Fullmetal Alchemist, Frieren and the Anime With No Japanese Locations

Why some series are not on this site

This site lists places you can stand in. For a lot of major series that works: Shibuya is really in Jujutsu Kaisen, Uji is really in Sound! Euphonium, Karatsu is really Hasetsu.

For some of the most popular titles in the world, it does not work at all, because the story is not set in Japan. There is nothing to visit, and pretending otherwise would waste your time and money.

This page covers what is actually known about those worlds — separating what the creators have said from what fans have worked out, the same way we separate official and fan-identified locations everywhere else on this site.

Fullmetal Alchemist

Amestris is not a real country and no real town was drawn as one.

What the author has said is more specific than "European-looking". Hiromu Arakawa has described building the setting by reading about industrial-revolution-era Europe, and Britain in particular — research from books, not location scouting. The military hardware borrows from later periods again, with equipment closer to the mid-twentieth century than to the 1800s. Xing, to the east, is drawn from China.

So the world is a deliberate composite of periods and places, assembled from reading. There is no single town that "is" Central City, and anyone who tells you otherwise is guessing.

What does exist: the two live-action films were shot on location in Italy — Volterra, Florence and elsewhere. Those are real places you can visit, and they genuinely appear on screen. They are film locations rather than models for the manga, which is a different thing, but it is an honest one.

In Japan: nothing permanent. Exhibitions tour occasionally; there is no museum, no themed area and no author-hometown site.

Frieren: Beyond Journey's End

Nothing has been officially identified, and we are not going to invent it.

What is observable: the naming is overwhelmingly German — characters, spells and places — and the architecture drawn is central European, with stone walls, timber framing and orange-tiled roofs. From that, a large amount of fan writing concludes that Germany is the model, and some of it names specific towns.

That conclusion is reasonable. It is also not something the creators have stated. There is no published location scouting, no named town, and no official map. Compare this to Ponyo, where Miyazaki actually lived in Tomonoura for three months while working on the film — that is a documented connection. Frieren has an atmosphere, not an address.

If you want the closest real-world equivalent to the look, the timber-framed towns of southern Germany and the Baltic coast will get you there. Just know that you are following a fan reading, not a location list.

In Japan: nothing permanent. Collaboration cafes and exhibitions run from time to time and then end.

The same is true of several others

Attack on Titan is the interesting exception. The story is not set in Japan, but the author is from Hita in Oita, and the town has built genuine sites around that — bronze statues of the three children below a 94-metre dam wall that stands in for the wall from volume one, and a museum. The connection is to the author, not the story, and it works.

The one where the location exists and you are asked not to go

Silver Spoon is set at an agricultural high school in Tokachi, Hokkaido, drawn from the author's own school — Hiromu Arakawa again, the same person who wrote Fullmetal Alchemist, this time writing about the farm she grew up on.

The location is real and identifiable. Do not go.

The production side issued an unusual public request asking fans not to make a pilgrimage here, and the reason is biosecurity: it is a working agricultural school with livestock, and visitors who do not normally go near farms can carry pathogens to animals. An outbreak would be a serious matter for the school and for the surrounding farms.

This is the only entry on this site where the honest advice is to stay away. Tokachi is a genuinely good place to travel — dairy country, wide horizons, some of the best food in Hokkaido — and you can go and eat and stay there without going near the school. Just do not treat the school as a destination.

Cardcaptor Sakura, and why it is not listed either

Tomoeda is a fictional town, and no real place has been officially identified as its model. Tokyo Tower has hosted official Cardcaptor Sakura collaborations more than once, and a lot of fans associate the tower with the series — but those collaborations are temporary, and the tower is not a location from the story.

By the same standard applied to Frieren above, that is an association rather than a location, so it is not on the map.

What to do if your favourite is on this list

Do not build a trip around it. You will end up in a shop.

Two things are worth doing instead:

1. Go to the source. The Tezuka Osamu Manga Museum in Takarazuka explains where the whole medium came from, and almost every series you like descends from it. It is 700 yen.
2. Pick up an official-goods stop rather than a pilgrimage. For most of these titles the merchandise exists even where the locations do not, and it slots into a day you were spending in Tokyo or Osaka anyway.

Then spend the actual travel days on a series that does have somewhere to go. There are more than forty on this site.

Why we do not list overseas locations

We considered adding European locations for these works and decided against it, for two reasons.

The first is accuracy. For Frieren there is nothing official to list, and listing fan inference next to documented sites like Tomonoura or Shiratani Unsuikyo would make both look equally reliable, which they are not.

The second is that this site is built for Japan — the maps, the transport advice, the accommodation and the routes all assume it. A pin on a German town would come with none of that, and a travel guide that cannot actually help you get there is not a travel guide.