When Fiction Becomes
the Reason You Came

We all have an entry point into Japan. For some it's video games. For most, manga. For others, art, or martial arts, or some sport that first opened the door. Everyone finds in Japan whatever they came looking for — and often ends up staying for entirely different reasons.

Mine was the desire to learn a language that resembled nothing I already knew. Nothing Latin about it at all. And naturally, that desire settled on Japan — a country I'd already been primed for since childhood, raised on manga, one series in particular: Hikaru no Go. It became my excuse to walk the streets of Tokyo on my first trip, hunting down Go salons where I could sit across from local players and try to recapture that particular atmosphere the story had made me fall in love with.

The desire to discover. The encounters. The personal adventure, the personal reckoning. There's something genuinely thrilling about confronting the dream with the reality — and even more so when reality outdoes the fiction. That's the quiet beauty of so many manga and video game worlds: they're anchored in something real that sometimes exceeds what the story ever imagined.

I've obviously never met an actual ninja, or anyone capable of summoning force fields or fireballs from thin air. But you understand, eventually, how a hunger for self-improvement, for perfection, bound to Japanese discipline and restraint, could give rise to worlds like the ones in Naruto, Dragon Ball Z, or One Piece, to name only the most famous. The quest for adventure creates a striking contrast with the everyday reality of Japanese life — but maybe that very reality is the soil that grows the ambition our heroes live inside. And that's part of what draws so many people to eventually want to see, with their own eyes, the country that made them dream so much through their favourite characters.

Why deprive yourself? And why not go further — actually visit the places, walk the specific streets and neighbourhoods that inspired these stories?

That's what we're building here at Torii Japan: a guide that lets you do exactly that, letting you enjoy Japan while carrying a little of the universe that first inspired you to come.

That guide is here now — four itineraries built around Slam Dunk, Hikaru no Go, Your Name and Persona 5.