By Yoshi | Japan Unveiled
In the summer of 2016, I drove to a small town in Gifu Prefecture called Hida-Furukawa (飛騨古川). It is a lovely place — an old merchant town with whitewashed plaster walls, sake breweries, and a canal lined with carp — and on the day I visited it was considerably more crowded than its small permanent population would ordinarily generate. The additional visitors were not there for the town’s traditional architecture, though many of them photographed it; they were there because specific streets, specific bridges, and a specific hilltop shrine in the town had appeared in the animated film Your Name (君の名は — Kimi no Na wa), Makoto Shinkai’s 2016 film that had recently become the second highest-grossing Japanese film of all time.
The visitors were engaged in seichi junrei (聖地巡礼 — sacred place pilgrimage, literally “holy ground pilgrimage”): the practice of visiting real-world locations that have appeared in anime, manga, or related media, treating those locations as destinations of personal significance because of their association with the specific fictional works that give the visitors’ lives specific meaning.
This practice — which has grown from a niche activity of the most dedicated fans in the early 2000s to a commercially significant tourism phenomenon affecting dozens of Japanese municipalities annually — is one of the most interesting expressions of what the fan relationship with fictional worlds produces when it encounters the real world, and it raises specific questions about the nature of place, meaning, and the relationship between imagination and physical experience that deserve examination beyond their commercial dimensions.
The Origin of Seichi Junrei: How It Began
The specific practice of visiting locations that appeared in anime and manga developed gradually through the 1990s and early 2000s, emerging from the intersection of several cultural trends: the development of the otaku fan community’s specific deep engagement with fictional worlds, the growth of the internet as a platform for sharing the location discovery information that seichi junrei requires, and the specific aesthetic turn in certain anime toward grounded, photographically accurate location depiction that made the real-world identification of fictional locations both possible and rewarding.
The early seichi junrei sites were identified and documented by individual fans who recognised specific buildings, streets, or landscapes in anime backgrounds and traced them to their real-world originals through a combination of geographic knowledge and methodical research. The early internet fan communities built the first databases of location identifications — the specific street in the specific district of the specific city that appeared as the background in the specific scene of the specific episode — and shared this information with fellow fans for whom the knowledge that the fictional location had a real-world correspondent was itself meaningful.
The specific practice crystallised around the 2000s with the growth of dedicated fan sites and blogs documenting pilgrimage visits — the specific genre of fan content in which the visitor photographs the real-world location beside a screenshot or print of the anime frame that shows the same location, demonstrating the identification and recording the visit. This specific documentation practice — the gahmen no hiareshi (画面の比較 — the screen-and-reality comparison photograph) — became the signature format of seichi junrei content and the specific community contribution that pilgrimage visitors produce for the communities that follow them.
The Mechanics: How Anime Creates Pilgrimage Sites
Not all anime creates equivalent pilgrimage potential, and understanding what specific anime characteristics produce highly visited pilgrimage sites illuminates both the production practices of the anime that generates them and the specific priorities of the fans who make the pilgrimages.
Location fidelity as creative choice. The anime that generates the most substantial pilgrimage activity is typically the anime that has made a specific creative choice to base its settings closely on real locations — to use photography of actual streets, buildings, and landscapes as the direct reference material for background art, rather than creating stylised fictional equivalents. This location fidelity is a specific creative decision with specific aesthetic implications: it grounds the fictional world in a recognisable reality that produces a specific emotional quality of sekai (世界 — world) for the viewer — the sense that the world of the anime is a real place rather than an imagined one.
The studio most consistently associated with high-fidelity location depiction is P.A.Works (Production I.G subsidiary), whose productions including Hanasaku Iroha (set in the Kanazawa area of Ishikawa Prefecture), Shirobako (set in Musashino City in western Tokyo), and True Tears (set in Nanto City, Toyama Prefecture) have generated substantial pilgrimage activity and, in the most successful cases, formal tourism development partnerships with the local municipalities.
The Shinkai effect. Makoto Shinkai’s specific aesthetic approach — the extraordinarily detailed, photographically accurate depiction of specific Tokyo environments, rendered in the specific lighting quality that his visual style produces — makes his films the most immediately identifiable source of pilgrimage sites in Tokyo. The specific Yotsuya station area, the specific footbridge, the specific approach to Shinjuku Gyoen that appear in The Garden of Words (言の葉の庭 — Kotonoha no Niwa, 2013), and the specific Suga Shrine staircase that is the emotional heart of Your Name, are among the most visited anime pilgrimage sites in Japan and among the most internationally recognised — the presence of visiting international fans alongside domestic Japanese fans at these sites on any given day reflects the global reach of Shinkai’s films.
The Economics: What Seichi Junrei Does to Local Communities
The economic impact of anime pilgrimage on local communities — the specific municipalities whose specific streets or landscapes have been depicted in specific anime productions — is one of the most closely studied aspects of the phenomenon and one of the most commercially significant for Japan’s regional tourism policy.
The landmark case study: Washino Onsen (鷲ノ温泉) in Saitama Prefecture, specifically the Chichibu area that served as the setting for AnoHana (あの日見た花の名前を僕達はまだ知らない — Ano Hi Mita Hana no Namae wo Bokutachi wa Mada Shiranai, 2011), is the case most extensively documented in the academic study of anime tourism. The series — a relatively quiet, emotionally intense narrative about childhood friends reuniting around an unsettled supernatural event in a small town — attracted an estimated 700,000 visitor visits to the Chichibu area in the twelve months following its broadcast in 2011, a figure that represented a measurable and substantial economic contribution to the local economy.
