JoJo: Diamond Is Unbreakable — Sendai as Morioh

Everything starts with where the author is from. Hirohiko Araki was born in 1960 in Wakabayashi Ward, Sendai, and grew up there with his parents and younger identical twin sisters. When he wrote Part 4, set in mid-1999, he took his home city as the model for the town of Morioh. The pin marks the ward, not a particular house, and there is no JoJo landmark here, only the origin of the whole story.

Location precision: Sources give only the ward as Araki's birthplace, so the pin marks the ward.

Morioh's street names are real Sendai names: Kōtōdai, Jōzenji and Kunimi all appear in the story. Kōtōdai is the park in the middle of Sendai, and its name comes from the house of Hanamura Kōtō, a blind poet favoured by the lord Date Masamune. It sits right by Jōzenji Street and the Mediatheque, so it is a natural place to start a walk through Morioh's Sendai.

Visitor guidance: Public park in central Sendai, a short walk from Jōzenji Street.

Jōzenji is a Morioh place name too, and the manga changed its characters midway, from 定禅寺 to 浄禅寺, while the real Sendai street keeps the original spelling. The street is named after the Jōzenji temple that guarded Sendai Castle's unlucky northeast corner. Today it is lined with Japanese zelkova trees, which help earn Sendai the nickname City of Trees, Mori no Miyako (杜の都). The Morioh pin sits on the avenue itself.

Visitor guidance: Public avenue in central Sendai, easy to walk.

This public building on Jōzenji Street holds a library, event space and galleries, and for JoJo fans it is where Morioh was made real. From 28 July to 14 August 2012 its sixth floor hosted "Hirohiko Araki Original Art Exhibition: JoJo Exhibition in S City, Morioh" for the series' 25th anniversary. In 2017 the 30th-anniversary JoJo Fest returned to Sendai, again with more than 200 colour originals.

Visitor guidance: Public building open to visitors; check current exhibitions and opening days.

In the manga, OWSON is the convenience store beside the Ghost Alley that Koichi uses and where the group plans against Kira. Its model is Lawson, which opened in Sendai in 1978, before the series began. For the 2012 exhibition the sign of the Lawson Sendai Yanagimachi-dori store was refitted as "OWSON, S City Morioh branch" for a limited run, and it did so again in August 2016 for a JoJo Tanabata festival.

Visitor guidance: The Lawson store is a normal working shop; the OWSON sign was only a temporary event.

Kunimi is another Morioh name borrowed straight from northern Sendai. In the anime, the Italian restaurant Trattoria Trussardi stands a minute's walk from the Kunimi Pass cemetery bus stop. The pin marks the real Kunimi district in Aoba Ward. It matches the name, not any single scene location.

Location precision: Kunimi is a real district name used in the story, but no single site is identified.

Morioh is a big suburb of a regional hub, home to about 53,000 people, and its commuter-town feel comes from the new towns built around northern Sendai in the 1970s and 1980s. The sources name Izumi Ward and Tsurugaya New Town in Miyagino Ward as models. The pin marks Tsurugaya, which is ordinary housing and a quiet contrast to the town's bizarre events.

Location precision: The sources name the new-town type and Tsurugaya as examples, not a specific street.

Morioh runs from the shore to the hills, and its geography was taken from the coast north of Matsushima towards Higashimatsushima. In the anime, the Morioh Grand Hotel stands at Morioh Beach and is the town's best-known hotel. The pin marks the town of Matsushima, the nearest named anchor for the sea side of Morioh.

Location precision: The model area is a stretch of coast, so the pin marks the town of Matsushima.