This three-part series about anime-based tourism is a collaborative effort between Artemis of Otaku Lounge and Buri-chan of San’in Monogatari. Artemis currently resides in Ehime Prefecture and since she likes to travel a lot, often discovers that she makes anime pilgrimages entirely by accident. She mostly writes about anime, with the occasional foray into Japanese music, street fashion, and general culture. Buri-chan originally became interested in Japan by watching the Odaiba episodes of Digimon Adventure, and already made that pilgrimage long ago. She currently resides in Shimane Prefecture and writes about Japan’s San’in region, including writing manga to introduce local Kojiki mythology.
For those anime fans with the opportunity to live in or visit Japan, undertaking a kind of anime ‘pilgrimage’ can be an interesting way to view the basis for, or inspiration behind, the locations depicted within some titles firsthand. Since many of these titles are set in places that are a little off the beaten track, this also affords a chance for people to leave the well-known cities behind them and see more of what Japan has to offer.
While there can be no precise starting date for when these anime pilgrimages first began to be undertaken, the official collaboration between the town of Washiyama in Saitama prefecture and copyright holders of Lucky Star beginning in August 2007 was in large part responsible for starting a noticeable trend. Sightseers spent more than a billion yen over the next three years in visiting this location, pouring money into the local economy and prompting Japan’s tourism industry to sit up and take notice. Buoyed by the enormous success of the formal relationship between anime and real-life town, Kyoto Animation, the studio behind Lucky Star, has also continued to work with local tourism for many of their other anime projects such as Hyouka and Free!.
Washiyama Shrine, home of Lucky Star
Situated in the midst of the Japanese Alps, the city of Takayama in Gifu prefecture has more of a quaint, small-town feel to it despite its population of just over 90 thousand. Because of the high altitude and its separation from other areas of Japan thanks to its mountainous location, Takayama developed its own distinct culture over the years which is still in evidence today, and is especially well-known for its carpentry. Further lending the city a more rural touch is its old town with whole streets of beautifully preserved merchant houses dating back to the Edo Period, the nearby Folk Village with its thatched and shingled roofs under which silk worms were once raised, and the ongoing daily morning markets selling local fruits, vegetables, and handicrafts. Flocks of tourists crowd the streets every year for Takayama’s unique spring and autumn festivals, counted among the most popular in all of Japan, but the city otherwise has a generally quieter and even somewhat folksy atmosphere.
However, not all the tourists who visit do so for the festivals. Kamiyama City, in which Hyouka is set, is a fictional location but is heavily based on the author’s real hometown of Takayama. In 2012, Juroku Bank reported that the Hyouka anime was responsible for attracting around 150 thousand visitors each year to Takayama, which has been actively cooperating with the creators behind Hyouka to boost tourism since the anime’s release that year.
For example, the Hina Doll Festival, featured in the final episode of the anime, is a real traditional festival still carried out every April in which nine unmarried women from the area are chosen to be dressed up as Hina dolls, and participate in a parade and mochi throwing ceremony. An anime-collaborative event takes place on the same day, where fans of the series can follow a walking course, collect the stamps at each point, and obtain original Hyouka goods. Hyouka-themed goods are also sold at various stores around the city.
In early 2013, the city’s official website revealed a free-to-download Hyouka tourist map as well as publishing ten thousand physical copies for distribution. The map shows 24 of the locations that were seen in the Hyouka anime such as the high school, the swimming pool from the first OVA episode, and the café in which Houtarou and Eru first meet outside of school. The last also features a signboard near the counter autographed by Houtarou, Eru, Satoshi, and Mayaka’s voice actors. However, the map is not available in English, making it more difficult to follow for fans with little to no Japanese ability.
Further west from Takayama and facing the Sea of Japan, Iwami-cho is a town at the north-eastern tip of Tottori Prefecture, has a population of 12,827. Most of the working population stays busy farming or in squid fishing boats off the rocky Uradome Coast. Iwai Onsen provides a luxurious place for tourists to stay after a day of hiking and swimming around the area’s abundant nature. If watching animated high school boys do the swimming is more your speed, then Iwami still has plenty to offer, as fans Kyoto Animation’s 2013 sports anime Free! are sure to recognize the townscape.
Part of the success of Kyo-Ani’s slice of life anime is attributed to the richness of the settings, so much so that the town becomes a character that fans can actually get to know in real life. Even on a Thursday afternoon side trip to Iwami last September, there were female fans on pilgrimages and cosplayers on location, so the impact is real even when there are no promotional events going on.
