Anime pilgrimage

Tokyo to Kumamoto through the actual places, not the shops

This is not a merchandise run, it's about places. Hakone literally is Evangelion's Third New Tokyo and you can walk it with the show's map. Hita, an inland town in Oita, has the Attack on Titan museum, because Isayama is from there and the Ōyama reservoir is the landscape he drew. The Naruto & Boruto Shinobi-Zato is on Awaji Island, inside Nijigen no Mori park. And the One Piece statues scattered across Kumamoto were commissioned by the prefecture together with Eiichiro Oda, who is from there, to raise funds after the 2016 earthquake. Along the way: the Ghibli Museum in Mitaka, Ghibli Park in Nagoya, the Slam Dunk level crossing in Kamakura, Akihabara and Denden Town.

The itinerary, stop by stop

1. Tokyo5 days

   It is not just Shibuya and Asakusa. Tokyo is the stone base of Edo Castle, once the largest in the world, sitting in a free public garden; it is Toyosu, the biggest fish market on earth, with glazed walkways above the tuna auction and sushi counters serving from first light; it is kabuki at the Kabukiza with single-act tickets sold same-day at the side window, no booking; and it is the whole forest wrapped around Meiji Jingu, minutes from Harajuku.

   Day trip to Kamakura

   Tokyo opens the route for the obvious reason, since this is where the plane lands and where the rail network you will use for eighteen days begins, and for a less obvious one: it is the only place on the trip where you see how any of this gets made. In Nerima, inside the Toei compound, there is a gallery belonging to the studio behind Mazinger Z, Candy Candy, Dragon Ball, Sailor Moon and One Piece, and that district is where Japanese television animation was born. In Suginami, home to more than a hundred studios, the ward runs a museum that walks through the whole process, light table and dubbing booth included. Both are free to enter. Akihabara comes afterwards, and that is the right order.

   Five days split comfortably: two for the city at street level, with Akihabara, Shibuya, Harajuku and Asakusa; one for the western side along the Chuo line, which pairs Mitaka and the Ghibli Museum with the Suginami museum, reached by bus from Ogikubo rather than on foot; one for Nerima; and the fifth for Kamakura. The Ghibli Museum is what dictates the calendar: tickets are released on the tenth of the previous month and vanish within minutes, so either you build the trip around that date or you accept it may not happen, in which case Suginami and Toei carry the day, though Toei also closes on a fair number of dates for filming. In Akihabara the warning that matters is not the price of figurines: do not follow anyone who approaches you in the street offering a maid cafe.

   The Kamakura day trip fits into that fifth day and changes register in an hour of train: temples among wooded hills, the Great Buddha out in the open, and on the Enoden line the level crossing that opens Slam Dunk. It is worth saying what that spot has become, because it is one of the worst overtourism flashpoints in the country: up to two hundred people a day, municipal cameras, Enoden stewards, a police car five days a week, and residents who have reported people urinating in their gardens. The town hall has floated making it deliberately less photogenic. It is thirty seconds of a shot and it costs nothing to behave: stay off the road, do not block the crossing, no flash, take your rubbish with you.

   What puts it in this route: Akihabara: Anime, Manga, and Electronics · Ghibli Museum (Mitaka) · Suginami Animation Museum · Toei Animation Museum in Oizumi-gakuen · The Slam Dunk level crossing at Kamakura-Koko-Mae

2. Hakone2 days

   Hakone is not a spa town but a forty-square-kilometre caldera with a dome in the middle: seven historic springs, each with its own chemistry and temperature, which is why the afternoon in the ryokan's rotenburo is the plan and not the trimming. You come up on Japan's oldest adhesion mountain railway, with three switchbacks, and cross Lake Ashi by boat. June brings hydrangeas along the embankment; October, the golden susuki of Sengokuhara.

   A train out of Shinjuku puts you in Hakone-Yumoto without touching a car at any point, and the whole stop is a shift of register: city gives way to mountain, and places about anime give way to anime inside the landscape. There is no museum or gallery to visit here, just terrain to recognise. Lake Ashi, Sengokuhara, Owakudani and Komagatake all appear in the series and you can place them unaided. Worth knowing: the official campaign ran in 2019 and 2020 and has ended, so there is no signposted circuit and no panels today, only the map from the series and your own eye.

   The two days divide themselves. One is the classic loop, which happens to be the route itself: the 1919 mountain railway with its three switchbacks, the Gora to Sounzan funicular, the ropeway over Owakudani, suspended on some days because of volcanic gas, and the boat across the lake. The other is deliberately empty, which is how Japanese visitors actually use Hakone: ryokan, bath, yukata, dinner, nothing else. This is the most expensive stop on the route and that second day is where the money goes. You can squeeze it into one day, but that is precisely the half you lose. In August, on the fifth, a giant torii is set alight on the slope above Hakone-machi.

