Date & Time: Tuesday, June 19, 9:30 a.m. – 6:30 p.m.
Spots: Zeniarai Benten Shrine, Tsurugaoka Hachimangu Shrine, Kotokuin Temple (Great Buddha), Kamakura Sr. High School and Enoshima
Visitors: 3 Chinese women
Language: Chinese
One of the participants of this tour was an eighteen-year-old girl who had just completed the university entrance exams. She is a J-Pop fan, and wanted to visit the places in the music videos of her favorite J-Pop boy band.
It has become an increasingly popular trend for young people to visit the settings of TV dramas, movies, anime and manga. For example, Hida-Furukawa Station in Gifu Prefecture attracts visitors as the setting for the anime Your Name (i.e. Kiminonawa). When KSGG received such a request, we planned a tour that included visits to the historic sites of Tsurugaoka-Hachimangu Shrine and Kotokuin Temple. It was a long tour, with my pedometer recording as many as 27,000 steps. We learned a lot about the J-Pop boy band ,Johnny’s, anime and shooting locations of TV dramas, movies, anime and manga our Chinese visitors were so interested in. You could say that for them it was a kind of a “Pilgrimage to the Holy Land”.
I’ll never forget the pleasant time we spent at the top of the hill in Enoshima at the end of the tour, where they expressed their satisfaction while eating tako senbei (octopus-flavoured rice crackers), an Enoshima’s specialty.