When arriving by car, it might at first seem there is no connection with the hit series, but even before wandering into a few sanctioned havens of fandom and tourism information, there is visual confirmation of this being the right beachside town.
The official Iwami tourism board does not put a big focus on Free! in its main branding approach on its homepage, but it does run news about everything from fandom events to special postcards to Free! themed desserts. It also endorses the official Free! map, which marks the spots with numbers and screenshots, so visitors who do not speak Japanese may still be able to find their way to the stages of their favorite scenes. It would be easiest to start the journey by train, as part of the Iwami station building serves as a fandom shrine and gateway to the three dimensional world beyond.
Besides the occasional event and special souvenir, however, it appears this is the extent to which the real Iwami and the Free! Iwami mix. The locals embrace the increase in tourism without selling out to it, and the fans help maintain a respectful divide between daily life and cosplayer invasion—at least based on Thursday observations, that is.
Just as much as “Cool Japan” is a driving idea in attracting international guests to Japan, “contents tourism” has been a major element in rural tourism. Arguably, rural Japan has been profiting from fandom based pilgrimages ever since commoners could afford fandoms and pleasure travel, though the recent push has been more focused on movies or period dramas. The push for anime tourism has been more recent, and Kyoto Animation, given their somewhat accidental but now active cooperation, attracts much of the attention for research on anime based “contents tourism.” However, even without active tourism promotion, anime fans have often been inspired to travel to “holy sites” (seichi junrei). We’ll take a look at a few other relationships between anime and their settings in the following entries. Hop aboard the cat bus, because our next stop on this tour is Studio Ghibli.
Additional Reading:
A Study on Impact of Anime on Tourism in Japan : A Case of
“Anime Pilgrimage” (Takeshi Okamoto, Web-Journal of Tourism and Cultural Studies, 2009)
ANIME NEWS: ‘K-On!’ school to play host for anime tourism event (The Asahi Shimbun, 2014)
Contents tourism and local community response: Lucky star and collaborative anime-induced tourism in Washimiya (Takayoshi Yamamura, Taylor & Francis Group, 2014)
Please enjoy this series while I’m on vacation, and I’ll be back to reply to comments shortly after the conclusion! Though I have an anime fan for a long time, I didn’t bother watching Free! until someone told me it took place in Tottori. I found the grilled squid throughout the series was a nice and accurate touch, as it’s big stuff out here. ~Buri
San'in Monogatari 
March 21, 2015 at 6:47 pm
Great information, format and feel. A really nice post to read, and nice to see a collaboration!
April 2, 2015 at 9:10 am
Thanks! We had fun with it.
May 21, 2015 at 3:33 pm
what a great way to preserve and promote local culture and traditions. i can’t think of any other country but japan that has this specific way of attracting tourism that also enriches the value and the practice of the local tradition.
May 22, 2015 at 9:08 am
Haha, yeah, I’m having trouble picturing places in the US that promote themselves based on pop culture, except for Elvis Presley’s burial site or something!
June 8, 2015 at 5:38 pm
i never been to that site despite having lived there for many years. maybe i should have.
October 20, 2015 at 4:09 pm
I visited these two places my last trip to Japan without realizing they were set locations for these series. I went to Hida-Takayama for Shirakawa-go before going up the Tateyama-Kurobe alpine route and Iwami was for Uradome Kaigan. Hyouka I watched after I saw the posters while visiting Hida-Takayama and Free! way before but not knowing Iwami = Iwatobi.
It was somewhat awkward for me when in Iwami and majority of locals asked if I was there for アニメ観光 … Still I can’t deny how amused I was when I watched Hyouka after and recognized locations I passed by while I was there.
Ps. I really liked the San’in-San’yo region. It’s one of those oddly isolated but charming places I felt.
October 21, 2015 at 9:32 am
I have not been to Tateyama-Kurobe, but my trip to Iwami was a totally unplanned side trip while checking out the Tottori Sand Dunes. Thankfully my friend who tagged along was a good sport about it even though she’s not much of an anime fan! I think she enjoyed the town landscape anyway. And yes, isolated is a good term for a lot of this region, but in a very charming way. I remember I really liked the setting of Asagiri no Miko, which was set in Miyoshi (I think) in Hiroshima and was one of the forerunners of anime tourism promotion, and now that I’ve passed through Miyoshi a number of times I’ve been wanting to rewatch that one to appreciate more about the setting.
Actually, seeing as there is now a Noragami tourism promotion going on around here and that there are a handful of anime that make reference to the gods gathering at Izumo Taisha, I’m playing with the idea of eventually going back through a few of them to show how accurate they are (or not!) in representing the setting.