Root Letter is set in Matsue, Shimane, and its backdrops copy real places: the Shimane Art Museum, the Kyomise shopping street, Lake Shinji, Yaegaki Shrine and Matsue Castle.
A man travels to Matsue to find Fumino Aya, a pen pal who vanished 15 years earlier, and questions her old classmates one by one. The route follows five real places that the game turns into scenes, from the lakeside city to a shrine tied to the Yamata-no-Orochi legend. The game's order of visits is not documented, so the stops are a sequence, not a timetable.
Attack on Titan is set behind three great walls, but its author comes from a real mountain town in Ōita, Japan. Hajime Isayama grew up in Ōyama, now part of Hita, and used the landscape around it as the model for his world.
The route follows the town from his birthplace to the 2014 event that made him Tourism Ambassador, and then to the statues of Eren, Mikasa, Armin and Levi that Hita set up in 2020 and 2021. The sources do not tie the series to any single real wall, so the stops mark the town's own tributes.
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.
