Mode Gakuen Cocoon Tower

What else is close by

The nearest places we have written up, with straight-line distance from here.

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  250 m

  Shinjuku Station West Exit Underground Plaza

  In 1969, a handful of anti-Vietnam War singers with guitars grew into weekly gatherings of several thousand people here. Authorities countered by changing signs from "West Exit Underground Plaza" to "West Exit Underground Passage" and deploying riot police, turning a single word on a sign into an argument over who controlled public space.

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  300 m

  Omoide Yokocho

  «Memory Lane» by Shinjuku's west exit: two alleys of tiny yakitori counters left over from the post-war black market.

• 

  550 m

  Tokyo Metropolitan Government Building

  Kenzo Tange's twin-towered city hall combines monumental late-modern architecture with free observatories overlooking the metropolis.

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  600 m

  Kabukicho

  Japan's largest entertainment district, named after a kabuki theatre that was never built; the Godzilla head looks down from the Toho building.

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  750 m

  Shinjuku Golden Gai

  This maze of tiny two-story bars began with postwar black-market traders and later became an unlicensed red-light district. After prostitution was outlawed in 1958, its cramped rooms became refuges for writers, filmmakers and theater people; regulars Kenji Nakagami and Ryuzo Saki won the Akutagawa and Naoki prizes simultaneously in 1976, sealing the district's bohemian reputation.

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  750 m

  Shinjuku Suehirotei

  This wooden rakugo theater became an unlikely angura venue in September 1967, when Shuji Terayama's Tenjo Sajiki presented its second production, "The Crime of Fatso Oyama," here. The collision of psychedelic experimental theater with a traditional vaudeville house captures the cultural disorder that made 1960s Shinjuku distinctive.