Takehara, the salt town where an anime's opening frame is a real staircase

Takehara sits on the Seto Inland Sea roughly ninety minutes from Hiroshima on the JR Kure Line, and for most of the year it is a town of about twenty thousand people going about an ordinary Tuesday. Then someone steps off the train holding a phone at chest height, walking slowly along the lanes, matching a curve of roof tile to a frame they have looked at a hundred times.

What the frame is actually of

The anime is Tamayura (たまゆら), begun in 2010, about a girl who photographs her surroundings with the film camera her father left behind. Almost nothing happens in it, which is precisely why the backgrounds carry the weight: the animators drew Takehara street for street, down to the pitch of the eaves and the placement of a drainage channel.

The old quarter is a machinami hozon chiku, a nationally designated preservation district, and it exists because salt did. Takehara's evaporation flats made merchant families wealthy in the Edo period, and their money went into deep-fronted wooden houses with slatted lattice windows, most of which are a ten-minute walk east of the station.

The climb to Fumeikaku

From the main lane a flight of stone steps rises to Saihō-ji, and above it stands Fumeikaku (普明閣), a small raised hall on wooden pillars with a balcony that looks back down over the roofs. The stairs are steep and the boards are worn smooth, so take them at the pace the wood suggests rather than the pace the camera wants.

What you see from the balcony is grey tile, an ordinary school roof, and the sea beyond — the same arrangement the animation used, unglamorous and slightly smaller than expected. That gap between the drawn frame and the actual one is the whole point of coming.

Walking a street that is still an address

These are not sets. People live behind the lattice, receive post, hang laundry, and the sake brewery frontage on the main lane is a working business rather than an exhibit. Photograph the street and the rooflines, not into doorways, and keep your voice at the volume the lanes already have.

A pilgrimage goes best when the town does not notice you came.

静かな町は、静かなまま歩くのがいい。

One night a year the lanes fill with bamboo lanterns for Shōkei no Michi (憧憬の路), held in late October, and the town is briefly the busiest it gets. Any other week you will have the steps to yourself, though Kure Line services thin out after dark, so check the return before you start climbing.