Shinjuku, Tokyo

The first thing to understand is that the station has no single concourse. JR East sits in the middle, Keio and Odakyu run their own terminals to the west and south west, the Marunouchi Line comes in under the east side, and the Toei Oedo and Toei Shinjuku lines run beneath everything on their own alignments. Each of those has its own ticket gates, and once you are through a gate you are in that company's passage network, not a shared one.

The practical consequence is that the exit you want is chosen before you tap out, not after.

The second thing is that the underground passages continue for several hundred metres past the gates in every direction, and the surface entrances they lead to have names of their own. Shinjuku Nishi-guchi, Shinjuku-sanchome, Seibu-Shinjuku and Tochomae are separate stations with separate fares, all within walking distance of the JR gates and all connected underground. This is a genuine advantage once you know it: in bad weather you can cross most of the district without going outside.

The one rule that removes most of the difficulty

If you are arriving in Shinjuku for a specific thing, do not get off at Shinjuku. Take the Marunouchi Line to Shinjuku-gyoenmae for the garden and the Toei Oedo Line to Tochomae for the towers, and you step out of a small station straight onto the street you wanted. Both are a single stop from the main station and both are covered by the same 24-hour subway ticket at $6.48 (¥1,000) that you were probably going to buy anyway.

The main station is worth entering only when you are actually changing trains or heading for the shops attached to it.

One more practical point about leaving. The bus terminal above the New South Exit is where the overnight coaches to Kyoto, Osaka and the mountains leave from, and it is a fifteen-minute walk from the East Exit with luggage. If you are catching one, allow for that walk rather than for the map distance.

Coin lockers across the whole complex fill by mid-morning on weekends, and the reliable overflow is the paid luggage rooms in the basements of the department stores rather than more lockers.

The Tokyo Metropolitan Government Building has two observation decks, one in each of its towers, and neither charges anything. The south deck is open from 09:30 to 22:00 with last entry at 21:30, which makes it the only high viewpoint in the city that is free after dark. The north deck runs 09:30 to 17:30 with last entry at 17:00.

The closure days are deliberately staggered, the south closing on the first and third Tuesday of each month and the north on the second and fourth Monday, so on any given day one of them is normally working. Full detail, including how the queue behaves, is on the observation deck page.

The comparison worth making is with the paid decks elsewhere in the city. A ticket for Shibuya Sky or the Skytree buys height, a designed experience and a timed slot that guarantees you get in. The free decks here buy a good west-facing panorama with Mount Fuji visible on clear winter afternoons, and cost nothing but the walk from Tochomae Exit A4.

If your trip has one high view in it, the paid ones are better. If it has three, this should be one of them.

What else is on this side

Omoide Yokocho, described below, is on this side of the tracks despite feeling like it belongs with the nightlife. So does the large electronics retail cluster around the West Exit, which is the same trade Akihabara is known for and often cheaper for cameras. After dark the building facade of the metropolitan government building carries a projection-mapping show, run by the city and free to watch from the plaza.

Beyond that, Nishi-Shinjuku is offices: pleasant to walk, with almost nothing open on a Sunday.

What is straightforwardly there: cinemas, a bowling alley, several hundred restaurants, karaoke chains, arcades, capsule hotels, a large modern tower with a hotel and entertainment floors on the western edge, and the Godzilla head that looks over the street from a hotel terrace. Hanazono Shrine sits on the eastern side, about ten minutes from the station, and is a working Shinto shrine with a flea market on some Sundays. None of that requires any special care.

Families walk through it, the main streets are lit and busy until the small hours, and violent crime against visitors is not the risk.

The risk is a specific and well-documented one: bars that quote no prices, reached by following someone who approached you in the street. The pattern is consistent enough to state as a rule rather than a warning. If a person on the pavement offers to take you to a bar, a club or a show, the answer is no, every time, without exception and without needing a reason.

Anywhere worth going to in Shinjuku is found by walking in off the street yourself, and every honest bar in the district either posts its charges at the door or tells you when you sit down. This is the single most useful sentence on this page and it costs nothing to follow.

The tourist-trap question, answered plainly

Kabukicho as a place is not a tourist trap. It is a real entertainment district that Tokyo residents use, and the crowds in it are overwhelmingly local. What is a trap is a small number of venues inside it that price by the customer rather than by a menu.

Robot-restaurant-style theatre shows, hostess and host bars, and anything advertised by a tout belong in that category by default. The ordinary izakaya, ramen counters, karaoke chains and cinemas do not. Walking the district costs nothing and is worth an hour on any evening; entering a venue you did not choose yourself is where the money goes.

One practical note on hours. Kabukicho has a curfew culture rather than a legal closing time: the last trains leave the station between about midnight and 00:30, and the district's own rhythm changes sharply after that, becoming louder, drunker and more male. If you are not staying nearby, plan the evening around the last train rather than around when you feel like leaving. Getting around Tokyo sets out how the last-train problem works across the network, and taxis from here at 01:00 are expensive and slow.

Start with the fact that decides the evening: there is no Golden Gai cover charge. There is no association tariff, no published rate and no authority that sets one. Each bar is an independent business, most of them tiny and family-run, and each decides for itself whether to add a seating charge on top of the drinks.

Some charge nothing. Some post a figure on a sign by the door, in Japanese and often in English too. Some apply it only to first-time customers.

Anyone quoting you a single figure for Golden Gai is generalising from the two bars they went into.

What that means in practice is simple. Read the door before you open it. A bar that wants your custom will have written its charge, its opening hours and often the words welcome or English menu on a board outside.

