In Uji, an anime bandroom and a thousand-year tea town share one riverbank

The euphonium in the title is a real instrument, Uji (宇治) is a real town, and the two meet on a paved path along the river where teenagers in an animation series walk home from band practice every spring. You can stand where the frame stood. The water moves the same way. What surprises most people is that the anime is the youngest thing here by about a thousand years.

Getting to the water

Uji sits at the southern edge of the Kyoto basin, close enough to the city that it never quite decided to be a suburb. Two rail lines reach it. From Kyoto Station, the JR Nara Line (JR奈良線) runs to JR Uji Station in seventeen to thirty minutes depending on whether you catch a rapid, for around 240 yen. The other approach is the Keihan Uji Line (京阪宇治線), which you join at Chūshojima (中書島) after riding down from Gion; its terminus, Keihan Uji Station, is a disc of glass and pale concrete that looks less like a station than a piece of civic sculpture.

Both stations put you within a few minutes' walk of the Uji River (宇治川, Uji-gawa), which is the point. Almost everything worth seeing is arranged along a kilometre of both banks, linked by bridges. You do not need a map so much as a willingness to cross back and forth.

The bridge that predates the anime by fourteen centuries

The Uji Bridge (宇治橋, Uji-bashi) was first thrown across the river in the year 646, which makes it one of the oldest bridge sites in the country. Partway across, on the upstream side, a small covered bay called the Sannoma (三の間) juts out over the current; tea masters once drew water here for the shogun. At the eastern foot of the bridge stands Tsūen (通圓), a tea house that has served travellers since 1160 and still pours a bowl of matcha for a few hundred yen at a counter worn smooth by over eight centuries of elbows.

This is the useful thing to understand before you go looking for cartoon backgrounds: the town was already a destination when The Tale of Genji was being written. Its final ten chapters, the Uji jūjō (宇治十帖), are set precisely here, and a quiet museum near the Keihan station keeps their memory. The anime did not put Uji on the map. It arrived late, and paid its respects.

Where the band walks

The series is Hibike Euphonium, made by Kyoto Animation, whose studio is a short ride away in the same city. Its high-school wind ensemble is fictional, but the streets they cross are not. The riverside promenade on the western bank, Ajirogi-no-michi (あじろぎの道), appears again and again — a flat gravel path under willows where two characters once sat on a bench and failed to say what they meant.

Follow it upstream and you reach the Asagiri Bridge (朝霧橋, Asagiri-bashi), a vermillion footbridge that lands on a slim mid-river island. On the island stands a thirteen-storey stone pagoda, the Ukishima Jūsanjū-no-tō (浮島十三重石塔), grey stone rising over the water, photographed by people who came for the tower and people who came for the show, often the same afternoon. The model for the students' school, a working public high school, sits a little inland; the courteous move is to recognise it from the far side of its fence and keep walking. People live and study here.

The frame is generous. It asks only that you not treat the sidewalk as a set.

Tea older than the frame

Uji has grown green tea since the thirteenth century, and matcha in particular is close to a civic identity. The approach to Byōdō-in, a covered lane called the Omotesandō (表参道), is lined with tea houses where the smell of roasting leaf hangs in the air. Nakamura Tōkichi (中村藤吉), founded 1854, serves a matcha jelly in a bamboo cup that draws a queue by mid-morning; Itō Kyūemon (伊藤久右衛門) does a tea-course lunch. A soft-serve of ceremonial-grade matcha runs about 500 yen and is worth the small ache behind the eyes.

At the lane's end is Byōdō-in (平等院) itself, whose Phoenix Hall (鳳凰堂, Hōō-dō) you have already seen: it is the building on the back of the ten-yen coin, and the phoenix on its roof is the one on the ten-thousand-yen note. The grounds and museum cost 700 yen; the interior of the hall is a separate 300-yen ticket, sold for numbered time slots that fill up on weekends. Across the river, up a short slope, Ujigami Shrine (宇治上神社) holds what is believed to be Japan's oldest surviving shrine building, its cypress-bark roof dating to the Heian period. Both are UNESCO World Heritage. Neither needs an anime to justify the walk.

How to walk it

Give it half a day, more if you linger over tea. Come on a weekday morning: Byōdō-in opens at 8:30, and the first hour is the only one you will have the Phoenix Hall's reflection in its pond to yourself. Buy the interior ticket the moment you arrive, then loop the river while your slot approaches. Budget roughly 1,500 to 2,500 yen for admissions and a bowl of tea, plus your fare in.

The one mistake worth naming: do not go hunting for the exact bench or the exact classroom window as if the town owed you a photograph. Uji is a lived-in place with a shrine older than most nations and a tea shop older than most countries' oldest buildings. Walk it the way the animation does — slowly, at eye level, letting the river set the pace — and the frames find you.

宇治川の水は、アニメが生まれるずっと前から同じ音で流れている。