New Shinjuku JR Station Exit – Southern Terrace

It seems that while I was sleeping on the job (seeing as the very first post I wrote on this blog back in November 15th 2008 was about Shinjuku Station), Shinjuku JR Station got a new exit added to its already existing Southern Terrace exit, right in front of the massive Southern Exit. It can’t be well known yet as there were very few people using it and I only found it by being to tired to mind where I was going, figuring I’d get out somewhere. It is roughly in the same place as the old New Southern Exit (it would have been interesting if they had kept the naming convention and named this one New New Southern Exit).

Shinjuku is the busiest train station in the world with numerous train lines and several train companies as well as two different subway companies making it easily the most important transport hub in Japan, handling between one and two million passengers per day. Considering this it is easy to imagine that most people and especially most tourists dread using the station in the beginning, it is just so easy to get lost and if you exit at the wrong place it may take you quite a while to walk to where it was you were supposed to go in the first place. But there are two simple rules to remember if you want to avoid getting lost, at least in the JR part of the station.

1. If you are heading down towards an exit, you will end up in one of the eastern or western exits.
2. If you are heading up towards an exit you will end up in one of the several southern exits.

If you decide to meet someone make it absolutely clear where it is you are supposed to meet them as it is very easy to get confused. There are for example police boxes and Starbucks cafes near most of the exits, so using one of these as a landmark might not be very helpful. Still it could be worse: I hold the Shibuya subway stations to be one of the most confusing in the world, and I use it a lot! These are the exits with ticket gates: East Exit, Central East Exit, West Exit, Central West Exit, Southern Exit, New Southern Exit, Southeastern Exit, Southern Terrace Exit. Quite a list, and if you were to add the dozens of other exits for the other lines it would become a very confusing list very quickly.