Harajuku and Omotesandō

photo by Daderot · CC0

photo by Dylan McGannon · CC0

Every Sunday from 1977 to '98 it closed to cars: up to 10,000 young people danced here.

Stepping out of Harajuku Station you enter Takeshita-dori straight away, the narrow pedestrian street full of signs where the kawaii style was born in the '90s, at the 6%DOKIDOKI shop opened in 1995. Behind the low, colourful buildings, the tree-lined avenue of Omotesandō changes character: zelkovas planted in 1919 as a solemn approach to Meiji Shrine, now lined with the shop windows of Louis Vuitton, Dior and Tod's, designed by architects such as Tadao Ando and Toyo Ito.

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.

ℹ️ Takeshita-dori is a narrow pedestrian street, crowded all year and even more so at weekends: the shops generally open around 10:00–11:00. Omotesandō is a public street you can walk at any hour; the brand shops keep shopping-centre hours, generally until 20:00–21:00. Harajuku Station is on the JR Yamanote line, 4 minutes from Shinjuku; Meiji-jingūmae Station (Tokyo Metro, Chiyoda and Fukutoshin lines) serves the same neighbourhood from the Omotesandō side.

🚉 Meiji-jingumae 'Harajuku' · 4 min walk

Sources: ja.wikipedia.org · en.wikipedia.org · en.wikipedia.org · gotokyo.org · nominatim.openstreetmap.org · onedayawaytravel.com

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