A different kind of pilgrimage
Most locations on this site appear in the work. These do not. The connection is to the author, and the towns built something around it — usually because the author is the most famous thing that ever came out of them.
The results are often better than the story locations, because a town honouring its own is more careful than a town hosting a campaign.
Kumamoto — Eiichiro Oda, One Piece
Ten life-size bronze statues of the Straw Hat crew across the prefecture, placed after the 2016 earthquakes and deliberately sited in the worst-hit towns. Luffy stands on the prefectural government promenade with the author's handprint at his feet.
The placement is the point: the statues went where the damage was, to bring people and money there.
Sakaiminato — Shigeru Mizuki, GeGeGe no Kitaro
178 bronze yokai along 800 metres of street from the station to his memorial museum, lit at night. The museum covers his childhood here, losing an arm in the war in New Guinea, and the years drawing rental manga in poverty. The war section is the part people do not expect.
Katsushika — Yoichi Takahashi, Captain Tsubasa
Nine bronze statues across Yotsugi and Tateishi in east Tokyo, installed under his supervision. Katsushika publishes the walking map in English as well as Japanese — one of very few pilgrimages set up for non-Japanese speakers.
Takarazuka — Osamu Tezuka
He moved here as a child and the city runs the Tezuka Osamu Manga Museum, eight minutes from the station. Almost everything else on this site descends from his work, which makes this the most useful 700 yen in Japan if you want to understand why the medium looks the way it does.
Takaoka — Fujiko F Fujio, Doraemon
Where he grew up and where he met his lifelong collaborator at school. The city gallery inside Takaoka Art Museum covers his beginnings, which is a different story from the Kawasaki museum: Kawasaki is where he worked, Takaoka is where he started. 500 yen, no ticket lottery.
Hokuei — Gosho Aoyama, Detective Conan
Yura station is nicknamed Conan Station, and a 1.4km road called Conan Street runs from it to his museum, lined with thirty comic-cover monuments, bronze statues and a bridge with relief panels along the railings. All free except the museum.
Hamanaka — Monkey Punch, Lupin the Third
A town of cliffs and fog on the far eastern coast of Hokkaido. The town cultural centre recreates his studio — his pens, his paints, and the tablet he was drawing on decades before most manga artists went digital — with a real Fiat 500 beside it. Free.
Saku — Buronson, Fist of the North Star
A 185cm bronze bust of Jagi inside the Shinkansen ticket gates at Sakudaira, and seven designed manhole covers set into the streets in the shape of the Big Dipper. Genuinely good civic design, and not what you expect on a Shinkansen platform.
Also worth knowing
Hita, Oita — Hajime Isayama, Attack on Titan. The story is not set in Japan at all, but the town put bronze statues of the three children below a 94-metre dam wall standing in for the wall from volume one.
Nagi, Okayama — Masashi Kishimoto, NARUTO. The town museum has hosted exhibitions presenting the landscape here as the origin of the work's world, though they are temporary rather than permanent.
Kiyosu, Aichi — Akira Toriyama, Dragon Ball. He lived there all his life. There is no monument and no museum, and we would rather say so than send you looking.
本頁部分連結為聯盟行銷連結。透過這些連結預訂，我們會獲得一筆分潤，而你不會因此多付任何費用。