In 1832 the printmaker Hiroshige travelled the Tōkaidō, the road from Edo to Kyoto, and made it into The Fifty-three Stations of the Tōkaidō. This route follows seven of his prints, from the bridge where the road began to the bridge where it ended.
Each stop pairs a print with what is there today: a rebuilt checkpoint, a long river bridge, a shrine, a preserved post town. Scholars debate whether Hiroshige saw every station himself, so the pins mark the places, not his exact viewpoints.
Murasaki Shikibu's eleventh-century novel follows Prince Genji from the capital to exile on the Suma shore and, in its last ten chapters, to Uji. Many of its places are real shrines and temples that visitors can still enter.
The route runs by chapter, from Kitayama to Uji, then to the temples tied to the author. Chapters are fiction; the Ishiyama-dera writing story is tradition, and Rozan-ji is one scholar's identification.
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.
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.
In January 1868 Japan's young emperor was declared ruler in fact as well as name, ending more than 250 years of Tokugawa shogunate. The last shogun's supporters did not give up quietly. For eighteen months a civil war rolled north from the edge of Kyoto to Edo, into the mountains of Aizu and finally to a star-shaped fortress on Hokkaido, where a short-lived breakaway republic made its last stand.
The route follows that war in six places, all of them visitable: the battlefield at Toba, Edo Castle, the hill of Ueno, Aizu's castle and the hill where its teenage soldiers died, and Goryōkaku. Dates are given in the Western calendar, converted from the Japanese lunar dates used at the time.
In the autumn of 1600 two armies met at Sekigahara to decide who would hold power after Toyotomi Hideyoshi. One day in the fog gave Tokugawa Ieyasu a decisive victory and put him on the road to the shogunate.
The route follows the campaign from the siege of Fushimi to the castles of Mino, the field of Sekigahara, the fall of Mitsunari's Sawayama and his burial in Kyoto, and ends at Edo Castle in 1603. Dates inside Japan's old calendar are labelled as such.
For over a thousand years, emperors, samurai and ordinary people have walked mountain trails to three shrines of the ancient syncretic Kumano religion. Emperor Go-Shirakawa alone made the trip 34 times, and in the Muromachi period the stream of walkers was called a "pilgrimage of ants".
This route follows the Nakahechi from Takijiri-oji through Chikatsuyu and Hongū, by river to Shingū, then to Nachi's stone steps and waterfall. Some stops are pinned to the area rather than a surveyed spot.
In April 1701 a lord drew a blade inside Edo Castle, and two years later forty-seven of his leaderless samurai stormed the mansion of the man he had attacked. The documented story runs from a corridor in Edo, through a surrendered castle and a quiet retreat near Kyoto, to a night raid and a temple cemetery in Tokyo.
The route sticks to dated events and places. The legend of Chūshingura, the later play, is kept to the final stop, where it is set apart from what happened.
Sound! Euphonium follows the Kitauji High School concert band, and its story is set in Uji, Kyoto.
The route follows Kumiko's commute on the Keihan Uji Line, crosses Uji Bridge, joins the Agata Festival and climbs Daikichiyama for the view of town. The school itself is fictional, so the route pins a real station in its place.
Nioh sends William Adams, a blond outsider who becomes Ieyasu's ally, through a dark-fantasy version of 1600: demons in the mud of Japan's civil wars, alchemist Edward Kelley behind them, and Tokugawa Ieyasu rising above it all. Its story is stitched onto real places, from a London prison to the battlefield that made the Tokugawa shoguns.
The route follows the main campaign and its last two expansions: the Tower of London, Kyoto, Sekigahara, then the Sanada-maru, Tennōji and Osaka Castle. The game is fantasy, so the map shows where its history happened, not where it was filmed or modelled.
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.
In 1581 the African slave Diogo comes to Kyoto with a Jesuit delegation and is handed to the warlord Oda Nobunaga, who renames him Yasuke and makes him a samurai. That year Nobunaga's army crushes the ninja province of Iga, where the young shinobi Naoe loses her father and inherits his Hidden Blade.
From there the two hunt the same conspiracy across Kansai: the port of Sakai, the temple at Honnō-ji where Nobunaga dies, a kofun in Settsu, the castle of Shōryūji at Yamazaki, the shrines of Yamato, and the Templar recruiting ground of Kii. Most stops are real castles, temples and tombs that the game rebuilds.
