Movies
Your Name: Tokyo, Lake Suwa and the Suga Shrine Steps
Taki, a Tokyo schoolboy who waits tables in Shinjuku, keeps waking up in the body of Mitsuha, a shrine maiden in a mountain town who has never left it. They leave notes on each other's skin, fall for each other from a distance — and then the switching stops dead. Taki rides west with two friends to find the town he can only draw from memory, and finds it gone: a fragment of a comet took Itomori and five hundred people three years before his visit.
The town was invented, but the film stands on real ground: the Shinjuku where Taki lives and works, the Hida valley that lent Itomori its backdrop, the lake generally credited with the crater pool, and the stone staircase where the story ends. One caveat: Itomori was never filmed, so its crater is the one stop here without a pin.
Contains major story spoilers.
Timeline & locations
What do the location labels mean?
- Exact
- The pin marks the actual place where it happened or was filmed.
- Approximate
- The right area — a town, park or district — but not a precise spot.
- Speculative
- A reasoned guess: sources disagree or the exact place is unknown.
- Fictional
- The place exists only in the story; any pin marks a real-world stand-in or inspiration.
The film's Tokyo is a ward rather than a building. Taki lives in Shinjuku and works evenings at Il Giardino delle Parole, an Italian restaurant where he and his friends wait tables. The restaurant is among the real Tokyo locations the film shows. The pin stands at Shinjuku Station, where 3.59 million people a day passed in 2018.
Location precision: The film names only the ward and a fictional restaurant; the pin marks Shinjuku Station at its centre.
Visitor guidance: The film spreads its Tokyo across the ward; Shinjuku Station is the natural place to start walking.
Sources
- Your Name
- Locator:
- Plot; Production
- Your Name
- Locator:
- Synopsis; Décors
- Shinjuku Station
- Locator:
- Introduction
- Your Name
Itomori's crater lake is drawn rather than filmed, and the film never names a real one; Suwa is the lake generally credited with the likeness, in the Kiso Mountains of central Nagano. The film's pool is where Taki, wearing Mitsuha's body, walks out with her grandmother and little sister on the way to the shrine in the crater. Suwa itself is ringed by the towns of Suwa, Okaya and Shimosuwa, and is known for the miwatari, large cracks that open across the frozen surface in winter, which local Shinto tradition reads as the gods crossing between the halls of the Suwa Grand Shrine.
Location precision: The film names no model for its crater lake; Suwa is the lake credited with it, so the pin marks the real shore.
Visitor guidance: Three towns line the shore, so the lake is a drive-around rather than a single viewpoint; the miwatari ridges are a winter sight.
Taki's search for Itomori ends in this valley. He travels west with Okudera and Tsukasa Fujii, unable to do more than show his sketch around, until a ramen-shop owner in Takayama recognises the town in it and offers to drive them there. The station is one of the film's real locations, and Hida-Furukawa supplied several of them. What stands today is a JR Central stop on the Takayama Main Line, opened on 25 October 1934.
Visitor guidance: The city library, the film's other real Hida location, is listed among the station's surroundings, about 400 m away.
Sources
- Your Name
- Locator:
- Plot; Production
- Your Name
- Locator:
- Synopsis; Décors
- Hida, Gifu
- Locator:
- Popular culture: Your Name
- Hida-Furukawa Station
- Locator:
- Introduction; Layout; History; Surrounding area; In popular culture
- Your Name
It is here that the three of them look up the comet disaster and learn that Mitsuha's family were among the five hundred dead. Itomori is fictional, but the town of Hida and this library were used as its backdrop. The building stands beside Hida City Office, just off National Route 41.
Visitor guidance: About 400 m from Hida-Furukawa Station, beside the city office off National Route 41.
Sources
- Your Name
- Locator:
- Produzione
- Hida-Furukawa Station
- Locator:
- Introduction; Layout; History; Surrounding area; In popular culture
- Your Name
- Locator:
- Plot; Production
- Your Name
There is no Itomori and no pin for it: the town is fictional, though it borrowed the look of Hida. On 4 October 2013 a fragment of the comet Tiamat struck it, killing about five hundred people, a third of the inhabitants, and flattening the place. Taki arrives three years later to find it in ruins, drinks the kuchikamizake Mitsuha brewed at the shrine above the Goshintai crater, and at twilight their two timelines overlap long enough for them to meet on the ridge. Down in the town, Mitsuha is arguing her mayor father into ordering the evacuation that empties the streets before the fragment falls.
Not pinned on the mapVisitability not confirmedLocation precision: Itomori and its crater are invented; no real place stands in for them.
The end of the film. Taki sees Mitsuha in a train running parallel to his, they get off and run, and they end up on the stone steps of a Shinto shrine in Shinjuku, where he cannot remember her name and they ask each other. The shrine is far older than the film: guardian of eighteen Yotsuya towns, moved to its present site in the early 17th century. Fans come in numbers now, photographing the steps and leaving ema plaques with wishes at the shrine.
Visitor guidance: The steps are inside the shrine grounds in the Yotsuya neighbourhood, a short walk from Yotsuya Station.
Sources
- Suga Shrine (Shinjuku)
- Locator:
- Introduction; Staircase
- Your Name
- Locator:
- Plot; Production
- Your Name
- Locator:
- Synopsis; Décors
- Suga Shrine (Shinjuku)
