Genesis at the Shrine: The Votive Art of an Anime Pilgrimage

In 2002 a dōjin group known as 07th Expansion produced a sound novel (visual novel) format game called Higurashi no naku koro ni (“When they cry,” hereafter referred to as Higurashi). ¹ Over the next several years, anime, manga, light novels, films, and other Higurashi products swept into the marketplace for an ever-expanding fan base. Higurashi is a mystery story that follows six central characters who are haunted by a series of murders. Much of the action of the narrative takes place in the rural community of Hinamizawa in June 1983. Besides one male protagonist, Maebara Kei’ichi, the main characters are all female and include Furude Rika, Hōjō Satoko, Ryūgū Rena, and the Shinozaki sisters, Mion and Shion. Additionally, there is one more character of interest: Rika’s ancestor, Hanyū, who happens to be the deity worshipped in the local shrine in Hinamizawa.

All of this, of course, is standard enough for an anime. But there is a twist—not with the story itself but rather with how fans reacted to it. Particularly stimulated by the television airing of Higurashi in 2006, fans set off on a quest, driven by Japan’s popular culture and accented by artistic intention, to enshrine their beloved Higurashi anime characters at the crossroads of the two-dimensional and three-dimensional worlds. They traveled to the site of the genesis of the anime.

THE HIGURASHI PILGRIMAGE

In the same way that motion pictures, TV dramas, and commercials are filmed on location, anime productions regularly incorporate backdrops adopted from real places; in recent years, more and more anime fans are choosing to actually embark on trips to these places, journeys that bring the two-dimensional world of the anime to the three-dimensional setting on which it is modeled. Fans have adopted the term seichi junrei, a compound meaning “sacred site” (seichi) and “pilgrimage” (junrei), for this spiritual enterprise.² Within Japan’s otaku culture, seichi are not limited to the settings of anime and games but also include thriving maid cafes, the homes and workplaces of anime or manga artists, factories manufacturing otaku-valued commodities, and Tokyo’s Akihabara shopping district, a mecca for assorted hobbyists.³ In this way, the term seichi is pervasively used by otaku in general, but it is anime fans in particular who tend to use the expression seichi junrei, which further emphasizes the pilgrimage aspect and the act of actually journeying to the sacred site in question.

Although seichi junrei remain largely unknown outside the fan community, such pilgrimages first started in the 1990s when fans began to seek out sites connected with specific anime. One of the earliest known pilgrimages occurred when fans inspired by the series Sailor Moon (1992–97, Bishōjo senshi Seeraamūn) gathered at the Hikawa Shrine in Tokyo’s urban neighborhood of Motoazabu.⁴ Since that time, the cultural phenomenon of anime seichi junrei has grown, and today there is an emerging genre of books listing pilgrimage sites throughout the country.⁵ Although academic research into anime pilgrimage is in its infancy, studies of pilgrimage as a form of tourism are more and more common, and one can even find a handbook instructing municipalities how to use pilgrimages to invigorate their local economies.⁶

In the case of Higurashi, fans perform the pilgrimage in order to spiritually connect with other fans, with the production of the anime, with its creators, and above all, with the characters. Although Hinamizawa is a fictitious village created for the narrative, it is based on an actual site: Shirakawagō, a village in Gifu Prefecture famous as a tourist showpiece of nostalgic rural Japan. Some Higurashi fans make the pilgrimage to Shirakawagō only once, some several times, and those enraptured by Higurashi visit repeatedly.

To facilitate the pilgrimage, fans have appropriated a tourist map of the real site of Shirakawagō and transformed it into a downloadable map of Hinamizawa, overwriting the original locations with those in the Higurashi story.⁷ Fans carry these maps in order to find, for example, a building that serves as a...