The true story behind Hachi: A Dog's Tale and Hachikō Monogatari runs from Ōdate, Akita, where the dog was born, to the Hachikō statue at Shibuya Station in Tokyo, Aoyama Cemetery, and a Rhode Island depot that played "Bedridge" in the 2009 film.
The route follows Hachikō, the Akita who kept waiting for his owner Hidesaburō Ueno, a Tokyo Imperial University professor, long after Ueno failed to return on 21 May 1925. It covers the birthplace, the station, the final morning, the grave and the 2009 film's location. Film details differ from the real history in places.
Akito wakes after a traffic crash in a Shibuya emptied by a masked occultist's fog, sharing his body with the spirit KK and able to see the Marebito that now fill the streets. Tango Gameworks built the district as a condensed, walkable stage rather than a straight copy, keeping landmarks, borrowing back streets and folding in a few districts from elsewhere in Tokyo.
The route follows the game from the scramble crossing and the station through Center Gai, Dōgenzaka and the 109 stand-in, then north to a borrowed Yanaka Ginza and across town to the Tokyo Tower finale. Pins mark the real places; the game's map moves some of them closer together.
Alice in Borderland begins with three friends running through Shibuya and ends with Arisu and Usagi fighting for the city itself. Between those points the series empties Tokyo, then lets it grow over. This route follows the real Shibuya landmarks the characters use — the scramble crossing, the Hachikō gate, Shibuya Stream, 109 and SHIBUYA SKY — and visits the two sets where the empty and overgrown city was built, in Ashikaga and Yokohama.
The story never leaves Tokyo; the production did. This route follows the Netflix series, not Haro Aso's manga, and each stop keeps the story place and its stand-in apart.
Neku Sakuraba wakes in the Shibuya crowd with no memory and is pulled into the Reapers' Game, a week-long contest of missions that decides whether the dead live on or vanish. Square Enix's 2007 Nintendo DS cult classic turned the district into its whole stage, keeping the landmarks and changing the shop names.
The route follows Neku from the scramble crossing to Hachikō, the ramen shop on Dōgenzaka, the Cat Street café, the hidden Shibuya River and the walk back through Udagawa. In-game places are mostly stand-ins, so pins are approximate except two icons.
Studio Ghibli's worlds feel lived-in because Miyazaki went to look at real places: a Welsh mining museum for the village in Castle in the Sky, Visby for the town of Kiki's Delivery Service, the harbour of Tomonoura before Ponyo. Other links are only rumoured, and he has denied at least one, the town of Jiufen in Taiwan for Spirited Away.
This route follows eight films in release order, from 1986 to 2008, and pairs each with the real place reported as its inspiration. Only some of these identifications come from Miyazaki himself, so every stop says whose claim it is, and none of them is a filming location.
