Around Harajuku Station: before it was Harajuku

Harajuku Was Once a Roadside Settlement

Long before Harajuku became an international fashion destination, its name was associated with an old road and a place where travelers stopped. The Edo-period geographical work Shinpen Musashi Fudokiko explains the name through a station on the Kamakura road, which connected Kamakura with regions farther north. One interpretation is that hara referred to open fields and juku to a lodging settlement. However, the exact origin of the first part is not firmly documented. The name Edo Harajuku appears in the sixteenth-century Odawashu Shoryo Yakucho, showing that it was already established well before modern Tokyo. Harajuku later existed as a village and an administrative place name. That official neighborhood name eventually disappeared, but the railway station preserved it.

→ Walk along Harajuku-dori and look for the Harajuku birthplace stone monument at Myoenji Temple.

Sources (in Japanese): 渋谷区立図書館・原宿が昔、何郡だったか知りたい, nippon.com・原宿の地名と鎌倉街道, CBCテレビ・原宿村と発祥之地の石碑, 東京都公式観光サイト GO TOKYO・原宿

Was Yoyogi Park Once an American Military Neighborhood?

On December 19, 1910, Japanese Army Captain Yoshitoshi Tokugawa made Japan's first officially recorded powered flight at the Yoyogi military parade ground. An intriguing detail complicates the story: a contemporary newspaper reported that Captain Kumazo Hino had flown approximately 60 meters five days earlier, on December 14. The parade ground had opened in 1909, replacing an area that previously included mulberry and tea fields.

After World War II, the site underwent another remarkable transformation. In 1946, it became Washington Heights, a residential compound for American occupation forces. For the 1964 Tokyo Olympics, the former American housing was converted into accommodation for international athletes. On 1967, Yoyogi Park officially opened to the public.

Today, two surviving landmarks make this extraordinary sequence tangible: a monument commemorating the beginning of Japanese aviation and a preserved building used by Dutch athletes during the 1964 Games. This peaceful green space has been a military training ground, an American residential district, an Olympic Village, and finally a public park.

→ Find the Japanese aviation monument and the preserved Olympic Village building once used by Dutch athletes.

Sources (in Japanese): 東京都公園協会「代々木公園50年の歩み」, 東京都公園協会「代々木公園」, 渋谷区立図書館「都立代々木公園」, 東京都公園協会「変わる代々木公園」