Anime is Not Just in Tokyo: Part 1!

Tokyo might seem like the most anime-est of locations, after all it’s the home of the cosplay and kawaii capital -Harajuku, the iconic city crushing monster that started the whole Kaiju genre – Godzilla, and there have been hundreds of anime that take place in this huge Asian metropolis. It’s not surprising this super city was the main location for so much anime and movies, this massive megaplex stretches over 5,000 square miles and is home to over 35 million people, so there’s bound to be some anime characters living there! But Tokyo isn’t the only amazing location where anime characters have frolicked, there are also a plethora of places in Japan that anime series are located. From the snowy Northern island of Hokkaido to the sunny tropical islands of Okinawa there is so much more to anime’s Japanese locations than just Tokyo! So let me welcome you to a four part blog series highlighting wonderful places outside of Tokyo Japan and the thrilling, heart warming, and fun anime that happen there.

Hokkaido

Let’s start off from the top with Hokkaido! Of course, you know that Japan is not one complete land mass, but rather a series of large and small islands, and Hokkaido is the Northern most of those islands. But did you know that this wasn’t always true? A couple hundred years ago Hokkaido wasn’t part of Japan, but as the Japanese empire expanded in the 1800’s it grew to include the large northern island and it’s native inhabitants. The indigenous inhabitants of Hokkaido (the Ainu) have a distinct culture completely different from the nearby Japanese islands and their art work and traditions are actually more like North Pacific Native American tribes (like Haida or Chinook) than Asian cultures. Unfortunately, like in many other countries, the indigenous people of Hokkaido weren’t treated very well by the Japanese government and much of their culture was suppress and some of it was even lost forever. Thankfully in the modern era the Ainu are more free to express their traditions and share their art work. If you look around the largest city in Hokkaido, Sapporo, you are sure to find some beautiful Ainu art work, showing that the Hokkaido spirit might have been buried for a while, but certainly not forgotten!

Beautiful Bones

Buried but not forgotten is something this Hokkaido anime knows all about. In the anime Beautiful Bones the enigmatic and lovely lady osteologist (bone researcher) Sakurako loves nothing more than finding some long forgotten buried bones, and solving the mystery behind them. With her assistant, a high school boy named Shotaro, they travel around Hokkaido stumbling across corpses and helping the police solve murder mysteries. It’s very much like an anime version of the TV shows“CSI” or “Bones”.

Coming from a wealthy and well respected family of researchers, Sakurako has been given some understanding for her eccentric hobby of collecting animal skeletons and her less than friendly personality for most of her life. Unfortunately that extra freedom has only fueled her obsession of collecting bones and she often becomes quite clingy to the bones she finds. Even if those bones are needed for a murder investigation! Thankfully her young assistant Shotaro is usually there to keep her bone grabbiness in check and to be a go-between for his caustic employer and the Hokkaido police department that Sakurako is often tasked with helping.