Why you should experience Shinjuku Southern Terrace in Tokyo, Japan.
Shinjuku Southern Terrace is an elevated urban promenade where Yoyogi's railway infrastructure, late twentieth-century redevelopment, pedestrian planning and Shinjuku's southward commercial expansion converge above the Odakyu Line.
Set along the railway corridor near Koshu Kaido and just steps from Shinjuku Station, the promenade extends roughly 350 meters across artificial ground constructed above the Odakyu tracks, linking the station area with Odakyu Southern Tower through a continuous pedestrian route. Broad paving, planted sections, retail pavilions and open plazas turn infrastructure once dominated by railway movement into a sequence experienced almost entirely on foot, with the tracks remaining concealed beneath much of the route. Crossing the elevated promenade reveals how deck construction reorganized movement around Shinjuku's southern edge by separating substantial pedestrian circulation from the railway infrastructure below. The result is a public route where an engineered platform, commercial architecture and pedestrian circulation transformed the southern station district into a coherent extension of Central Shinjuku.
What you should know about Shinjuku Southern Terrace.
Shinjuku Southern Terrace is best known for translating Odakyu's 1973 “Boulevard Concept” into an elevated pedestrian district extending the company's chain of properties southward across railway infrastructure. Sakakura Associates conceived the larger sequence as a connection between Odakyu Department Store, Mosaic Street, Odakyu Shinjuku Mylord, Shinjuku Southern Terrace and Odakyu Southern Tower, creating a continuous development strategy across properties assembled during different periods. Artificial ground above the Odakyu Line supplied the structural basis for the terrace, allowing shops and pedestrian circulation to occupy space directly over active railway tracks. Sakakura Associates developed Odakyu Southern Tower and Shinjuku Southern Terrace with Taisei Corporation and Odakyu Construction, completing a 36-story tower containing approximately 79,561 square meters alongside the elevated commercial promenade in 1998. The project received a Special Prize in the 40th Building Contractors Society Awards in 1999, followed by recognition for the wider Shinjuku Station South Gate district in the 1999 Townscape Awards and a Shinjuku Urban Design Award in 2000. The 1973 concept, railway deck, coordinated architectural program and subsequent design recognition established Shinjuku Southern Terrace as the pedestrian component of a development strategy pursued across a quarter century.
Pedestrian circulation became the defining mechanism of the completed southern station district as the terrace created a new north-south route above Odakyu railway operations. East Deck extended that circulation across the JR tracks toward Takashimaya Times Square, linking development on opposite sides of one of Tokyo's densest rail corridors through an elevated pedestrian connection. The approximately 350-meter promenade then carried that movement toward Odakyu Southern Tower, where retail occupied the lower levels beneath offices and hotel floors in the 36-story building. Odakyu's approximately 4,100 square meters of rentable terrace space placed commercial activity directly along this engineered circulation route, turning railway air rights into inhabitable urban ground. East Deck, the 350-meter promenade, Odakyu railway deck and Southern Tower demonstrate how Shinjuku Southern Terrace converted fragmented infrastructure into a continuous pedestrian system at the station's southern edge.
How to fold Shinjuku Southern Terrace into your trip.
Shinjuku Southern Terrace works as the urban hinge within a daytime progression connecting imperial horticulture, a century-scale forest experiment and electronic media culture across Shinjuku and Yoyogi.
Begin at Shinjuku Gyoen, where land granted by Tokugawa Ieyasu to Kiyonari Naito in 1590 passed through an agricultural experiment station and Imperial Botanical Garden before horticulturist Fukuba Hayato commissioned Versailles professor Henri Martinet to prepare a Western garden scheme in 1900. Five years of reconstruction produced the basis of the 1906 garden, combining Martinet's landscape planning with Japanese garden traditions and horticultural research that had already produced Japan's first full-scale heated greenhouse in 1892. Continue to Meiji Jingu, where forestry experts designed a self-regenerating sacred forest for the shrine dedicated to Emperor Meiji and Empress Shoken, drawing donated trees from across Japan and volunteer labor into a project completed in 1920. Dr. Seiroku Honda helped direct a woodland planned across generations; the present 70-hectare forest contains 234 tree varieties and survived the 1945 destruction that consumed most of the shrine buildings before their 1958 reconstruction. Conclude at NTT InterCommunication Center, developed by NTT from a concept initiated in 1990 to commemorate a century of telephone service in Japan and established inside Tokyo Opera City Tower in 1997. Virtual reality, interactive multimedia, exhibitions, performances, symposia and the InterCommunication journal extended the institution's founding relationship between science, technology and artistic culture into an enduring program devoted to electronic communication and media art. The progression moves from Fukuba Hayato and Henri Martinet's transformation of an imperial horticultural ground through Seiroku Honda's century-scale forest planning into NTT's institutional exploration of electronic culture, placing Shinjuku Southern Terrace within a wider district repeatedly remade through ambitious experiments in landscape, infrastructure and technology.
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