Shinjuku's physical character is shaped by elevation. The Yodobashi Plateau, the highest ground in the ward, runs through the station area, while the Kanda River cuts through the northern Ochiai and Totsuka neighborhoods near sea level. The highest point in the ward is Hakone-san in Toyama Park, a modest 44.6 meters above sea level -- not dramatic terrain, but the kind of stable bedrock that matters profoundly in an earthquake-prone city. When the Great Kanto Earthquake struck on September 1, 1923, this stability proved decisive. While neighborhoods like Nihonbashi were devastated, Shinjuku's east side escaped with relatively minor damage. The post-quake rebuilding that followed planted the seed for the skyscrapers that would later define Nishi-Shinjuku, making it one of the few areas in Tokyo with a genuine high-rise skyline.

In the 1960s, Shinjuku became the epicenter of Tokyo's avant-garde, its creative ferment drawing comparisons to Greenwich Village in New York. Directors of the Japanese New Wave -- Nagisa Oshima, Koji Wakamatsu, Toshio Matsumoto -- set films in Shinjuku's streets. In 1967, the Art Theatre Guild opened the Scorpio Theatre in a cinema basement, a venue named by novelist Yukio Mishima after Kenneth Anger's film Scorpio Rising. It was at the Scorpio Theatre that Mishima screened his own film Patriotism for the first time. Around the Hanazono Shrine, Juro Kara's Red Tent theater company staged its first performances. Butoh dancer Tatsumi Hijikata was a regular presence. At Cafe Fugetsudo, artists, intellectuals, and counterculture figures gathered -- Takeshi Kitano, painter Taro Okamoto, filmmaker Shuji Terayama, and transvestite actress Akihiro Miwa among them. In the Golden Gai, a warren of shanty-style bars east of Kabukicho, artists and protesters drank elbow to elbow in rooms that could barely hold ten people.

Shinjuku is not one neighborhood but a mosaic. Kabukicho, Tokyo's famous red-light district near Seibu-Shinjuku Station, pulses with bars, restaurants, and neon signage. Shinjuku Ni-chome, a few blocks south, holds the world's highest concentration of gay bars. Nishi-Shinjuku, the area west of the station, is a forest of skyscrapers anchored by the Tokyo Metropolitan Government Building, where the governor's office and metropolitan assembly relocated from Marunouchi in 1991. The 58.3-hectare Shinjuku Gyoen blends Japanese, English landscape, and French formal gardens on the grounds of the old Naito estate. Okubo, near Shin-Okubo Station, is Tokyo's historic ethnic Korean neighborhood. Kagurazaka, on a hill descending toward Iidabashi, was once one of Tokyo's last remaining geisha districts and now hosts a sizable French community. Totsuka, surrounding Waseda University and Takadanobaba Station, thrums with student nightlife. The ward holds 355,981 residents within its boundaries, but the daily population -- workers, commuters, tourists pouring through Shinjuku Station's 3.64 million daily passages -- dwarfs that figure many times over.

The Tokyo air raids of 1945 destroyed almost 90 percent of the buildings in and around Shinjuku Station. Only in Kabukicho was a grand reconstruction plan carried out; elsewhere, the surviving roads and rail lines dictated the post-war street grid. The present ward was established on March 15, 1947, from the merger of the former wards of Yotsuya, Ushigome, and Yodobashi. In 1964, marathon and 50-kilometer walk courses for the Summer Olympics passed through its streets. A year later, the Yodobashi Water Purification Plant -- the city's first modern water treatment facility, built in 1898 -- closed, and skyscrapers rose on its former grounds. By the time the Tokyo Metropolitan Government moved its headquarters to Nishi-Shinjuku in 1991, the ward had fully earned its designation as Tokyo's fukutoshin -- its secondary center. The word acknowledges what Shinjuku has always been: not the old capital, but the restless second city that grew up on solid ground while the first one kept shaking.