Anime Pilgrimage and the Growing Worldwide Appeal of Personal Pilgrimage

It's the end of a much-loved anime movie: Makoto Shinkai's 2016 hit your name..

The protagonists, Mitsuha and Taki, have just glimpsed each other on a subway train in Tokyo, only for both to get off at the next station and frantically try to find each other.

Then they come to some steps, leading to a shrine in Shibuya, and walk past each other, only to turn and ask each other: “What's your name.?”

These are the Suga Jinja Steps. Not only are they a real location in Tokyo, but since the film's success, they've become a regular spot for anime pilgrims seeking to visit the location of their favorite movie. For many, this isn't just about being there. It's right down to taking a picture of the animated protagonists and using it to recreate the screen on the stairs themselves.

It helps, of course, that many anime series and films from Sword Art Online: Ordinal Scale to Suzume, feature real-world locations within their narratives, and this could also be said to extend to video games like Ghost of Tsushima or Assassin's Creed: Shadows, which recreate specific times and locations in Japan, such as castles in Tsushima and Kiyomizudera in-game.

Suzume, in particular, was released just as Japan reopened its borders after the COVID-19 pandemic and featured lesser-known sections of Tokyo, like Ochanomizu, as well as portions of Kyushu, Ehime, and, of course, somewhere in Tohoku where Suzume was living during the events of 3/11. As a result, not only did the film feature a real-world campaign to show off distinctive items from each of Japan's 47 prefectures, but it also encouraged foreign anime fans to go beyond Tokyo, Kyoto, and Osaka in Suzume's shoes.

Anime pilgrimage isn't new, either. With the world online 24/7, it's become so much easier to share your experiences and your fandoms online via social media. There's even an Anime Pilgrimage site offering eighty-eight suggestions (a sacred number in Japanese Buddhism and often associated with the act of going on pilgrimage), as well as year-specific recommendations, which includes plenty of options for fans to find real locations that are important to them.

Indeed curated tours–such as one of Your Name produced by language and culture site Tofugu–are a common occurrence, offering not just photos but a Google Maps guide, an itinerary and the best times to visit, but also useful hints and tips to help other fans maximise their time and experience.

I sat down with Dr. Kaitlyn Ugoretz, an Instructor and Associate Editor for the Nanzan Institute for Religion and Culture at Nanzan University in Nagoya, Japan, and the host of the award-winning YouTube channel “Eat Pray Anime,” to find out more.

“The Japanese term seichi junrei means pilgrimage to sacred sites and generally refers to visiting locations of special significance to fans of pop culture contents like anime. It's a play on religious pilgrimage practices in Japan called junrei, which are thousands of years old. But instead of focusing on temples and shrines, pop culture pilgrims visit places that appear in their favorite media. Scholars have traced evidence of anime pilgrimage becoming a trend in the early 1990s, but it may have started much earlier. The internet and social media have thrown gasoline on the fire by allowing fans to easily share photos and other information.”

Given the obscene levels of over-tourism in Japan since the end of the pandemic, it's not surprising that cities like Tokyo, Kyoto, and Nara are teeming with tourists who come to visit TeamLabs, feed sacred deer, or hike up to Kiyomizudera (sometimes even with their suitcases!).

For many, Akihabara was the Mecca for all things anime, but now Nakano Broadway is quickly becoming the next focal point for anime and figure fans. Many fans will also visit actual sacred sites like Kanda Myōjin near Akihabara because it has appeared in various anime such as Love Live! or because of another collaboration, which the shrine is doing for this year's Kanda Matsuri with The Apothecary Diaries, a hit series which has gained popularity around the world since it debuted in 2023.

“In a lot of ways, seichi junrei isn't so different from visiting shrines and oftentimes borrows and transforms some devotional practices, like collecting pilgrimage stamps (goshuin) and leaving behind illustrated prayer boards called ema. However, there are also trends unique to seichi junrei, such as butai tanbō (aka ‘scene hunting’) where fans use a camera to capture a photo that exactly replicates a scene from a related anime. Unlike visiting Shibuya Crossing and taking pictures to prove you've been there, the goal of anime pilgrimage is to get closer, both physically and psychologically, to the characters and spaces in the show or film.”

