History
Shinjuku Station opened in 1885 as a stop on Japan Railway's Akabane-Shinagawa line (now part of the Yamanote Line). Shinjuku was still a quiet community at the time and the station was not heavily trafficked at first. The opening of the Chūō Line (1889), Keiō Line (1915) and Odakyū Line (1923) led to increasing traffic through the station. Subway service began in 1959.
In August 1967, a freight train carrying jet fuel bound for the U.S. air base in Tachikawa derailed and caught fire on the Chūō Rapid tracks.
The station was a major site for student protests in 1968 and 1969, the height of civil unrest in postwar Japan. On October 21, 1968, 290,000 marchers participated in International Anti-War Day taking over Shinjuku station and forcing trains to stop.
There have been plans at various points in history to connect Shinjuku into the Shinkansen network, and the 1973 Shinkansen Basic Plan, still in force, specifies that the station should be the southern terminus of the Jōetsu Shinkansen line to Niigata. While construction of the Ōmiya-Shinjuku link never started and the Jōetsu line presently terminates in Tokyo Station, the right of way, including an area underneath the station, remains reserved.
On May 5, 1995, the Aum Shinrikyo doomsday cult attempted a chemical terrorist attack by setting off a cyanide gas device in a toilet in the underground concourse, barely a month after the gas attack on the Tokyo subway which killed 12 and injured thousands. This time the attack was thwarted by staff who extinguished the burning device.
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“Classes struggle, some classes triumph, others are eliminated. Such is history; such is the history of civilization for thousands of years.”
—Mao Zedong (1893–1976)
“We don’t know when our name came into being or how some distant ancestor acquired it. We don’t understand our name at all, we don’t know its history and yet we bear it with exalted fidelity, we merge with it, we like it, we are ridiculously proud of it as if we had thought it up ourselves in a moment of brilliant inspiration.”
—Milan Kundera (b. 1929)