Suzume — Filming Locations & Real Places

Wait, that abandoned park is actually still open? That's what surprised me most while looking up the filming locations.

The Kyushu port town where Suzume grew up is modeled on Aburatsu Port in Miyazaki Prefecture — a real, quiet harbor.

The film actually kicks off when Suzume follows a traveler named Souta she runs into on her way to school, into a ruin in the mountains. There, she finds a lone door standing in the rubble, and the moment she opens it without thinking, a worm-shaped disaster entity called the Mimizu starts leaking out.

Then Souta, the 'closer' whose job is to shut these doors, gets turned into an old three-legged children's chair while trying to stop the disaster. It sounded like a bizarre setup at first, but once the talking white cat Daijin shows up too, the road trip of Suzume and 'chair Souta' really kicks off.

야와타하마항, 에히메현 (극중 페리 항로의 실제 모델) · Wikimedia Commons

That journey runs the length of Japan — Kyushu to Shikoku, Kobe, Tokyo, and finally Tohoku. The ferry scene where she chases Daijin over to Shikoku is a real route too, based on Yawatahama Port in Ehime.

But the one that really caught me off guard was different. The abandoned amusement park with the 'second door' partway through the film — I assumed it was a real ruin. Turns out it's modeled on the Kobe Fruit Flower Park, which is still an operating amusement park today. They painted a working park to look abandoned.

The Tokyo section has Suzume's group fighting off a giant Mimizu threatening the whole city, and the bridge they cross is real too — Hijiribashi in Ochanomizu. Fans point to Ushigafuchi, a moat on the outer edge of the Imperial Palace, as the likely site of Tokyo's 'back door.'

Then, at the very end of the journey, on the Tohoku coast, Suzume finally confronts a wound from her own childhood head-on. What she was really searching for on the other side of all those doors slowly comes into focus here.

This part lands differently. Once you know Shinkai has said he made this film as both a mourning for those lost in the 2011 earthquake and a comfort for those who survived, the fact that the backdrop is a real recovery-era rest stop in Miyagi stops feeling like just another filming location.

아오시마(오니노센타쿠이타), 미야자키현 - 스즈메의 고향으로 설정된 니치난 해안 지역 · Wikimedia Commons

Once you notice that the act of locking a door is itself a metaphor for accepting loss and moving forward anyway, you want to actually retrace this road trip.

The small kindnesses from strangers along the way matter too. It's a heavy journey to close doors and stop disasters, but people keep feeding Suzume, giving her a place to sleep, helping her out at every stop — and it makes the film warmer than you'd expect.

The talking cat Daijin is worth a second thought too. Once you realize this adorable, maddening cat is actually deeply tangled up with the beings that hold disasters at bay, all those chase scenes read differently in hindsight.

I haven't retraced the whole Kyushu-to-Tohoku route myself yet, but whenever I do, I want to go into the Tohoku stretch with the right frame of mind rather than treating it lightly.

A Kyushu port, a ferry to Shikoku, a Kobe amusement park, a Tokyo bridge, and the Tohoku coast — string them together and this one film gives you a travel route running the entire length of Japan.