Departures (Okuribito), the 2008 film, was shot around Sakata, Kaminoyama and Tsuruoka in Yamagata, Japan. The story follows a cellist who becomes an encoffinment mortician in his hometown.
The route visits the Concerto café in Kaminoyama, the NK Agent office and Minato-za cinema in Sakata, the Tsuru-no-yu bathhouse in Tsuruoka and Amarume Station. Several buildings have moved or closed since filming.
Tokyo Story (1953) follows an elderly couple from Onomichi to Tokyo and the hot spring town of Atami, with filming at Jōdo-ji temple, Ueno Park, Tokyo Station and Osaka Castle.
The route follows the film in order: the Onomichi temple of its famous dawn scene, the Adachi suburbs, the Atami seawall, Ueno Park, Tokyo Station and Osaka Castle. Several original film spots, such as the Atami seawall, are gone.
Kawabata's Snow Country is set in the hot spring town of Yuzawa in Niigata, reached through the Shimizu Tunnel on the Joetsu Line. The author never names the town in the novel, but later wrote that the snow country is the Echigo-Yuzawa hot spring.
This route follows Shimamura's train ride from the long border tunnel, past the signal stop and Echigo-Yuzawa Station, to the inn where Kawabata stayed, Komako's attic room and the warehouse fire that ends the book.
Gil Pender is a screenwriter with a nostalgia problem, in Paris with a fiancée and her wealthy parents. Every night at midnight a 1920s car pulls up and carries him back to the 1920s, among the Fitzgeralds, Hemingway and the surrealists. By day he is stuck in 2010.
This route follows the film from Monet's garden at Giverny to Pont Alexandre III, with the stops placed from a film-locations guide: where the 1920s scenes are shot you can still sit, eat and shop today. The party and flea-market scenes are approximate.