   What puts it in this route: Evangelion location route in Tokyo-3

3. Nagoya2 days

   The city where you watch Japan being manufactured: the Toyota museum traces the jump from the loom to the car with the machines running, and an hour away you can look down from a walkway onto a real assembly line, kanban cards moving along it. The castle has rebuilt its residential palace in cypress with traditional joinery — you go in barefoot — and you eat hitsumabushi, grilled eel served three different ways in the one bowl.

   Drop down to Odawara, take the Tokaido shinkansen, and you are in Nagoya soon after. On this route it works as the hinge between the quiet kind of pilgrimage and the industrial version of the same thing. Ghibli Park is here, and it is neither the Mitaka museum nor anything like it: it sits in Nagakute, in Aichi, is easy to reach from the city, and runs on dated, timed tickets booked well in advance, often by lottery. Nagoya is also where the World Cosplay Summit takes place every August, with a parade through the centre and teams from dozens of countries. It is the only stop whose date governs all the others.

   A full day for the park and another for the city, which holds up better than its industrial reputation suggests: the castle's Honmaru Goten palace, rebuilt in cypress and visited barefoot, the Toyota industry museum, and a local kitchen that resembles neither Tokyo's nor Osaka's, with hitsumabushi, miso-katsu, tebasaki, and the morning coffee that comes with breakfast attached. If cosplay means nothing to you, Nagoya shrinks to one day and the route barely suffers; if you are here for the Summit, that weekend takes over the centre and you should not plan anything delicate around it.

   What puts it in this route: Ghibli Park · World Cosplay Summit

4. Osaka2 days

   This city eats standing up and out loud: the neon of Dotonbori over the canal, takoyaki, okonomiyaki and kushikatsu, the izakaya alleys of Ura-Namba and, around Tenma station, the densest cluster of stand-up bars in Japan. Kitsune udon was invented here, and Osaka was pressing sushi in wooden boxes before Tokyo got round to nigiri. It is also home to Taro Okamoto's Tower of the Sun, seventy metres of sculpture you walk inside.

   Under an hour of shinkansen from Nagoya and the route eases off. Osaka is on the itinerary for two reasons, and it is only fair to say which weighs more: Denden Town, the Akihabara equivalent in the Nipponbashi district, with figurines, manga, retro games and electronics; and the fact that Awaji island is entered by bus from here. Direct coaches to Sumoto leave from Umeda and JR Namba and take roughly two to two and a half hours, and anyone who would rather not spend that long on the road can take the Sanyo line to Maiko and board the same bus at the elevated stop right underneath the bridge.

   Given two days, Denden Town will not fill half of one: after Akihabara it reads as the same thing in fewer blocks. What justifies the stop is the city around it. Dotonbori after dark, street food that here amounts to a genre of its own, the Ura-Namba alleys where you eat standing up and move on after two dishes, and manzai at the Namba Grand Kagetsu, where without Japanese you lose the script but not the timing or the crowd's reaction. If the trip is short on days, this is the easiest of the seven stops to cut back, and the one you miss least.

   What puts it in this route: Denden Town: Electronics and Otaku Culture

5. Awaji Island2 days

   The first island Izanagi and Izanami create in Japan's founding myth, home to the shrine tradition calls the country's oldest and to three Tadao Ando buildings within half an hour of each other. And, on the same island, the park with a life-size Godzilla and a Hidden Leaf Village built in the woods.

   Awaji has no railway. You arrive by road bus over the Akashi-Kaikyo bridge, and that is not a workaround but the normal way in, with departures every half hour and no reservation needed. The difficulty starts once you are on the island. Local buses link Iwaya, Sumoto and Fukura along route 28 often enough, but almost everything you will want to see sits one or two kilometres from a stop or is served three times a day, and the island runs fifty-three kilometres from north to south. A rental car triples what you cover in the same time. Counting the transfer in, treat the two days as one and a half.

   The Naruto and Boruto Shinobi-Zato is here, built into the woods of Nijigen no Mori park: the Konoha gate, the Hokage's office, an Ichiraku Ramen that actually serves food, and a course of ninja trials. The park works in a way that catches most people off guard: admission is free and each attraction is paid for separately, with its own ticket and its own hours, spread across a hundred and thirty hectares of slopes and long walking distances, so you pick one or two and give up on the rest. Basic Shinobi-Zato entry runs from 3,300 to 4,100 yen depending on the day, and the version including the trials goes to 4,800-5,600; it is bought online with a time slot and sells out in high season. Next door stands the full-scale Godzilla, with a zip line into its mouth.