A bar with nothing written and a closed curtain is not hostile, it is a regulars' bar, and walking past it is the correct response rather than a missed opportunity. Walking all six lanes takes about ten minutes and gives you a dozen candidates with legible signs, which is a far better method than picking the first door you reach.

How the lanes actually work

The bars are themed to a degree that surprises people: film bars, punk bars, jazz bars, horror bars, bars devoted to a single author. Capacity is the constraint, not price, and a bar with six seats and five regulars in it will genuinely be full. Most open around 20:00 and run late; a significant number close on Sundays.

Cash is still the norm in the smallest places. If you want to look at the lanes rather than drink in them, go at about 17:00, when the lanterns are lit and the alleys are empty, and photograph them then.

If the idea of choosing blind is the obstacle, that is exactly what the evening backstreets walk is for at $22.21: ninety minutes with a local guide through Kabukicho, these lanes and Hanazono Shrine, which at minimum leaves you able to come back on your own the next night. The longer food walk does the same job through four eateries and about thirteen dishes, and is a dinner rather than an orientation.

The difference is that Omoide Yokocho is about food. It is a strip of roughly sixty tiny counter restaurants, most of them grilling yakitori and kushiyaki over charcoal, with a handful of ramen and soba counters. You eat there; you drink alongside the food.

Golden Gai is the reverse. That also means the seating charge question mostly disappears here: you order dishes and drinks off a menu, and the bill is the sum of them. Cash is preferred at many of the stalls and some do not take cards at all.

The lane opens for dinner rather than for lunch, and the grills are properly going by 17:30. Seats are the scarce resource: each counter has six to ten of them, and from about 18:30 on a Friday or Saturday you queue or you walk on. Two people can usually be seated somewhere within ten minutes; a group of five cannot, and should not try.

The alley is roofed, narrow and thick with charcoal smoke, which is part of the point and also a reason to leave a good coat at the hotel.

The name, and what it tells you

The lane grew out of a postwar black market beside the tracks and kept the improvised layout, which is why the buildings are one room deep and the upper floors are reached by ladder-steep stairs. Its old nickname refers, unflatteringly, to the era's lack of plumbing; the modern alley has none of that problem, but the name survives in guidebooks and confuses people about the state of the place. It is clean, it is legal, and it is one of the few surviving pieces of that Tokyo anywhere near the centre.

What is down there is not a supermarket. It is a hall of individual counters, each run by a separate confectioner, butcher, pickle-maker, tea merchant or bakery, most of them long-established businesses with a single specialism. Bento boxes are assembled and sold whole; seasonal sweets change with the month; the wrapping is done at the counter and takes as long as the transaction.

Prices run from a few hundred yen for a single pastry to figures a visitor would not believe for a boxed melon.

For a traveller the halls do two useful things. They solve dinner on a night when you do not want to queue anywhere, because everything in them is sold to take away and most stores discount prepared food in the last hour before closing. And they solve gifts, since almost everything is already packaged for giving.

The department stores themselves publish their opening hours store by store rather than as a district timetable, so check the specific shop's own site for the day you are going; most run to around 20:00 with the basement closing last.

Where else the money goes here

Shinjuku is a shopping district before it is a nightlife one, and the mix is unusually wide: the department stores at the east exit, large electronics chains at the west exit, discount stores open around the clock in Kabukicho, and Korean groceries and cosmetics a couple of stops north at Shin-Okubo. If you are pricing a trip rather than shopping on it, what Tokyo costs has the daily figures, and tax-free purchasing rules are worth reading before you spend, since they apply per store and per day.

Admission is $3.24 (¥500) for an adult, $1.62 (¥250) for students and visitors over 65, and free for children of junior-high age and under. There is no reservation, no timed slot and no queue worth the name outside cherry-blossom season. The closing hour moves three times a year, at 16:00 from 1 October to 14 March, 17:30 through spring and late summer, and 18:30 from 11 June to 31 July.

The garden closes on Mondays, and on the following weekday when a Monday is a national holiday, plus the New Year period from 29 December to 3 January.

Two things to know before you go in. Alcohol is not permitted inside, which makes it a different proposition from a Tokyo park; nor are sports equipment and musical instruments. And the Monday closure is the single most common wasted walk in this district, because it coincides with the day much of the rest of the city closes too, which is set out in full on what is open on Monday.

The garden's own page, its seasonal detail and the three separate entrance gates are covered on the Shinjuku Gyoen guide.

A short version is two hours: out of the West Exit, up to the free deck for the panorama, back down through the tower district, and into Omoide Yokocho when the grills start. That gets you the geography, the view and dinner, and it can be dropped into a day that started somewhere else entirely.

On timing across the week: Monday removes the garden, Sunday thins out Golden Gai, and the last trains between about midnight and 00:30 set the real end of the evening. Rain barely matters here, since the underground passages, the station complex, the department stores and the arcades connect for most of the distance. The one weather-dependent thing is the deck view, which is worth checking against a clear day if Mount Fuji is what you came up for.

Where Shinjuku fits in a trip

Most first-time itineraries put Shinjuku in the evening and something else in the daytime, which is right. It sits on the western side of the Yamanote loop, four minutes from Harajuku and seven from Shibuya, so the three of them make an obvious west-side day that ends here after dark. Pairing it with Asakusa or Odaiba on the same day means crossing the city twice and is the mistake the neighbourhoods hub exists to prevent.

Where the district sits against the rest of the city is set out on the Tokyo city guide homepage.