Kabukicho and the Godzilla Head

Look up at the Shinjuku Toho Building and you will see a life-size Godzilla head peering over the eighth floor. It roars and lights up on the hour from ten in the morning until eight at night. The head is positioned at fifty metres above street level to match Godzilla's official canon height. It is the most Tokyo thing imaginable — a kaiju guarding the entrance to the city's most notorious entertainment district.

And that district is named after something that never existed. Kabukicho takes its name from a kabuki theatre that was planned for this area but never built. After the Second World War, a local businessman proposed constructing a grand kabuki theatre to anchor the neighbourhood's redevelopment. The plans fell through, but the name was officially adopted on April first, nineteen forty-eight — and nobody ever bothered to change it. An entire district named after a phantom building.

Before any of this, the area was a swamp called Tsunohazu. In nineteen twenty, someone decided a swamp was the perfect location for a girls' school. Then the war came, the area was bombed flat, and the postwar reconstruction turned it into Tokyo's primary entertainment and red-light district. After Japan's nineteen fifty-seven Anti-Prostitution Law banned the practice in designated zones, sex workers from the official Shinjuku red-light district migrated here to Kabukicho, which was not an official zone and therefore operated in a legal grey area.

Today Kabukicho is a neon-drenched maze of restaurants, bars, karaoke joints, host clubs, and entertainment venues. It has cleaned up significantly since its rougher decades, but it still hums with an energy you will not find anywhere else in Tokyo. And Godzilla watches over all of it, roaring on the hour.