Harajuku and Omotesandō 原宿・表参道
Every Sunday from 1977 to '98 it closed to cars: up to 10,000 young people danced here.
Harajuku began as a post station on the Kamakura road in the pre-Edo period, and that is exactly where the name comes from: 原宿, ‘the station of the fields’. The railway station opened in 1906. In 1919, with the founding of Meiji Shrine, the Omotesandō avenue was widened and laid out as the formal approach to the shrine, lined with zelkovas. In the '70s the youth fashion that had been concentrated in Shinjuku moved here and to Shibuya; in the '80s Takeshita-dori became the stage of the takenoko-zoku, the groups of teenagers who danced in the street in their costumes, and in the '90s the cradle of the kawaii style.
Tokyo
Meiji-jingumae 'Harajuku'
