Your Name — Filming Locations & Real Places

Isn't Itomori a real town? That was my first thought after the movie.

Turns out it's not entirely made up — but the way it's built is kind of funny.

That distinctive Itomori alleyway, the white-walled storehouses lining the Seto River, is lifted almost directly from a real street in Hida Furukawa, Gifu Prefecture. Lake Itomori is somewhere else entirely — modeled on Lake Suwa, in Nagano.

So the fictional 'Itomori' is really two different real places stitched together: the town from Gifu, the lake from Nagano. Once I realized that, googling one town turned into planning two separate trips.

히다후루카와역, 기후현 히다시 · Wikimedia Commons · CC BY-SA 4.0

The film actually opens as a fairly comic body-swap story. Mitsuha and Taki don't even know the other exists at first — they just live each other's days, bumbling through small mishaps, leaving notes and rules for each other in notebooks. The first act is genuinely funny.

Then, at some point, it just stops. The swapping cuts off completely, and Taki loses every way of reaching Mitsuha. He sets off for Hida with nothing to go on but the scenery from his memories — and that's exactly where the film's mood shifts completely.

What Taki finds when he gets there is something he never expected: three years earlier, a comet fragment struck Itomori and wiped the entire town off the map. Learning this for the first time genuinely gave me chills.

What's even more chilling is what comes next — it turns out Taki wasn't swapping bodies with the Mitsuha of 'now.' He was living the days of Mitsuha from three years in the past. The two of them were never even living in the same time to begin with.

So, to save the town and its people, one last attempt begins — one that's only possible during 'tasogare,' the twilight hour, a time that belongs to neither day nor night, when the line between this world and the next blurs.

도쿄 국립신미술관, 미나토구 롯폰기 · Wikimedia Commons · CC BY-SA

Here's the part that genuinely gave me chills once I learned it. The staircase where Taki and Mitsuha brush past each other near the end is modeled on the real staircase at Suga Shrine in Yotsuya, Shinjuku — apparently still the most popular final stop on the fan pilgrimage route.

Even 'musubi,' the concept Mitsuha's grandmother explains, isn't something the film made up. It's a real Japanese word — literally tying a cord or thread, extended to mean tying a bond between people — and it turns out to be the real metaphor running through the whole story that crosses time itself.

And at the very end, the two of them get a chance to cross paths again somewhere in Tokyo, having forgotten each other's names and faces entirely. Whether they can actually recognize each other again is the one question the film carries all the way to its final frame — and it might be the real engine behind the whole story.

I haven't made it to Hida Furukawa yet, but when I was in Tokyo I went out of my way to climb that staircase in Yotsuya. It's just an ordinary neighborhood stairway, but knowing the story behind it makes climbing it feel strangely different.

Next time I'm in Japan, I want to make it to Hida Furukawa and actually walk through the real 'Itomori.'