1973 Articles
Shinjuku [in Japanese with attached English translation of text] [1973]
This article was written in close collaboration with the architect Peter Gluck, and analyzes the urban qualities of the Shinjuku section of Tokyo, a dense area of activity and commerce at the intersection of nine radiating rail and subway lines that carry over one million passengers a day, still the largest such station in the world. Many of them stop off for shopping and entertainment that has grown in, around, and through the station, including four mammoth department stores and over three thousand small retail shops, restaurants, and bars.
The article describes the history of Shinjuku (literally “new post town”) as it emerged in the Edo period as as the first stop on the Kōshū highway leading west out of the city. The article analyzes the structure of the area as a station, as a market, and as a “fairyland” in which to seek a variety of experiences. Special attention is given to the sprawling inter-connected underground area and its linkages to the street level through stairs and elevators. The article features over fifty illustrations, both black-and-white and color, and numerous maps and diagrams, including a projection of what the area might look like a decade later in 1984.
The article became the inspiration for the exhibition “Shinjuku JAPAN: The Phenomenal City” that was shown in the winter of 1974-75 at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City, the 50th anniversary of which was celebrated in October 2025 in a series of events and exhibitions in the Shinjuku area.
Citation: Peter Gluck and Henry Smith, "Shinjuku 「新宿」," A+U: Kenchiku to toshi 『Ａ＋Ｕ 都市と建築』 [Architecture and Urbanism], August, 1973. pp. 132-156. [Note that this is for the original article in Japanese with a one-page English summary. The full English translation appended here was not published separately.]
Geographic Areas
Files
-
Length check https--www.columbia.edu-~hds2-pdf-1973_Shinjuku_A&U_with_English_translation.pdf
application/pdf
11.9 MB
Download File
Also Published In
- Title
- A+U: Kenchiku to toshi
More About This Work
- Academic Units
- East Asian Languages and Cultures
- Published Here
- May 28, 2026
Notes
This article about Shinjuku was my first publication to represent a complete reorientation of my research, leaving behind the radical student movement of the 20th century and embarking on a broad project to study the history of the city of Tokyo from its Edo origins. Having gone through grade school in small mining towns (lead in southeast Missouri, zinc in far northern New York state), my first experience of living in a big city was my year at the Stanford Center in Tokyo in 1962-63, when my small apartment was just three trolley stops from Shinjuku, which I visited at least once or twice a week for shopping and exploration of its labyrinthine spaces. My three years of thesis research gave me a wider sense of the city, living in an apartment near Seijōgakuen-mae on the Odakyū line, just twenty minutes from Shinjuku, which I passed through daily on trips to research at the University of Tokyo library at Hongō, or to interviews with the many former Shinjinkai members living in or near the city.
Moving as widely around Tokyo as I did, the sense of its complex topography became ingrained, bringing to mind the classic distinction between low-lying areas along the Sumida River, known as Shitamachi and the higher and more hilly areas to the west that came to be called Yamanote, “towards the hills.” (This distinction would provide the title for Edward Seidensticker’s influential history of Tokyo, High City, Low City: Tokyo from Edo to the Earthquake [New York: Knopf, 1983]. )
