Numazu's nine manhole covers, where Love Live meets the actual sidewalk

The manhole cover sits in the pavement outside the north exit of Numazu (沼津) station, and a small rotation forms around it. Not a queue exactly — two people, then a third, crouching in turn, each waiting for a gap in the foot traffic so the cast iron reads clean. On it, a girl in a school uniform is drawn the way she is drawn on screen, set into the ground of the town that lent her its harbour, its hillsides, and the particular grey-blue of its winter sea.

The bay behind the frame

Numazu is a working port city on Suruga Bay (駿河湾), in Shizuoka prefecture, an hour or so southwest of Tokyo. It is also, since 2016, the home ground of the animated idol series Love Live! Sunshine!! and its nine-member group Aqours (アクア, pronounced "aqua"). The school the girls attend is invented, but the coastline around it is not: the sweep of Uchiura (内浦), the offshore hump of Awashima (淡島), the mandarin groves stepping up the slopes above the water. Suruga Bay is the deepest in Japan, dropping past 2,500 metres not far from shore, which is why a town this size keeps a museum of deep-sea fish.

What makes the place worth a day is not that it appears on screen — plenty of towns do — but how completely the show and the streets have folded into each other. Shop windows carry character panels. The tourist office hands out a pilgrimage map. And underfoot, the frames meet the sidewalk in the most literal way a city can arrange.

Nine covers, one town

There are nine manhole covers (マンホール, manhōru), one for each member of Aqours, cast in colour and set into public pavement rather than hidden behind a paywall. They are scattered deliberately — a few near the station's north and south exits, more strung out toward Numazuko (沼津港), the port, and others planted along the bay road out at Uchiura. The city installed them as tourism, plainly, but the effect is a walking route stitched by iron discs, and it costs nothing but shoe leather and attention.

Finding all nine turns a flat industrial city into a search. You pass the Nakamise (仲見世) shopping arcade, its roof low and its lighting the colour of the 1970s, and the Senbon-hama (千本浜) pine beach where, on a clear day, Mount Fuji stands across the water above the breakwater. The covers are on live footpaths and, in a couple of cases, at the edge of roads with real cars, so the photograph you came for is taken half-crouched, with one eye up.

Out along Uchiura

The heart of the setting is Uchiura, twenty-five minutes from the station by Izuhakone Bus (伊豆箱根バス) from the south exit, bound for Mito Sea Paradise, for roughly ¥520 one way. You get off at a fishing hamlet where the seawall doubles as the show's most-photographed backdrop and the water is close enough to smell. Above the houses, terraces of mikan (みかん, mandarin oranges) climb the hills; in late autumn the fruit hangs in reach of the lanes and roadside stands sell netted bags for a few hundred yen.

At the end of the line is Izu-Mito Sea Paradise (伊豆・三津シーパラダイス), a modest aquarium with a dolphin pool that faces straight out to Awashima island — admission around ¥2,300 for adults. The reason to make the trip is not the tank but the curve of shore itself: stand on the seawall and the opening sequence resolves around you, the same headland, the same light coming flat off the bay in the afternoon.

The port and the deep-sea fish

Back at Numazuko, the port has two lives. One is the fish market, where numbered receiving gates open before dawn and lunch counters serve kaisendon (海鮮丼, a bowl of raw seafood over rice) from about ¥1,500 to ¥2,500; the local specialty is aji (鯵, horse mackerel), often served as a lightly fried whole cutlet. The other is the Numazu Deep Sea Aquarium (沼津港深海水族館), which keeps a preserved coelacanth and open from 10:00 to 18:00, with adult tickets near ¥1,800.

Between the two sits a tall lift-bridge over the inner harbour, the Byuo (びゅうお), free to ride up in daylight. From the deck the whole map lays out at once — the arcade you walked, the pine beach, and the pale ridge of the far shore where the bus went.

沼津は、物語の背景を、そのまま暮らしの風景として持っている。

Getting there, and the part that isn't yours

From Tokyo, the quickest route is the Tōkaidō Shinkansen (Kodama service) to Mishima (三島), roughly fifty minutes and about ¥4,600, then two stops on the JR Tōkaidō line to Numazu, six minutes and around ¥200. A slower all-local run on the JR Tōkaidō takes closer to two hours and skips the Shinkansen fare entirely. Time the visit for a weekday morning, when the port is unhurried, and for autumn if you want the mikan on the trees and Fuji clear across the bay; summer haze usually swallows the mountain.

The one thing to hold onto: much of what you came to see belongs to people who live and work here. The Uchiura seawall is an active fishing dock, and the lanes behind it are homes, not sets. Keep to the public path, do not block the wall for a photograph while a boat is unloading, and greet the fishermen rather than filming them. The manhole covers reward the same patience — wait for the pavement to clear, take the frame, and step off the road before the light changes.