Lucky Star

When Lucky Star aired in 2007, fans started visiting **Washimiya Shrine** in Kuki, Saitama — the model for the shrine where two of the main characters live. The local chamber of commerce engaged with them instead of ignoring them, and the result became the template that Oarai, Numazu and Chichibu all followed afterwards. Nearly twenty years on, the shrine still gets New Year visitor numbers in the hundreds of thousands, the local businesses still run series collaborations, and the town is generally credited as the starting point of modern anime pilgrimage in Japan. Washimiya Station is about an hour from Asakusa.