Anime Tourism: How Fans Travel the World to Visit Their Favorite Series

When "Your Name" depicted specific streets in Tokyo and a specific town in the Hida region of Gifu Prefecture, fans began visiting those locations within weeks of the film's release. The streets in Shinjuku, the stairs at Suga Shrine, the surrounding countryside that Mitsuha's town was modeled on — each became destinations for viewers who wanted to stand in the specific places the film had made meaningful. Tourism to the Hida region increased measurably following "Your Name"'s release, with local businesses noting the change in visitor demographics and local governments acknowledging the film as a catalyst.

This phenomenon — traveling to real-world locations depicted in anime or manga, sometimes called "seichi junrei" (sacred site pilgrimage) — has been a feature of dedicated fandom since at least the early 2000s, when internet communities made it possible for fans to identify and share location information systematically. The community around "Lucky Star" documented every real-world location in the series' fictional Washinomiya setting (based on Kuki City in Saitama Prefecture), and their visits contributed to a significant increase in tourism to the Washinomiya Shrine that the series prominently featured. The shrine, previously a local institution with modest visitor numbers, became a nationally known destination for anime fans.

The reasons fans make these journeys are not uniform. Some are motivated by a desire for direct sensory encounter with something that has been aesthetically significant to them — standing in a place that was depicted beautifully is a different experience than looking at the depiction. Some are motivated by community — the knowledge that other fans have made the same journey, that standing in a particular place connects you to an extended network of people who found the same thing meaningful. Some are motivated by a form of verification that resists easy analysis: the desire to confirm that the places in the fiction correspond to places that actually exist, that the world of the anime is continuous with the physical world.

The tourism industry has responded with varying degrees of engagement. Certain local governments in Japan have formally embraced anime connections — creating stamps, producing collaboration merchandise, installing artworks at key locations — because the economic benefits are clear. Others have maintained distance from the phenomenon, particularly when the attention has been unwanted: locations depicted in series with adult content have sometimes attracted visitors whose behavior has been disruptive to local residents. The management of anime tourism at the community level is genuinely complex.

International anime tourism — fans traveling from outside Japan to visit locations — has grown substantially as Japanese tourism generally has recovered and expanded. Locations associated with Studio Ghibli films, with major franchises like "One Piece" and "Demon Slayer," and with series like "Spirited Away" whose imagery is specifically tied to Japanese visual culture attract visitors from across the world. The Japanese government's tourism infrastructure has recognized anime as a significant draw, and the framing of "Cool Japan" tourism often centers on the ability to visit the real landscapes that anime has made beautiful to global audiences.