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 1878 Isabella Bird, then 46, travelled from Tokyo to Hokkaido and described the journey in letters to her sister, published as Unbeaten Tracks in Japan.
The route follows her dated letters from the landing at Yokohama through Nikkō and the northern river towns to an Ainu village in Hokkaido. Town pins are approximate; the inns and houses she slept in are not located.
In July 1853 four black warships anchored off Uraga and ended more than two centuries of Japanese seclusion. Within a year, Commodore Matthew Perry had delivered a president's letter, signed a treaty and opened two ports.
The route follows his two voyages: from the Ryukyu court at Shuri to Uraga, Kurihama, the treaty at Yokohama and the temples of Shimoda. Perry also visited Hakodate in 1854, but that stop is not included.
Hitori Goto is a guitarist who loves music and can hardly talk to anyone. Her band, Kessoku Band, plays at a small live house in Shimokitazawa, and the story stays close to real music towns in Tokyo and Kanagawa.
This route follows the band from the stage that inspired STARRY to Hitori's home station and a summer day on Enoshima. Two venues are invented and modelled on real live houses; the pins mark those models.
You start in a quiet town, pick a starter, beat eight gym leaders and take on Team Rocket. The Kanto of Pokémon Red and Blue is invented, yet it is based on the real Kantō region of Japan, and fans have spent decades matching its towns to real places.
This route follows the game's journey from Pallet Town to the final gym and sets each stop beside the real place it is said to resemble. The game's Kanto is inspired by the real one, not a copy of it, so every pin is an outside reading of the map, not an official 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.
Sunja grows up in her mother's boarding house on Yeongdo, an island in the harbour of Busan, under Japanese rule. Pregnant by a married man, she marries a gentle minister instead and leaves with him for Osaka, where Koreans live poor and despised in a neighbourhood called Ikaino. The Apple TV+ series (2022–2024), based on Min Jin Lee's 2017 novel, follows four generations of her family from 1915 to 1989.
The route follows the family through real places in Korea and Japan, in story order. Homes, shops and offices in the series are fictional, so the pins mark the neighbourhoods and cities where the story is set, not filming locations.
On the evening of 2 October 1872, the punctual and unflappable Phileas Fogg bets his fellow members of the Reform Club £20,000 — half his fortune — that he can go around the world in eighty days, and leaves that same night with his new French valet, Passepartout. On his heels comes Detective Fix, convinced that Fogg is a bank robber on the run. Jules Verne's novel appeared in 1872, when the opening of the Suez Canal and new railways across India and America had made such a race against the timetable just about possible.
The route follows the journey eastward in the novel's own dates, from Pall Mall back to Pall Mall.
In 1888 Nellie Bly, the star reporter of Joseph Pulitzer's New York World, proposed turning Jules Verne's Around the World in Eighty Days into fact. On 14 November 1889, with two days' notice and as little luggage as she could manage, she sailed from Hoboken to beat Phileas Fogg's fictional record. She came home 72 days, 6 hours and 11 minutes later, a world record — briefly — and a celebrity, while the World's readers guessed her arrival time to the second.
The route follows her book of 1890, stop by stop, with the dates from her own record. She went east by steamer and train, through the Suez Canal and the British ports of Asia.
