About Anime Routes Japan
Anime Routes Japan is an English-language travel guide to the real places behind Japanese anime and manga, and to the regions those places belong to. That includes the locations a scene was drawn from, the home towns of the people who made the work, and the official projects that towns and prefectures have built around them.
We start where the work touches the ground: a station platform, a stretch of coast, a level crossing, a road through the mountains, a statue a town commissioned, a museum it opened. Then we keep going, into the food, the hot springs, the markets and the landscapes that surround it. A pilgrimage stop takes an hour. The region around it can fill a trip.
Anime may be the reason you arrive. Japan should be the reason you stay.
What We Cover
Every route guide is built to work as an actual trip rather than a checklist of locations:
- Pilgrimage locations, and how to find them once you are there
- Local food, and where to eat it
- Things to do nearby: shrines, castles, museums, coastlines, and hot springs
- Souvenirs and regional products worth carrying home
- Where to stay, and which area makes the most sense as a base
- Trains, buses, and rental cars, including the local connections that are easy to miss
- One-day and two-day itineraries built around realistic travel times
If you would rather start with a trip than a list, three that need no car: Bocchi the Rock! in Shimokitazawa, an afternoon and an evening inside Tokyo; Slam Dunk in Kamakura and Enoshima, a day from Tokyo on the Enoden and on foot; and Detective Conan in Hokuei, Tottori, where the core walk is on foot and by local train. To weigh the rest the same way, the Choose by the shape of the trip panel sets out, for every guide, how long the journey from the gateway takes, how long the trip itself needs, how far you get without a car, and the one thing most likely to break the plan.
How We Write Our Guides
Practical information comes first
Many of our readers are visiting Japan for the first time. We try to answer the questions that come up on the day rather than the ones that sound good in a listicle: how long the walk from the station really takes, how early the last bus leaves, how much cash to carry, whether anything is open in winter, and what to do if it rains.
We are clear about how to get there
Some locations are easy to reach on public transport alone. Others are spread across a valley or a coastline where a rental car is the only sensible option, and a few sit somewhere in between. We say which is which at the top of each guide, instead of leaving you to work it out after you have arrived.
We ask you to travel considerately
Almost every location in these guides is somewhere people live and work: a residential street, a working station, a school, a shop with regular customers. Each route includes notes on photography and local etiquette, and we would rather leave a location out than encourage visits that cause problems for the people who live there.
Who Writes This
Nick, who runs Anime Routes Japan
I am Nick, and I live in Japan. I like anime and I like travelling, and a good many of my trips are built around an event or a live show. I also like the slower kind of trip — the sort that ends in a hot spring with nothing to do.
This site covers the places a work is tied to, and the scenery and the food around them as well. It sets out how to get there, what it costs and the rules that apply on the ground, so I hope it is useful when you are choosing where to go and working out a route.
Everything here is written and edited by Nick. Anime Routes Japan is an independent site rather than a tour operator or a booking service, and the guides are researched and planned from published sources rather than written up from a tour. Where a guide was built that way, it says so and gives the date its sources were read.
How These Guides Are Actually Made
Each guide starts from two kinds of source. For the work: the official introduction, the official character and setting pages, and whatever the rights holder or the local project has published about which real places are connected to it. For the trip: the pages the places themselves publish — the museum’s opening hours, the bus operator’s timetable, the campsite’s own rules, the city’s announcement. The maps also use published geographic data, credited on the map.
What we add is the part no official page provides. Official sources describe one facility at a time; they do not tell you that the last admission at one clashes with the only convenient bus from another, or which half of a town to give up when you have one afternoon. Building the route, ordering it, costing it and deciding what to leave out is the editorial work, and it is the reason to read a guide rather than a list of links.
What is checked, and what is an estimate. Opening hours, fares, access and the requests a place makes of visitors are taken from that operator’s or facility’s own page, and each guide says what was checked and on what date. Journey times, the order of a day and how long to allow somewhere are planning figures and editorial judgement: timetables change, a connection that works on paper can be missed, and a seasonal sheet expires. Where official sources disagree, we say so rather than quietly picking one, and where something could not be confirmed we leave it out or say it is unconfirmed instead of filling the gap. We do not invent experiences, reviews, quotations or photographs, and a route planned from published information is never written up as one that was walked. Editorial responsibility for what appears here is ours.
If you find something wrong or out of date, please tell us through the contact page. Corrections are made in the guide itself.
An Independent Travel Site
Anime Routes Japan is an independent travel publication. We are not affiliated with, endorsed by, or connected to any anime studio, publisher, production committee, broadcaster, distributor, or rights holder, and nothing on this site is official information about any work.
Series titles and other trademarks belong to their respective owners, and we refer to them only to describe the connection between a work and a real place. The imagery on this site focuses on the destinations themselves, using original or appropriately licensed travel photography, and we do not use unauthorized anime artwork, character images, or screenshots.