![]() Pilgrimages aren’t restricted to particular genres. Imagine watching The Simpsons and seeing a perfect reproduction of the dry cleaner around the corner from your apartment. This may sound unlikely, but it’s possible because for anime with real-life settings, artists often sketch backgrounds using reference material of actual places, including everyday ones. Vito was taking part in what the Japanese call seichijunrei - literally “holy land pilgrimage,” but in this context, translated as “anime pilgrimage.” While American tourists are familiar with the idea of visiting places where TV shows or movies were filmed or set, fans of Japanese anime also visit the locations of their homegrown animated films. Toho Studios and Courtesy of Michael Vito The highest-grossing animated film in Japan (surpassing Studio Ghibli’s Oscar-winning Spirited Away), as well as the fourth-highest Japanese movie overall, Kimi no Na wa went on to huge success internationally, particularly in China, and in the process, brought fame to some places you wouldn’t expect to be tourist destinations. This was no ordinary bus stop, but the site of a scene in the 2016 animated movie Kimi no Na wa, released in English as Your Name. Why would someone trek to an abandoned bus stop in rural Japan? The better question is: Why would a dozen people do it? When Vito got there, he joined a small crowd of tourists at the mundane location. Instead, the bus stop was his destination. He wasn’t there to catch a bus - a good thing, seeing as the town shut down service the previous year. Here’s a typical vacation for Michael Vito, an American living in China: a flight from his home in Shanghai to Tokyo then a sequence of four trains to get to Hida, a small city in Gifu prefecture followed by a 10-minute walk to a bus stop.
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