A quick walk up Kabukicho Ichiban Dori on a Saturday night in June, 2023. Those of us who love Shinjuku love this quality: the endless flow of people along these streets and the richness of the mixture these people constitute in their totality. There aren’t a lot of bourgeois posers around, but there are all kinds of other people, mixing and merging on the fabled thoroughfares. Calling Kabukicho ‘the red light district of Tokyo’ does not really do justice to the cosmopolitan nature of the place, which is never unidimensional. Above all else, what Shinjuku and Kabukicho both have is energy–endless human energy and activity.
