Itomori may not be an actual city, but here’s where the hometown of Your Name’s female lead would be in real-life Japan.
Hit anime movie Your Name splits its scenes between Tokyo, home of male lead Taki, and Gifu Prefecture, where Mitsuha, his body-swapping female counterpart, lives. Each are rendered in the loving detail that director Makoto Shinkai is known for, but while Taki resides in the real-life Shinjuku district, Mitsuha hails from the fictional rural town of Itomori.
▼ Itomori can be seen at the 1:18 mark of the Your Name trailer.
Itomori has similarities to Hida, an actual Gifu town, but the two are still meant to be different places, as both cities are visited by the characters during the movie’s events. So while tourists have been setting a course for Hida in droves since Your Name’s release, you won’t find Itomori on any maps of Japan…or at least you won’t find the word “Itomori” written on any of them. However, you can see exactly where Itomori would be, if it really existed, right now by using Google Maps.
In the film, Itomori is situated in a mountainous area of rural Gifu, as shown in a twilight aerial shot centered on the lake that sits at the middle of the town. Because the region is only sparsely developed, sharp-eyed fans were able to use the illuminated roads and buildings visible in the scene as references from which to work out where Itamori’s location corresponds to in reality.
▼ There’s no lake there in real life, but drawing one in further proves that this is the spot on the map that Shinkai utilized.
The closest major landmark is a mountain called Nagarehayama (流葉山), so let’s pull up that point in Google Maps.
What makes things tricky, though, is that in the scene in Your Name the camera, so to speak, is facing east, so we have to rotate the map 90 degrees counterclockwise.
Looking at the map comparison in the tweet, we can see that Itomori’s lake sits at the bottom of a basin formed by the slopes of Nagarehayama and another mountain, Oborayama (大洞山), so we can use those points to triangulate the position of Itomori, which should be right around here.
Like we said, there’s no large lake there. What you will find in the vicinity, though, is a wetlands area called the Ikegahara Marsh.
With raised platforms allowing you to walk above flowering plant life, it looks like the perfect place to visit if you’re a fan of beautiful scenery in both the anime and natural worlds.
Related: Ikegahara Marsh
Source: Hachima Kiko
Top image: YouTube/ 東宝MOVIEチャンネル
Insert images: SoraNews24/Google Maps, Hida Mori wo Arukou