Many of these tourists will also take time to visit their own personal holy sites; the head of Godzilla on the Hotel Gracey in Shinjuku, Yokohama's much-missed life-szed Gundam, the iconic Scramble Crossing in Shibuya or a specialist store dedicated to a particular fandom, such as the Sailor Moon Store in Harajuku or the Studio Ghibli-focused Donguri Republic.

Such ideas of almost religious awe extend to popular tourist attractions like Team Labs or exhibitions, such as the Sailor Moon Museum which began in Roppongi and, in 2024 went on tour around Japan allowing more people to visit, as well as attracting a large number of foreign visitors as well,

But is this just a foreign otaku thing?

Japanese people absolutely participate in seichi junrei. After all, we wouldn't have the term if Japanese people hadn't coined it to describe what they were doing or seeing other people do. But of course, not all Japanese people are the same. Those outside of fandom often see anime pilgrimage as something strange and the desire to connect with the 2.5D as delusional. People who live around sacred media sites might find the increased tourism a nuisance. Others, like the Japanese national and local governments and even religious organizations, have seen the benefits of anime tourism and collaborated with animation studios and fan communities to promote sacred sites and create new ones.

TikTok and Facebook are filled with reels of people visiting their favorite sites in Tokyo or Kyoto, often taking photos of themselves in places like Azabu-Jūban, highlighting the exact locations of Sailor Moon, such as shrines, temples and local attractions, drawn not only by the love of the show but, in this case, a series of manhole covers added around the city for fans to visit.

It feels like a very Japanese thing to do, but as Dr. Ugoretz explains, tourists around the world do something very similar:

“Seichi junrei is often associated with anime, but it's part of a larger phenomenon called 'contents tourism.' Pretty much any place can be imbued with special significance by fans of any type of media, including computer games and live-action TV. Plus, this isn't something that only happens in new media or Japan. A few of my favorite sacred sites outside of Japan are 221B Baker Street in London, the real location of the fictional detective Sherlock Holmes's home, and the hobbit holes from the Lord of the Rings movies in New Zealand.”

When anime pilgrimages are reframed in this light, it doesn't seem quite as strange, does it? Who hasn't been to a place like Disneyland or Universal and not taken pictures of themselves, often dressed up in cosplay, to commemorate an important memory in a place that holds importance for the person in the photo?

Dr. Ugoretz continues: “Sacred sites aren't limited to places that only appear in our favorite media. They can also be sites that are involved in the production or consumption of that media. For example, the Studio Ghibli headquarters or a factory that makes action figures for a certain franchise. What matters most is that going to the place helps fans feel closer to the media they are passionate about.”

Many of these spaces are often temporary and liminal: a collaboration cafe for a movie, a pop-up selling limited edition merch from a particular mangaka or franchise, which is only there for a short period. This creates a sense of urgency but also a feeling of transience; an experience which an anime fan might treasure as being a form of communion between themselves and the franchise of their focus.

It is a way for fans to commune with their chosen fandom, in a place of particular importance for them and how they interact with it. Then they share it with other fans, thus perpetuating the need to visit for themselves. Even better, no two fans share the same fandoms or sacred locations, meaning that the options for personal pilgrimage are just that, personal.

As technology improves, this also means we could be seeing more than tour itineraries on websites, and photographic recreations or videos shared on YouTube. The future is all about AR and VR, so how long will it be until you can experience the Suga Shrine Steps and Tokyo from the comfort of your home via a headset? Is being able to visit a real site in a virtual space the same as going there yourself? How far can computer games or films go to recreate the feelings of a real place?

Regardless, as long as anime exists, fans will want to go to places they know from beloved episodes or favourite films, be it a product of Japan or a franchise from another part of the world, like Lord of the Rings. Thanks to how much of our lives are now spent online, it's only getting easier for the concept seichi junrei to grow and evolve as newer forms of media become easier to access, cheaper to use, and more mainstream in their acceptance.