You Only Live Twice: Bond's Japan

Bond's Japanese mission starts in a sumo hall. At a tournament, Japanese secret service agent Aki approaches him. The scene was shot at the Kuramae Kokugikan, the Tokyo sumo hall built by the Japan Sumo Association and opened in 1954. The hall has since been demolished, so there is nothing left to visit here.

Bond breaks into the office safe of Mr. Osato, the company's president, and so reaches the heart of Osato Chemicals. The building outside is the Hotel New Otani, which stood in for the headquarters of Osato Chemical & Engineering, the Japanese front for Blofeld's SPECTRE organisation. Its rooftop revolving restaurant gave it an iconic status, and the hotel's gardens, said to date from the 16th century, doubled for the ninja training scenes.

Visitor guidance: A working hotel in Kioicho, Chiyoda; the garden is set in about 10 acres.

Bond chases Aki to a secluded subway station and falls through a trap door into the office of Tiger Tanaka, head of the Japanese secret service. Tanaka's private station was filmed at Nakano-shimbashi, a stop on the Tokyo Metro Marunouchi Line in Nakano. It is a real, working station, so you can ride out to see where Bond dropped in on his Japanese ally.

Visitor guidance: A Tokyo Metro station on the Marunouchi Line branch in Nakano.

Bond and Aki drive to Kobe, where the cargo ship Ning-Po is docked, and learn that she was delivering elements for rocket fuel. Once discovered, Bond dodges a horde of SPECTRE agents in a dockside fight while Aki escapes. The sequence was filmed at Kobe Docks, in the industrial port near Osaka.

Location precision: The film shows Kobe Docks without a named quay; the pin marks the Port of Kobe.

Bond prepares to investigate the island by training with Tanaka's ninjas and putting on a Japanese disguise. The ninja training camp was Himeji Castle in Hyōgo Prefecture. Known as White Heron Castle for its brilliant white exterior, it stands on a bluff above the town and was registered in 1993 as one of Japan's first UNESCO World Heritage Sites. You can see it clearly from Himeji Station.

Visitor guidance: The castle can be seen clearly from Himeji Station.

Bond is introduced to Kissy Suzuki, Tanaka's student, who will play the role of his wife in the fishing village. Together they reconnoitre a cave booby-trapped with phosgene gas that leads towards the volcano with the secret rocket base. The village scenes were shot at Akime, a fishing village on the southern coast of Kyushu, about thirty miles southwest of Kagoshima, where Bond and his Ama wife lived.

Location precision: The pin marks the Akime area on Kyushu's southern coast; the exact spot of the shoot is not given.

Near a volcano, Bond destroys four helicopters, which confirms his suspicions of a hidden base. Blofeld's SPECTRE base is hidden inside the volcano, and at the end an eruption destroys it. The exterior is Shinmoedake, in Kagoshima Prefecture on Kyushu, part of the Mount Kirishima cluster. The lair interior was a $1 million set built at Pinewood Studios. Shinmoedake has erupted many times, most recently in 2025.

Location precision: The pin marks the Shinmoedake summit area; the film's crater interior is a studio set.