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.
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.
Haruhi Suzumiya follows a bored narrator, Kyon, and an eccentric classmate who founds a club to search for aliens, time travellers and espers. The story never names its city outright, but its setting is Nishinomiya in Hyogo, where author Nagaru Tanigawa lived from the age of three.
The route visits the real places that served as models: the school, two stations, a riverside park, a mountain and Koshien Stadium. Story place names are altered, so most pins mark a model, not a set.
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.
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.
