo is a universal city in the sense that no matter what type of person you are, you are likely to find a ward that will fit your tastes. Classy and reserved? Shibuya. Nerdy? Akihabara. Fashion forward? Harajuku. Grungy and down to drink the night away? Shinjuku. Nothing is too out there for Tokyo.

But we had settled on Shinjuku, so for better or worse we settled in with the grunge. We stayed at a capsule hotel, the “one-star” Shinjuku Kuyakusho-mae Capsule Hotel. At this establishment, there were many firsts for me. It was my first public bath, for one. Boy howdy…that’s an experience. For those of you unfamiliar with Japanese bathing practices, let me go ahead and let you know…you bathe completely naked. It is considered “unclean” to bathe with any clothes on. As an American, my discomfort was forefront and evident. It required quite a few drinks to work past.

Not only do you strip down the birthday suit, but you also must perform this sort of cleansing ritual, proving to all the other patrons of the bath that you are clean enough to share the same water as them. It means sitting in front of a little mirror and scrubbing every single inch of your body with soap, shampoo, and doing your best not to accidentally spray your neighbor in the face with your shower hose. Most of the Japanese people I observed spent at least five to ten minutes just rinsing their bodies before they even got into the tubs themselves. As a gaijin with a lot to prove, I spent fifteen minutes scrubbing. I got significantly fewer mean glares than some of my gaijin compatriots who got a quick rinse and headed straight in. Cleanliness is king in Japan.

The baths themselves were a super pleasant experience. At the capsule hotel where I stayed, there were three separate baths: one for hot water, one for cold water, and one that was hot water with jets. If you got too hot, you could simply adjust to a colder temperature or sit in one of the plastic chairs and let all the family jewels hang barren for onlookers to subvertly goggle at. But to be honest, after about ten minutes in the bath, you get so used to the sight of other people nude that you begin to kind of tune it out. Sure, we are all secretly looking at each other’s junk, but its in a “well…so that’s there” kind of way rather than a “look at this dude!” sort of way. Whether positive or negative.

And then there’s the sauna. I’ve been in saunas before and they are hot, of course. But Japanese saunas are on a completely different level. After about four minutes in the sauna for the first time, I thought I was going to pass out. I hopped into the cold pool and tried to keep from going unconscious in the water, the room spinning worse than if I had drunk six consecutive shots. Suffice to say that dipping into the waters of the public bath was a disconcerting but memorable experience.

Just as memorable, but less enjoyable, was the state of the capsule hotel itself. First off, I stayed in many hostels in my youth, and capsule hotels are a step above those. At Shinjuku Kuyakusho-mae Capsule Hotel, you get a little private room, but only a thin vinyl screen separates you from the other two-hundred or so bodies sharing the same floor. The entire time I was in my little coffin, I imagined an earthquake crushing and entombing me then and there. The sheets were stained and the bed was rather uncomfortable to add to this anxiety. But then again, you get what you pay for. It was hands-down the cheapest hotel around during the peak of hanami season. But still…for $65 a night US equivalent, I guess I expected more. At least the opportunity to get more bath towels…which I found out I was limited to only my initial set. Oh and also…even if you had booked consecutive nights, you had to leave the hotel between 11:00am and 3:00pm for “cleaning.” No sleeping in. No leaving your luggage in you locker. You could store your bigger stuff with everyone else’s, but that’s about it.

And then there was the worst part of all: the other foreigners. Let me start by saying that I don’t mean everyone. There are plenty of people from home and elsewhere that have been respectful and pleasant humans, going out of their way to make sure they hold onto their trash for the next available trashcan. But some of the foreigners staying at the Shinjuku Kuyakusho-mae Capsule Hotel did not fit into this category. Hearing the hard R from a polish guy, or Australians bragging about sleeping with the ladies of the Japanese red light just kind of left me feeling a little gross and put a damper on an otherwise incredible experience. I mean, more power to you, do what makes you happy…but bragging about it loudly while blowing smoke into passersby while blocking an older Japanese gentleman from getting his stock into the Family Mart just seems so damn rude. I haven’t been here all that long, but already I found myself judging these tourists. And felt ashamed to be among them. What a weird experience.

I can understand why people in this country do not always like foreigners. However, as Kyota Ko (a Japanese author and YouTuber) has commented, the tides are changing. Thanks to social media and the internet (and hopefully blogs such as this), more people around the world are gaining access to how to properly behave and respect their host country for their time within it. So, with a narrative outline as convoluted as Shinjuku Station, I hope you have gotten a bit of a mish-mashed glimpse into the biggest city in the world. And maybe a little bit of advice of how not to be while visiting.

And now, to end with etymology:

“Tout.” While a verb, in this case I mean the noun. This is one of those rare words that hasn’t really undergone a whole lot of change in recent years. It was reconstructed from Proto-germanic *tut- “to project and modified into the Old English *tutian, totian which meant “to stick out, stand out; peep, peer.” It’s first iteration in modern English came in the form of a “thieves’ cant” which was used to “act as a lookout, spy on.” The noun came about as initially a slang for “scout, watchman” by 1718 and in 1853 as “someone who solicits custom.” While the mid-nineteenth century seemed obsessed with using the word for horse racing and betting, we can see from a modern perspective how this has become a more…promiscuous sort of showcasing (“Tout”).

Works Cited

Steen, Emma. “5 Most Confusing Train Stations in Tokyo.” Time Out, 26 Sept. 2024, https://www.timeout.com/tokyo/things-to-do/most-confusing-train-stations-in-tokyo . Accessed 8 April 2025.

“Tout.” Etymonline, https://www.etymonline.com/word/tout. Accessed 8 April 2025.