Japan to revise official romanization rules for first time in 70 years

Many who study Japanese, probably prefer the current official system. It more closely reflects Japanese kana spellings. There are multiple ways of writing syllables like "ji" in Japanese and that's why there are multiple ways of writing it in nihonshiki romanization. There are variants of Hepburn that have the same property, but few actually write it strictly - even long vowel sounds may not be shown.

Reminds me of Mandarin romanization. Pinyin is quite logical for Mandarin speakers, and students studying the language, but misleading if you just approach it assuming English sound values. The system more closely adapted to English (Wade-Giles romanization) as actually used (no one bothers with all those apostrophes) effectively ignores a bunch of important distinctions in Mandarin.

In practice, romanization is trying to achieve two separate goals. The two goals are mutually incompatible, or at least largely work against each other.

One goal is to accurately transliterate the language according to its own internal logic. It might mirror aspects of the language's writing system, carefully distinguish between all possible sounds in that language, and it might use morphemes as the language's speakers think about them. For example, a hypothetical romanization of English might always use the letter z to write plurals, even though the actual sound varies from z ~ s depending on environment. This regularity is useful for learners of the language, for academic study, and so on.

The other goal is to make it pronounceable to someone who doesn't speak the language in question. When done for a linguistic audience, this is universally done with the International Phonetic Alphabet. But there is no commonly agreed upon way of representing any other language's sounds in English spelling. And so people end up using transliteration systems - often really complicated ones intended for specialist use - when what they really want is a simplified phonetic transcription, something that tells you how to approximately pronounce the word.

That means terms like “shinjuku” will probably survive as retro touchstones - good vaporwave material, when people look back and say “remember when sinzuku used be spelled ‘shinjuku’ and it sounded like…”

Good for tee shirts and tchotchkes.

You've got it backwards. Shinjuku is sticking around as the official spelling, or rather becoming the official spelling by adopting Hepburn romanization. The pronunciation wouldn't be any different in either case.

I completely misread the article too (and the 'Additional context' article posted here), I think because it words things strangely but also the whole message is about change and all the examples seem to be of places where the well known spelling is already the Hepburn spelling. So the change is to official spellings that aren't used?

Not knocking him, just clarifying. It is terribly written (The Japan Times is an English-language Japanese publication, you can safely knock them for it), but the (untranslated) chart tells the tale: Kunrei-shiki on the left and Hepburn-shiki on the right. What the article doesn't make clear is that Hepburn-shiki is what we're already used to seeing overseas, so for us, nothing is changing. Shibuya is still Shibuya, but the written Romanization is not the best pronunciation guide no matter what form of Romaji.