Look Back: Nikaho, Akita

Fujino starts as a proud elementary schooler who publishes four-panel strips in the school paper. The live-action film placed her neighbourhood at Kunpuen in Nikaho, using its cherry-tree lane and the path beside a pond as the way near Fujino's home. Nikaho is also author Tatsuki Fujimoto's own birthplace. Please stay on public paths and off private land when you look for the scene.

Visitor guidance: Keep to public paths; the city asks visitors not to enter private land.

After meeting Kyomoto's far better drawings, Fujino throws herself into improving her art. In the live-action film the bookshop where she stocks up on art supplies is Bunrindo in Hirasawa, a stop on Nikaho's official location map. It is an ordinary neighbourhood shop, so treat it as a quick look from the street rather than a set.

Visitor guidance: A working shop in the Hirasawa shopping street; be considerate of the owner and customers.

Nikaho Station now holds a rebuilt set of Fujino's room. Among the props are a school backpack, half-finished manga and a 2007 wall calendar, all used in the film. The station opened in 1922 as Ugo-Hirasawa Station. It is the easiest place to start: the set is inside the station, and the room is where Fujino finds her spark again and decides to keep drawing.

Visitor guidance: The set stands inside the station building.

When Fujino delivers Kyomoto's diploma, she walks into a house with sketchbooks piled high and meets the reclusive girl behind the door. The rebuilt set of Kyomoto's room, in Japanese style, now stands in Nikaho's Smile welfare centre. It includes the dotera robe with Fujino Ayumu written big across the back, the object the manga made famous.

Visitor guidance: Inside the Smile welfare centre in Hirasawa.

Kyomoto turns down serialization because she wants a formal art education at Tohoku University of Art and Design. On 10 January 2016, a man who accused the school of plagiarism commits a deadly attack there, a scene the author later altered after readers raised concerns. The university is real and sits in Yamagata; Fujimoto himself graduated there in Western painting, in 2014.