   The remaining half day is the island itself, and it is where the route surprises anyone who came only for the park: Honpuku-ji, the Water Temple, where Tadao Ando buried the main hall under an elliptical lotus pond and you descend a staircase that splits the water, four hundred yen and open every day of the year; Izanagi Jingu, held by tradition to be the oldest shrine in the country; and Yumebutai, concrete cascading down the hillside whose earth was dug out to build Kansai airport. From Fukura, at the southern tip, boats run out to the whirlpools of the Naruto strait, a tidal phenomenon with no connection whatsoever to the series, and considerably bigger on the spring tides of spring and autumn than in August.

   What puts it in this route: NARUTO & BORUTO Shinobi-Zato · Nijigen no Mori: how the anime park works

6. Hita1 day

   A merchant town the Tokugawa shogunate governed directly: the Mameda quarter still has its 18th- and 19th-century merchant houses, sake breweries and storehouses, and in summer cormorants fish by firelight on the Mikuma River. It is also Hajime Isayama's home town, with the Attack on Titan museum and the statues of Eren, Mikasa and Armin below the Oyama dam.

   This is the long haul of the trip and there is no dressing it up: bus back across the bridge, a shinkansen halfway across the country to Hakata, then the Hita-go road coach, one hour thirty-five from Fukuoka, 1,790 yen each way, with around thirty departures a day and no reservation. Count it as a travel day. In exchange, the route changes its nature exactly here: until now you have been visiting places that were drawn, and from Hita onwards you visit where the people who drew them came from. Hajime Isayama grew up in Oyama, a valley inside this inland town in Oita.

   With a single day, sequence matters. The statues of Eren, Mikasa and Armin stand on the apron below the Oyama dam, ninety-four metres of concrete they look up at the way the characters look up at the wall in the opening scene; access and parking are free, there are no opening hours, and the entire point is standing where they stand. The Shingeki no Kyojin museum is inside the Oyama roadside service area, 500 yen, and the ANNEX sits in the grounds of the Sapporo brewery, 700, with a combined ticket at 1,000 valid for two days. Without a car, the Tsuetate line of Hita Bus takes about thirty minutes for 560 yen but runs rarely; with a car the whole lot fits in half a day and Mameda-machi, fifteen minutes on foot from the station, fills the other half.

   What puts it in this route: Attack on Titan in HITA Museum · Attack on Titan in HITA Museum ANNEX

7. Kumamoto3 days

   The castle is still under repair after the earthquake, which is why a 300-metre elevated walkway lets you look straight at stone walls that are still down; at night it stays lit until dawn as a symbol of the rebuilding. East of the city opens the Aso caldera: with the crater closed because of the gas, what is left is the Kusasenri grassland and its horses, the Daikanbo lookout, and a museum relaying live feeds from cameras fixed inside the crater wall.

   From Hita you backtrack along the Kyudai line to join the Kyushu shinkansen and run down to Kumamoto, which closes the trip for the same reason Hita turned it: Eiichiro Oda was born here. Before dividing up the three days, understand how the Straw Hat statues are distributed, because that decides the plan. Luffy stands in the garden of the Prefectural Office, inside the city and reachable on foot, while the other nine are scattered across the rest of the prefecture and amount to a full day of driving. This is the only one of the seven stops where the pilgrimage depends on having a car.

   A sensible split is one day in the city, one on the road and one at Aso. In the city: the castle, its keep open again since 2021 and the elevated walkway of some three hundred metres that brings you close to walls still lying collapsed; ramen in a lighter pork broth with black garlic oil; and the alleys between Shimotori and Kamitori after dark, local nightlife without aggressive touts. Aso comes with a warning: as of September 2026 access to the Nakadake crater is closed and a one-kilometre exclusion zone remains in force, taking in the rim viewpoint. Still open are the Kusasenri grassland, the Daikanbo caldera lookout, the Komezuka cone and the Volcano Museum, which streams the crater's interior live from cameras fixed to its wall.

   If you are not driving, the statue day falls away and there is plenty to put in its place: Kurokawa Onsen, in the north of the caldera, about two and a half hours by bus, where a cedar wood disc buys you three open-air baths at three different inns; or Amakusa, two and a half to three hours out, with the village of Sakitsu and its dolphins. One background warning for the end of the trip: August in Kyushu means real heat and humidity, and after two long weeks your legs will know it. The route does not finish here because Kumamoto is the climax, but because this is where the arc that began in the studios of Nerima closes.

   What puts it in this route: The One Piece statues of the reconstruction