History
Shinjuku Station opened in 1885 as a stop on Nippon Railway's Akabane–Shinagawa line, today's Yamanote Line, in what was then a quiet outskirt of Tokyo. The Kōbu Railway, ancestor of the Chūō Main Line, arrived in 1889, the Keiō Line in 1915, and the Odakyū Odawara Line in 1927, by which point the surrounding area had become a major commercial hub after the 1923 Great Kantō earthquake. A 1933 urban-planning revamp by Kensaburō Kondō shaped the modern west-side concourse. JR East's Shinjuku platforms received station numbers in 2016, the same year a 32-storey terminal expansion opened, and a long-term station-area redevelopment begun in July 2021 is scheduled to continue into the 2040s. The Jōetsu Shinkansen's still-active 1973 Basic Plan even designates Shinjuku as the line's southern terminus, with right-of-way reserved beneath the station for a connection that has never been built.
History summarized from Japanese & English Wikipedia · last reviewed 2026-05-18.
Notes
More than three million passengers pass through on an average day — about 3.59 million in 2018 — moving across roughly 35 platforms that serve 11 railway lines run by five operators (JR East, Keiō, Odakyū, Tokyo Metro and Toei). No other railway station in the world handles as many.