MESSAGE

“As anime has started to present works from various genres, you might find things that capture your interest within the images or discover words in the dialogue of the characters that pique your curiosity. Even in fantasy works, there may be actual models or real-life settings depicted. When you encounter such images, what do you feel? Have you ever thought about what the creators were thinking when they chose such settings or came up with those words? Even in the creation of entertainment, the staff has reasons for using certain settings and puts effort into crafting memorable words.

If you can enjoy it, that’s great, but if you’ve ever felt a sense of wonder while watching anime, I’d like you to consider visiting the places that inspired those settings at least once. I want you to go there, move your body, see the actual scenery, and experience it physically. By doing so, that experience should teach you something new.

Even if you don’t necessarily learn something, anime can be the catalyst for you to step outside, and you might obtain something you didn’t know before.

This is something that even senior anime fans have experienced, and those seniors who have a desire to tour the places they learned about in anime have begun to express a wish for hints on how to do such things (although it’s not necessarily easy).

Thinking about whether we can help with these feelings and recognizing that we may not be able to do it sufficiently, we decided to establish something called the Anime Tourism Association with the support of those in the anime industry with whom we are connected.

In the future, we hope for the participation of all of you, and we also want the association itself to engage in activities for the advancement of the new anime century. Please stay tuned.

General Incorporated Association Anime Tourism Association

Chairman: Yoshiyuki Tomino”