Anime Pilgrimage: How to Actually Visit Real Anime Locations

The Japanese term is seichi junrei (聖地巡礼) — literally "holy land pilgrimage," borrowed from religious practice and applied, entirely unironically, to standing at the exact railway crossing where an anime character once stood.

It is no longer a fringe hobby. A 2024 Japan Tourism Agency survey found that 11.8% of visitors to Japan cited anime- and film-related locations as a reason for their trip, and a number of small towns now build genuine tourism strategy around a single series.

The famous ones

Kamakurakokomae, Kanagawa — Slam Dunk The level crossing outside this tiny Enoden station, with the sea and Enoshima behind it, is the opening-sequence shot. It draws large crowds, particularly from overseas, and it is worth being explicit about the problem: this is a live railway crossing on a public road. People standing in the road for photographs has become a serious enough issue that guards are now stationed there. Take the photo from the pavement.

Suga Shrine steps, Yotsuya, Tokyo — Your Name The staircase from the final scene. Ten minutes' walk from Yotsuya Station, in an ordinary residential neighbourhood, which is exactly the point — and also the reason to keep your voice down.

Hida-Furukawa in Gifu, the model for the town in Your Name's second half, and a genuinely lovely place independent of the film.

Hida-Furukawa, Gifu — Your Name The station and library in this small Gifu town appear directly in the film. Unlike the Tokyo locations, the town has embraced it — there is a map, and the tourist office is used to visitors. It is also a beautiful, well-preserved merchant town with canals full of carp, which means the trip stands up even for someone in your group who has not seen the film.

Chichibu, Saitama — Anohana A day trip from central Tokyo, and one of the earliest and most successful examples of a town formally partnering with an anime production.

Ōarai, Ibaraki — Girls und Panzer Perhaps the definitive case study. A seaside town of modest tourism prospects that leaned into a single series so thoroughly that character standees appear in shop windows across the town and the local businesses hold an annual festival with the production committee.

How to find locations yourself

• Search the Japanese name plus 聖地巡礼. Japanese-language fan blogs document locations with far more precision than English sources, and browser translation handles them adequately.
• anitabi.cn and similar location databases map scenes to coordinates for a large number of series.
• Google Street View is genuinely effective for confirming a location before travelling to it.
• Check the town's tourism office site. Many now publish official pilgrimage maps as PDFs.

The etiquette, which matters more here than elsewhere

Almost all of these places are ordinary neighbourhoods where people live and work. There is no ticket, no barrier, and no staff, which puts the entire burden of behaving well on the visitor.

• Do not stand in roads or on railway crossings for a photograph. This is the single biggest complaint from residents and railway operators, and it is genuinely dangerous.
• Do not photograph private houses, gardens, or residents. A house that appears in an anime is still someone's house.
• Keep noise down, especially early in the morning, which is when the light is best and the temptation strongest.
• Spend money locally. The towns that welcome pilgrimage tourism do so because it supports local businesses. Buy lunch, buy a souvenir, use the local train rather than a rental car.
• Look for the notebook. Many locations have a fan-kept junrei nōto in a nearby café or shop where visitors leave messages and drawings. Signing one is the closest thing this hobby has to a ritual.

Building it into a real trip

The mistake is planning a trip around pilgrimage sites, which usually produces a lot of train time for a few photographs. The better approach is to fold one or two locations into an itinerary that works anyway: Kamakura is a genuinely good day trip from Tokyo regardless of Slam Dunk; Hida-Furukawa sits close to Takayama and Shirakawa-go.

For the wider context on why these series matter so much inside Japan, our look at the anime that actually shaped the country covers the ones with the deepest cultural footprint. And since almost all of this is reached by rail, the trains guide is worth reading first.