Seichi junrei

• 1. When Fiction Calls

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  Seichi junrei sent many visitors to Hida in Gifu Prefecture after Makoto Shinkai's film Your Name opened in August 2016. A red staircase at Suga Shrine in Tokyo became a destination too. The film had reached well beyond the usual anime audience, and many people made the trip to see real places they had watched on screen.

  Seichi means 'sacred site' in Japanese, and junrei means 'pilgrimage'. Together they name a form of pop-culture tourism where fans travel to real-world locations that appear in their favorite anime, manga, games, or drama. A distinction is usually drawn between this practice and the religiously significant Buddhist and Shinto junrei from which it borrows its vocabulary.

  Japan's Cabinet Office promoted seichi junrei as part of its 'Cool Japan' strategy to attract overseas fans as tourists. Local governments, chambers of commerce, and private businesses adopted the same language to direct tourist spending into regional Japan. From internet subculture to national economic strategy, the practice made that crossing with unusual speed.

  On the 1st of December 2016, the term was named among the year's standout buzzwords in Japan's Shingo Ryukogo Taisho. That recognition marked its entry into mainstream vocabulary. How did a fan habit become a national economic tool? And what happens when a community unexpectedly finds itself on the fan's sacred map? The answer starts in 1974, when one animated series first sent Japanese fans toward the Swiss Alps.

• 2. A Long History of Detours

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  221B Baker Street in London carries a blue plaque despite its most famous resident being entirely fictional. Fans of the Sherlock Holmes stories come anyway, drawn by narrative alone. Meiringen in Switzerland, at the foot of Reichenbach Falls, has become a tourist spot for Holmes devotees from around the world. A road sign there uses directions from the novel, and an active museum marks the spot. The practice of visiting places made famous by stories predates anime by a considerable distance.

  Maienfeld in Switzerland became a destination for Japanese tourists through Heidi, Girl of the Alps. This was the earliest recognized example of anime inspiring location tourism. Several other series in NHK's World Masterpiece Theater time slot followed, among them Dog of Flanders and Anne of Green Gables. Early domestic examples include Ashita no Joe, Rumiko Takahashi's Urusei Yatsura, and Maison Ikkoku.

  The 1991 OVA of Kyūkyoku Chōjin R took an approach that would become influential. Rather than setting its story near real landmarks, it wove actual place names directly into the narrative, creating destinations by design. Tenchi Muyo! is often cited as an early example of linking fictional place names to real-world counterparts, giving fans a ready map to follow. Sailor Moon worked differently. That series did not guide fans to its locations. Fans identified them anyway, establishing the pattern of self-directed discovery that defines much of seichi junrei.

  Please Teacher!, broadcast in 2002, is an early TV anime credited with triggering seichi junrei. It was Lucky Star in 2007, however, that pushed the practice into wider public awareness. The series depicted Washinomiya Shrine, located in what is now Kuki, Saitama. Online discussion of the seichi spread rapidly, especially toward the end of the decade. Hatsumōde visitors to Washinomiya had numbered 90,000 in 2006. By 2008, that count had reached 470,000.

  On the 7th of March 2012, NHK's Close-Up Gendai broadcast a segment titled 'Dramatic Changes in the Anime Industry: The Mystery of Seichi Junrei'. Six years later, volunteers erected a monument near Tagiri Station, unveiled on the 28th of July 2018, formally designating that spot as the birthplace of seichi junrei.

• 3. The Making of Seichi

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  When The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya aired, fans identified Nishinomiya Kita High School in Hyogo Prefecture as the model for the series' school. No studio announcement had pointed them there. Anime and manga seichi are rarely disclosed by producers. Fans discover candidate locations on their own, using on-site trips or digital Google Street View searches. The school turned out to be the alma mater of Nagaru Tanigawa, the author of the original Haruhi light novel series. Some creators do name their locations explicitly, through dialogue, commentary books, or official websites. Local governments sometimes respond with posters, stamp rallies, and standees.

  Inio Asano's manga background style made the correspondence between fiction and real location especially legible. Asano traces photographs of real places and adds screentones in image manipulation software to create the panels' backgrounds. Several visual novels of the 2000s and 2010s used a similar technique, passing real-world photographs through image filters. When the source material is photographic, the match between an illustration and its actual location can be nearly exact. Post-2007 anime more often used reference photographs from location scouting trips to closely reproduce real buildings and landscapes in their hand-drawn backgrounds.

  Alongside seichi junrei, a related practice called butai tanbou has taken hold. Fans who practice it superimpose their own photographs to match the exact camera angles depicted in a series. Sony Music Solutions developed a Japan-only Android and iOS app to support butai tanbou and seichi junrei, with tools for maps, geofencing, and AR photography. The app went defunct in 2023.

  A Buddhist temple or Shinto shrine is usually designed to look sacred, marked by distinctive architecture and decoration. The places that become anime seichi carry no such visual signal. They look exactly as they did before fans discovered them. The entire transformation is a narrative one.

• 4. Between Reality and Fiction

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  Critic Yohei Kurose has written about what happens when real scenery is placed inside a fictional animation. Kurose argues that placing real space inside fictional space creates a discrepancy. That awkwardness, he says, is precisely what gives the work its sense of reality. He draws on the 'formulae of emotions', a concept developed by art historian Aby Warburg, to explain the effect.

  Literary critic Ryota Fukushima argues that a place becomes a seichi simply by having a story added to it. He frames seichi junrei as a form of pseudo-historical imagination. Visitors project an imaginary origin, a fictional past, onto the real present of authentic history. Critic Yuichi Murakami takes a different angle, arguing that seichi exist between reality and fiction. Projected onto fiction, they become landscapes. Projected onto reality, they become destinations for junrei.