The Chichibu local government’s response was both rapid and well-structured: a dedicated anime tourism website identifying the specific pilgrimage locations and providing access information; a character stamp rally (スタンプラリー — the specific activity in which visitors collect stamps at specific designated locations, creating a scavenger-hunt-style engagement structure) that encouraged visitors to move through the full range of pilgrimage locations rather than visiting only the most famous single site; and a collaboration with the production company to produce official location guide merchandise sold at local shops. The model that Chichibu developed has become the reference template for subsequent municipal responses to anime pilgrimage, replicated with local variations across dozens of municipalities in the years since.
The economic logic: anime pilgrimage visitors are specifically desirable from the municipal tourism perspective because their motivation is inherently specific — they are visiting a specific location for a specific reason that connects to their specific emotional investment — and their spending pattern reflects this specificity. The pilgrimage visitor buys locally produced merchandise that identifies the site’s anime connection; they eat at restaurants whose connection to the anime (the specific ramen shop that appeared in the background of a specific scene) they have identified in advance; they stay at local accommodation rather than day-tripping from a major urban centre. The per-visitor spending is higher than standard tourism, and the emotional motivation that drives the visit produces a specific loyalty — repeat visits, positive word-of-mouth within fan communities — that standard tourism does not consistently generate.
Notable Pilgrimage Sites: A Selective Geography
The geography of anime pilgrimage in Japan reflects both the production geography of the anime industry (much of which is Tokyo-based) and the specific creative choices of anime productions that have sought real-world grounding across the country.
Washinomiya Shrine (鷲宮神社) in Saitama Prefecture, associated with Lucky Star (らき☆すた, 2007): the pilgrimage to Washinomiya Shrine, which appears as the Washinomiya Shrine in the series, is the pilgrimage most frequently cited as the founding case of commercially significant anime tourism — the shrine’s New Year’s Eve hatsumode (初詣 — first shrine visit of the year) attendance increased from approximately 30,000 visitors to over 400,000 visitors in the three years following the series’ broadcast. The Kuki City commerce association’s partnership with the series’ production studio produced a model of municipal-industry collaboration that many subsequent anime pilgrimage destinations have emulated.
Kamakura for Slam Dunk (スラムダンク, 1993): the famous railroad crossing scene in Slam Dunk, and the broader Enoshima and Kamakura area coastal setting of the series, generates pilgrimage visits that — decades after the original broadcast — remain substantial, particularly from international fans in China, Korea, and Southeast Asia for whom Slam Dunk has the specific nostalgic significance of a series watched in childhood translation. The specific Kamakura Kōkō-mae Station railroad crossing that appears in the series’ opening sequence has become one of the most photographed locations in the Kamakura area, substantially changing the area’s visitor composition and the content of photographic production by its visitors.
Ōarai (大洗) in Ibaraki Prefecture for Girls und Panzer (ガールズ&パンツァー, 2012): the series, which is set in Ōarai and depicts the town’s streets and harbour in detail, produced pilgrimage activity that the local merchant association engaged with through an extraordinarily comprehensive commercial response — character panels displayed at specific locations throughout the town, official pilgrimage maps, dedicated merchandise shops, and an annual fans’ event that brings several thousand visitors to the town. The Ōarai response is the most commercially comprehensive of all municipal anime pilgrimage responses and the one most frequently cited as the model for the active municipal engagement approach.
The International Dimension: Global Pilgrims in Japanese Towns
The international dimension of anime pilgrimage — non-Japanese fans traveling to Japan specifically to visit anime locations — is among the most commercially significant recent developments in the phenomenon and one whose scale reflects the globalisation of anime consumption most directly.
The specific international pilgrimage pattern differs from the domestic pattern in scale but not in essential character: the international fan who has watched a series multiple times, who has identified the real-world locations through online research, and who incorporates specific anime pilgrimage stops into a Japan travel itinerary is engaging in the same practice as the domestic fan who takes a day trip from Tokyo to Chichibu. The difference is in the investment required — the international fan’s pilgrimage is embedded in a significantly larger travel commitment — and in the specific emotional quality of the experience: the encounter with the real-world basis of the fictional world that one has experienced from thousands of kilometres away carries a specific intensity of significance that the domestic fan’s more accessible version of the same pilgrimage does not produce in quite the same way.
The practical infrastructure for international anime pilgrimage has improved substantially: dedicated English-language pilgrimage guides, translation-enabled apps that identify locations from screenshot images, and the social media communities that share current pilgrimage experience information have made the practice significantly more accessible to international fans with limited Japanese language ability. The Japan Tourism Agency’s specific engagement with anime tourism promotion — including multilingual materials and dedicated sections in international tourism promotional content — reflects the official recognition that international anime pilgrimage is one of the most high-value segments of the inbound tourism market.
— Yoshi 🗾 Central Japan, 2026
Enjoyed this? Continue with: “Otaku Spaces and the Future: Soft Power and Pop Culture Tourism” and “Akihabara: Inside Tokyo’s Otaku Capital” — both available on Japan Unveiled.
