Shinjuku Station

Shinjuku Station spans the boundary of Tokyo's Shinjuku and Shibuya wards, opened in 1885 as a stop on the Nippon Railway's Akabane to Shinagawa line and gradually expanded over more than a century into the busiest railway station in the world. Its complex is shared by multiple operators, principally JR East, the Odakyu and Keio private railways, and the Tokyo Metro and Toei subway systems, together offering dozens of platforms connected by an extraordinarily dense network of underground and elevated passageways, arcades and more than two hundred exits. Guinness World Records has recognized it as the world's busiest station, with an average of roughly 3.5 million passenger movements a day in recent counts. Its scale and layout, built up incrementally rather than to a single master plan, make it notoriously difficult for first-time visitors to navigate despite extensive signage.