In Ishin!, Sakamoto Ryōma flees Tosa as a murder suspect, hides in Kyoto under the name Saitō Hajime and joins the Shinsengumi to find the masked killer of his adoptive father. The game is fiction built on real history: its Ryōma, its plot and its twists belong to the game, while the Teradaya attack and the Ōmiya killing really happened.
The route follows the story from Kōchi Castle through the Shinsengumi's Mibu, Gion and Fushimi to the Ōmiya Inn, and each stop says what is the game and what is the record.
Two Godzillas, sixty years apart, wreck the same city. In 1954 he comes out of Tokyo Bay at Shinagawa and walks into Ginza; in Shin Godzilla (2016) he lands at Kamata, mutates at Kitashinagawa and is finally frozen beside Tokyo Station.
The route follows the 1954 film first, then Shin Godzilla, using the places named in each story. Where a scene was shot elsewhere, the stop says so.
Sailor Moon is a fantasy about moon princesses and magical warriors, but its home ground is a real Tokyo neighbourhood. Author Naoko Takeuchi had lived in Azabu-Jūban, and apart from the fantasy elements most places in the story are modelled on real ones nearby.
This route visits five of them: the shopping street, a park under a highway, two shrines that stand in for the Hikawa Shrine of the story, and Tokyo Tower. The manga and the older anime sometimes used different real models, and the two shrine pins mark real stand-ins for the story's invented Hikawa Shrine.
Hitori Goto is a guitarist who loves music and can hardly talk to anyone. Her band, Kessoku Band, plays at a small live house in Shimokitazawa, and the story stays close to real music towns in Tokyo and Kanagawa.
This route follows the band from the stage that inspired STARRY to Hitori's home station and a summer day on Enoshima. Two venues are invented and modelled on real live houses; the pins mark those models.
Two Makoto Shinkai films, two love stories that never quite meet: a rainy-morning friendship in a Tokyo garden, and a boy and girl pulled apart across Japan, from a snowbound station in Tochigi to a rocket island in the south.
The route starts with The Garden of Words in Shinjuku Gyoen, then follows 5 Centimeters per Second through its three episodes: Tokyo and Iwafune, Tanegashima, and Tokyo again. Each stop names its film.
The anime Hyouka is set in a fictional town, but its backdrops are real streets in Takayama, in the mountains of Gifu. The author's home town became the model, and the local tourism board publishes an official pilgrimage model course.
This route follows six places from the opening title to the final episode: the river and morning market, the school-route crossing, the Old Town, the library, the hill shrine and the festival shrine outside town. Where the story renames a place, the pin marks the real one.
In August 1492 three small ships slipped down the Río Tinto from Palos with a plan to reach the Indies by sailing west. By mid-March 1493 Columbus was back in Palos without his flagship, which had been wrecked off Hispaniola, but with captives, samples of gold and plants unknown in Europe.
The route follows the voyage in order: the friary where the plan found friends, a stopover in the Canaries, the first landfall in the Bahamas, the wrecked flagship and the fort of La Navidad, a storm-driven stop in Lisbon, the return to Palos and the report to the monarchs in Barcelona. The landfall island and the fort site are both debated, and the pins say so.
The S.T.A.L.K.E.R. games send scavengers called stalkers through the Zone, a radioactive wasteland built from the real Chernobyl exclusion zone. The developers copied bridges, railways and buildings from photographs and visits, then bent the geography for gameplay.
This route goes from the edge of the Zone to the reactor, setting each game location beside its real counterpart. The real zone is restricted and trespassers are prosecuted, so this is a map to read, not a trip to plan.
Andrei Tarkovsky's Zone, a fenced-off wilderness where a guide takes a writer and a professor toward a Room said to grant wishes, was largely shot around Tallinn, Estonia, among abandoned hydropower plants, a power station and an old chemical works.
This route follows the film's story through those places: the factory and power plant seen before the Zone, the gate, the river plants where the journey was shot, a highway bridge and the power station that smokes behind the final homecoming. Exact spots are often unrecorded, so most pins are approximate.
Vasily Livanov and Vitaly Solomin's Soviet Holmes and Watson were made when filming abroad was impossible, so a Riga lane became Baker Street, a Petersburg station became Victoria and a waterfall in Abkhazia became the Reichenbach Falls.
The route follows the Lenfilm television films of 1979 to 1986 from the Riga street with the screen 221b to Peterhof, Saint Petersburg, the Gega Waterfall and Tallinn.
Gaidai's 1968 comedy The Diamond Arm films Istanbul in Baku's Icheri Sheher and Shirvanshahs' Palace, and its home town in Sochi and Adler. One watermelon rind, one "Damn it!", and the economist wears a smugglers' plaster cast full of jewels.
The route follows the film across its filming sites: the old streets and palace of Baku that play Istanbul, then the southern coast and a Moscow wasteland that play the heroes' home town. Only the Baku and Kiselyov Rock stops are pinned to a specific place; the rest are approximate.
Walking the Streets of Moscow was shot across Moscow itself: Chistoprudny Boulevard, Krivoarbatsky Lane, GUM and Red Square, Gorky Park. Georgiy Daneliya's 1964 comedy follows one day in the lives of Kolya, a night-shift metro builder who cannot stop helping people, and Volodya, a writer just arrived from Siberia.
The route follows the film in order through seven places, from Chistoprudny Boulevard to Universitet station. Some scenes were shot in a different street from the one the story names, and the text says where.
On New Year's Eve a Moscow surgeon goes to the bathhouse with his friends, wakes up in Leningrad and walks into a flat that looks exactly like his own. The Soviet classic that Russia still watches every 31 December starts as a joke about identical buildings and ends as a love story.
