Anohana: The Flower We Saw That Day: the real places
Chichibu is ninety minutes from Ikebukuro and has been a pilgrimage town since 2011, which makes it the gentlest introduction to the practice: the city lists the locations itself, runs a stamp rally, and organises a clean-up of the sites with the fans rather than complaining about them. The bridge is the image — a concrete three-arch span of 1931, a prefectural cultural property, kept for people on foot after the new bridge took the traffic. The temple is the seventeenth station of the Chichibu pilgrimage, which is a four-hundred-year-old walking route this anime accidentally sent a second kind of pilgrim along. Two locations here for now; the city names several more and they will be added with their own sources.
3 places
Shrine · Rules of its own
Chichibu shrine
The town's own shrine, which the city lists among the locations its two anime are drawn from. It is far older than either: the guardian shrine of Chichibu, with a history the city counts in millennia, and the Chichibu Yomatsuri in December is its festival — one of the three great float festivals of Japan, and the reason the town is on maps that have never heard of the series.
- Address
- 埼玉県秩父市番場町1-3
- Getting there
- Chichibu railway, Chichibu, about 5 min on foot
Five minutes on foot from Chichibu station on the Chichibu railway, or fifteen from Seibu-Chichibu. Open grounds, free.
Rules of its own. A working shrine and the centre of the town's year, not a set. Bow at the gate, keep off the middle of the path, and if you come on 2 or 3 December you are in the middle of the Yomatsuri with two hundred thousand other people — which is worth planning for or planning around.
On the map · Official page · read on September 26, 2026
Temple · Rules of its own
Jōrin-ji, seventeenth station of the Chichibu pilgrimage
The small temple the group meets at, which the city lists among its anime locations. It is the seventeenth station of the Chichibu thirty-four Kannon pilgrimage, a walking route four centuries old, and its bell — carved with the hundred Kannon of the Japanese route — is a prefectural art property. Two kinds of pilgrim now use the same gate, which the temple takes with more grace than it had to.
- Address
- 埼玉県秩父市桜木町21-3
- Getting there
- Chichibu railway, Ohanabatake, about 15 min on foot
About fifteen minutes on foot from Ohanabatake on the Chichibu railway, in a residential lane with the keyaki park next door.
Rules of its own. A working temple on a pilgrimage route, in a residential street. People come here to pray and to have their book stamped: keep quiet, do not block the gate or the hall, do not photograph anyone praying, and remember the neighbours on both sides of the lane.
On the map · Official page · read on September 25, 2026
Bridge
Old Chichibu bridge
The bridge the series is remembered by, and the one the city's own tourism pages send fans to. It was finished in May 1931, a reinforced concrete span of three arches, 134.6 metres long and six wide, and it has been a prefectural cultural property since 1999. Traffic moved to the new bridge, so this one belongs to people on foot — which is why standing in the middle of it works at all.
- Address
- 埼玉県秩父市阿保町3795番地1先
- Getting there
- Seibu Chichibu line, Seibu-Chichibu, about 25 min on foot
About twenty-five minutes on foot from Seibu-Chichibu station, or a short ride; the cut-stone piers of the Meiji bridge of 1885 are still beside it.
On the map · Official page · read on September 25, 2026
How this list is made
A place is listed when the work, its publisher or the town's own tourism page names it, and the page it was read on is linked with the date it was read. Positions come from OpenStreetMap or from the Geospatial Information Authority of Japan, never from Google.
We never show a frame of a work beside a photograph of a place. The scene is described in words instead, which is also the version a screen reader and three languages can use. How we check and rank, in full.