Haruki Murakami's A Wild Sheep Chase is set in Tokyo and Hokkaido in 1978, from an advertising agency in the capital to Sapporo, Asahikawa and a lonely farm house in the north.
The route follows the narrator's hunt for a star-marked sheep in five stops. Only Tokyo and Sapporo are named in the book, so the later stops follow readers' inferences about the real setting, and the Dolphin Hotel and the Rat's villa are fictional.
Golden Kamuy is set in Hokkaido after the Russo-Japanese War, and its gold hunt runs through Otaru, Yūbari, Kushiro Marsh, Abashiri Prison and Sapporo. Veteran Saichi Sugimoto and the Ainu girl Asirpa chase convicts tattooed with a map to hidden gold.
This route follows the manga's trail across real Hokkaido places, from the port of Otaru to the prison at Abashiri. The manga names towns and landmarks, not exact spots, so most pins are approximate.
Inō Tadataka measured Japan on foot, from his brewer's house in Sawara and the Tomioka Hachiman shrine in Fukagawa to Mount Hakodate and Nihonbashi. In ten surveys from 1800 he and his team paced the country's coasts, and maps based on his work were still in use in 1924.
The route follows his life in places: the brewer's house at Sawara, the shrine where he prayed before the first survey, Mount Hakodate and the far end of that journey in Hokkaido, Nihonbashi, his grave and the shrine that honours him. The surveys were separate expeditions, so the stops are not one connected walk.