  Murakami's framing extends beyond geography. K-On! prompted some fans to purchase guitars featured in the series. Others replicated the choreography from the ending credits of The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya. By this reading, any act of carrying fiction back into everyday life has something of junrei about it.

  Tourism scholar Ryōske Okamoto compares seichi junrei to the power spots of contemporary Japanese new spirituality. Chichibu Shrine, associated with the anime AnoHana, is among the sites he names. The line between secular fan pilgrimage and broader Japanese spiritual tourism, he suggests, may be less clear than it first appears.

• 5. Sacred Ground, Real Money

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  A 2016 report from Juroku Research Institute estimated that anime tourism had contributed 25.3 billion yen to Gifu Prefecture's economy. The three series credited were A Silent Voice, Your Name, and Rudolf the Black Cat. The combined visitor estimate for those properties was 1.3 million people.

  Lucky Star fans contribute to the annual festivals at Washinomiya Shrine. They parade a mikoshi, a portable shrine, decorated with amateur illustrations of Lucky Star characters. Their participation is an unusual example of fan culture entering the ritual calendar of a local religious institution.

  In 2009, a life-size replica of the RX-78-02 Gundam was installed in Odaiba, Tokyo. Within 52 days of opening, it drew an estimated 4 million visitors. That October, a giant statue of the robot from Tetsujin 28-go was unveiled outside Shin-Nagata Station in Kobe, honoring the hometown mangaka Mitsuteru Yokoyama. The Unicorn Gundam, which replaced the RX-78 at Odaiba in 2017, appeared along the route of the Triathlon at the 2020 Summer Olympics.

  The city of Sakaiminato in Tottori Prefecture developed a road lined with statues of the yōkai drawn by Shigeru Mizuki, creator of GeGeGe no Kitarō. Mizuki was born in Sakaiminato. The street is called Shigeru Mizuki Road, and the city promoted itself as 'Kitaro's Hometown'. Himi in Toyama Prefecture followed a similar model, building around the legacy of Fujiko Fujio and the character Ninja Hattori-kun. In Kasukabe, Saitama, the main cast of Crayon Shin-chan received a special resident certificate to support child rearing and education in the city.

  In 2016, KADOKAWA, JTB, Japan Airlines, and other organizations formed the Anime Tourism Association. On the 26th of August 2017, the association published its first annual list of 88 Japanese anime holy places to visit. The number 88 refers to the 88 Buddhist temples visited along Kūkai's Shikoku Junrei. The number of series on the list now exceeds 88, though the title has been kept.

  Hokkaido University associate professor Takayoshi Yamamura proposed a triangular model arguing for a nearly mutual relationship between fans, producers, and local authorities around a seichi. The producers of Yuru Camp coordinated with Yamanashi Prefecture immediately after the decision to adapt the manga was made. The Yamanashi Tourism Organization prepared a dedicated website to showcase Yuru Camp tourist spots before the series began airing.

  Gundam Factory Yokohama opened in December 2020 with a moving full-scale Gundam and a ticketed observation deck, the first attraction of its kind. It closed on the 31st of March 2024, after a final drone and firework show.

• 6. The Problem of the Pilgrims

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  Some fans of The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya broke into the grounds of Nishinomiya Kita High School in Nishinomiya, Hyogo, and painted graffiti there. The school had been identified as the model for the series' fictional school. It is one of the clearest examples of seichi junrei creating a problem for a place that did not seek the attention.

  Similar incidents were reported in Numazu, Shizuoka, where fans visiting the school modeled in Love Live! Sunshine!! vandalized manhole covers. Arasuna Shrine in Iwami, Tottori, received graffiti from Free! fans. The anime had featured the shrine under its real name.

  In 2017, In This Corner of the World director Sunao Katabuchi posted a warning asking fans to avoid the quiet neighborhoods his film depicted. He issued the caution before expected pilgrimages began, hoping to prevent disruption before it could start.

  Bocchi the Rock! fans attended concerts at Shelter, the live house venue featured in the series, without purchasing tickets, and sometimes trespassed on neighboring properties. The anime's official website posted a call for proper conduct. Atlus, developer of Persona 5, made a similar public appeal about fans visiting a laundromat in Sangenjaya, Tokyo, for purposes other than using the facility.

  Shirakawa Village in Gifu was identified as the setting for the Higurashi When They Cry murder mystery series. Some residents reportedly found the association with violence and obscenity unwelcome. Shirakawa created an official manga manners guide for Higurashi fans and conventional tourists alike.

  After The First Slam Dunk was released, fans descended on a rail crossing on the Enoshima Electric Railway in Kamakura in numbers the area could not absorb. Tourists blocked car traffic to take photographs. The Kamakura Police Station received upwards of 100 reports concerning the crossing in 2023. Security guards hired by the city were assigned to monitor it during peak hours.

  In Tomakomai, Hokkaido, local businesses sold unauthorized merchandise tied to the anime Erased until rightsholders stepped in. A similar situation arose in Oarai, Ibaraki, where shops sold unlicensed goods connected to Girls und Panzer. Producer Kiyoshi Sugiyama chose not to act against the goods immediately, instead building a relationship with the community first. Despite his private skepticism about government-led anime tie-ins, the relationship between Girls und Panzer fans and Oarai is now regarded as a success.

  Lagrange: The Flower of Rin-ne is often cited as a case of failure. The Rin-ne no Lagrange Kamogawa Promotion Committee says the city of Kamogawa, Chiba, learned of the production after the fact and did not initiate the tie-in. Fans were critical of what felt like blatant product placement in a city that had not planned its own participation.