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.
Two Mamoru Hosoda films are built on places from his own life. Summer Wars is set in Ueda, Nagano; Wolf Children draws on Kamiichi, Hosoda's home town in Toyama, and the hills around it.
The route visits Ueda Station and the castle gate seen in Summer Wars, then Hitotsubashi University, a farmhouse in Kamiichi and a school in Namerikawa from Wolf Children. The Kamiichi pin marks the district, not the house.
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.
Kazuma Kiryu's Kamurocho feels like a real Tokyo night out because it nearly is: Sega modelled it on Kabukicho, then did the same with Dotonbori, Shinsekai, Yokohama and the port town of Onomichi. Every district in the series is based on its real location as it looked in the year its game came out, and later games remodel them again.
This route walks the six real stand-ins behind the fiction in the order the games introduced them: Kabukicho's sleepless streets, the theater square, Dotonbori's neon canal, Shinsekai's tower, Onomichi's temple slopes and Yokohama's Isezaki Mall. All six are ordinary public places you can visit today.
Puyi became emperor of China at the age of two, lost the throne at six, and spent the rest of his life being used by others: as a puppet emperor for Japan in Manchuria, then as a war criminal re-educated in a Communist prison, and finally as an ordinary citizen working in a Beijing garden. Bernardo Bertolucci's 1987 epic, which won all nine Oscars it was nominated for, was the first Western feature film allowed to shoot inside the Forbidden City.
The route visits the real places of Puyi's life, most of them museums today. The film compresses and softens his story, and some of its scenes were shot in Italy.
