The Towns That Adopted a Series

What this is about

A collaboration is a campaign: posters go up, goods are sold, and it ends. What follows is different. In these six places the relationship outlived the broadcast, in some cases by nearly twenty years, and it is now maintained by the residents rather than by a rights holder.

That distinction is worth understanding before you go, because it changes how you should behave when you get there.

Washimiya — Lucky Star (2007)

The one that started it. After the broadcast, fans began arriving at Washimiya Shrine in Saitama, and the local chamber of commerce chose to engage with them rather than wait for it to pass. Nearly twenty years later the shops along the approach still run collaborations and the shrine still draws hundreds of thousands at New Year.

Everything that follows on this list is, in some way, a copy of what Washimiya did first.

Oarai — Girls und Panzer (2012)

The most complete version. Individual shops in this Ibaraki port town each display their own character, an arrangement run by the shopkeepers themselves. Fans kept coming through the town's recovery from the 2011 earthquake and tsunami, and the relationship is now more than a decade old.

Buy something where you photograph a panel. That exchange is the whole mechanism.

Yuwaku Onsen — Hanasaku Iroha (2011)

The strangest and best case on this list. The series features a festival called the Bonbori Festival that did not exist. The village decided to hold it anyway, and the Yuwaku Bonbori Festival has run every October since 2011 — thousands of wooden prayer tablets hung and burned, exactly as in the anime.

An anime invented a festival and a real village adopted it as its own. Nothing else here works quite like that.

Numazu — Love Live! Sunshine!! (2016)

The scale case. The shopping arcades, the local bus company, the bay ferry and a long list of individual shops all carry the characters, and fan visits became a measurable part of the local economy. It stopped being a campaign and became part of how the town presents itself.

Chichibu — Anohana (2011)

The quiet one. Chichibu did not rebuild itself around the series, but the tourist office still hands out the pilgrimage map, Jorinji temple still sells the ema, and the ema racks hold more than a decade of accumulated plaques. The town absorbed it without being changed by it.

Sakaiminato — GeGeGe no Kitaro (1993)

The oldest, and it predates the whole practice. Sakaiminato began installing yokai statues on its main street in 1993 and has kept going, reaching 178. It was not responding to a fandom; it was a fishing port in decline betting on its most famous son. It worked.

The rule that makes all of them work

None of these towns installed a barrier, an admission desk or a photo spot with a queue rail. They opened themselves and trusted visitors to behave, and the arrangement continues because on the whole visitors have.

That means:

• Spend money locally. Not on official merchandise — on lunch, on the greengrocer, on the bathhouse.
• Photograph the displays, not the residents.
• Keep the noise down in residential streets.
• Do not touch or move the panels and standees. They belong to the shop.

Every one of these places could stop tomorrow. Several similar arrangements elsewhere have.