The route follows Zhenya's night from his new flat and the banya to the Leningrad airport, the identical building, and the station, then back to Moscow. The caveat: both the "Leningrad" and the "Moscow" houses were shot in the same Moscow district, and the story's street had been renamed years before.
In 1961 Yuri Gagarin trained at Moscow's Khodynka Airfield, launched from Baikonur and came down near Engels. Less than two hours in space made the pilot a worldwide celebrity; his capsule is kept in a museum in Korolev City.
This route follows Yuri Gagarin from the training ground at Moscow's Khodynka Airfield to the launch pad at Baikonur, the field in the Saratov region where he came down, the Kremlin ceremony and the museum that keeps his capsule. The museum pin marks the Energia company site rather than the museum itself.
In 1466 or 1468 a merchant from Tver set out down the Volga to trade around the Caspian Sea. He was robbed on the way, crossed Persia, sailed from Hormuz to India and wrote down what he saw in A Journey Beyond the Three Seas.
This route follows him from Tver through Derbent, Hormuz and the coast of India to Bidar, and home to Caffa on the Black Sea. Dates are debated, and most stops are marked by area only because his notes name towns rather than buildings.
It rains on Tokyo all summer, and runaway Hodaka Morishima meets Hina Amano, a girl who can pray the sky clear. Makoto Shinkai's film follows them through real corners of the city: a McDonald's in Kabukichō, a rooftop shrine on an abandoned building, a hillside flat, a fireworks festival and a jewellery shop at Shinjuku Station.
Seven stops run from Hodaka's home island to Lumine Shinjuku. Several pins mark a district rather than a spot, and Yoyogi Kaikan was demolished in 2019–20, so that stop is a memory.
Tokyo-3 is the fortress city of Neon Genesis Evangelion, home of NERV and the battleground against its monstrous enemies. It is fictional, but the series places it on the north shore of Lake Ashi near Sengokuhara, in Hakone, and the town has leaned into the connection ever since.
The route follows five real places where the series' scenes and stand-ins meet Hakone, from the Sengokuhara plain to the lake where Tokyo-3 drowns. The city never existed, so each pin marks a real stand-in.
Slam Dunk follows Hanamichi Sakuragi, who joins the Shohoku High School basketball team to impress a girl and turns out to be a natural. Its Shōnan coast is real: a railway crossing from the anime opening, a seaside station renamed for a rival school, and the beach where the film ends.
The route runs from the Kamakurakōkōmae crossing to Kugenuma Beach in Fujisawa, with the model for Ryonan High School and the Hiratsuka gymnasium on the way.
Team Ninja's open-world samurai game drops a masterless Blade Twin into the last years of the shogunate. Between 1858 and 1868 the story runs from Yokohama's foreign quarter through the killing of a Chief Minister to Kyoto's Shinsengumi and a plot to burn Edo.
This route follows the game's main story through seven places, from the port to the capital, pairing each scene with the real site that history ties to it. Where the game names only a district, the pin marks the nearest well-known landmark.
Heracles' first six labours are set across the Peloponnese: Tiryns, Nemea and its lion, Lerna and its Hydra, Ceryneia, Erymanthos and Elis. He must kill a lion no arrow pierces and a many-headed Hydra, and clean a stable of thirty years' dung.
This route follows the first six labours in their traditional order, from the fortress of Tiryns through Nemea, Lerna, Ceryneia, Erymanthos and Elis to Lake Stymphalia. The myth rarely names an exact spot, so most pins mark the place the tale is tied to, not a cave or a lair.
In December 1933, eighteen-year-old Patrick Leigh Fermor set off from the Hook of Holland to walk to Constantinople, carrying a few clothes, some letters of introduction, an anthology of English verse and a volume of Horace. He slept in barns and shepherds' huts, but gentry and aristocracy kept inviting him into their country houses. He wrote the journey up decades later in A Time of Gifts, Between the Woods and the Water and The Broken Road.
The route follows him through ten places the sources let us pin, from the Hook and a Stuttgart apartment to Melk, Vienna, Prague, the bridge into Hungary, an island on the Danube that now lies under water, Plovdiv and Istanbul. Many pins are approximate: the sources name a town, not the exact spot where he stood.
The Kanto of Pokémon Red and Blue is based on the real Kantō region of Japan: fans match Pallet Town to Machida, Vermilion City to Yokohama, Celadon City to Shinjuku and Lavender Town to Narita. You start in a quiet town, beat eight gym leaders and take on Team Rocket.
This route follows the game's journey from Pallet Town to the final gym and sets each stop beside the real place it is said to resemble. The game's Kanto is inspired by the real one, not a copy of it, so every pin is an outside reading of the map, not an official location.
Bob is a fading American movie star in Tokyo to advertise whiskey; Charlotte is a disillusioned recent graduate, married for two years. Both are far from home, and they find each other at the Park Hyatt Tokyo.
The route follows their story in the film's order: the neon streets of Shinjuku, the hotel, Shibuya Crossing and a karaoke room, then Charlotte's day trip to Kyoto Station, Nanzen-ji and Heian Shrine. Coppola shot for just 27 days, many of its locations in real places of business and public areas. The karaoke branch is pinned approximately.
Where The White Lotus season 3 was filmed: its Thai resort is stitched from the Four Seasons on Ko Samui, the Anantara Mai Khao and the Rosewood in Phuket, and Frank's scenes in Bangkok at the Mandarin Oriental. It opens with gunshots and a body in a lake, then rewinds a week.
This route visits six real places in story order, from the Four Seasons on Ko Samui to a Bangkok hotel and a Muay Thai stadium. The on-screen resort was stitched together from several hotels, so no single place is the White Lotus.
