A Town That Kept Its Promises

We walked around Hida-Kanayama on a rainy, foggy afternoon, which seemed fitting. It’s not the actual setting for the horror PC game Silent Hill f, but the fictional town of Ebisugaoka (戎ヶ丘)—where the protagonist fights her personal demons—is modeled after places like this aging Shōwa-era village.

I know almost nothing about Silent Hill f. My daughter plays it and even wrote a college paper about the Shinto imagery embedded in the story and how the characters must navigate being human. I know that it’s suspenseful. Reaghan has shared some of the gameplay with me—some walkthroughs—and she tracked down Hida-Kanayama as the model for the fictional setting. Doggedly, she tracked down the real-life town using Reddit posts and YouTube videos. Reaghan was always a detective.

It really is a fascinating story about life choices, though I wouldn’t recommend it for the preteen crowd—maybe 18+ and up. There’s some body horror, but I think the player needs to be emotionally mature to understand the underlying message. That said, if you enjoy this type of game, it’s worth a look.

The game’s setting was inspired by rural Japan—places like this: quiet towns that never collapsed, never became ruins, and never quite arrived where they were supposed to go. I wrote briefly about its history in a prior blog. Go read it. I’ll wait.

Today’s field trip was a bit of screen tourism. Screen tourism is travel inspired by movies, TV shows, video games, or anime, and it’s an umbrella term used in tourism studies and by tourism boards.

The term anime pilgrimage (seichi junrei) is often used when fans visit real places linked to anime or games.

Hida-Kanayama is new to this. Prior to the release of this game, the town had never experienced this kind of attention.

It doesn’t announce itself as abandoned. The train station works, with 20 to 30 trains stopping there daily. The station is fully functional but lightly maintained, serving as a quiet access point rather than a commercial hub like Gifu. The streets are maintained. We saw active road repairs, including the rebuilding of byways washed out by a landslide. Houses are lived in, and schools have students in the seats. Signs are intact and optimistic in a way that feels inherited rather than current. Nothing is broken. That’s what makes it unsettling, if you let it.

This is not decay. It’s continuation.

Walking the streets, you notice how much infrastructure remains for a crowd that no longer gathers. Wide roads that once expected traffic. Storefronts still wearing their best faces. A sense that everything is doing exactly what it was designed to do—just without the audience it imagined. The town hasn’t been left behind so much as it has been politely overlooked.

That, I think, is why a horror story would come here.

Silent Hill f isn’t drawing from places like Hida-Kanayama because they’re frightening. It’s because they aren’t. Japanese horror rarely begins with monsters or destruction. It begins with routine—with schools, neighborhoods, shrines, stations—and asks what happens when nothing visibly breaks, but something internal starts to press inward. Shame. Silence. Social gravity. The fear of being noticed for the wrong reason, or not noticed at all.

And the people were generous and real. There was the child waving at us as we wandered the empty streets. There was the senior we crossed paths with repeatedly as she motored her mobility scooter through the narrow roads—in the background, unannounced, the sound of small rubber tires and an electric motor weaving along back roads.

And the umbrella man.

I didn’t catch the umbrella man’s name, and he didn’t know mine, but he took a moment out of his life to make mine more comfortable. It was the end of a long day of walking (my pedometer says 15,211 steps), most of it in the rain. I was pretty soaked. Bad choice of coats and no umbrella.

A white sedan passed us at an intersection on a nearly deserted street. After passing by three full car lengths, he backed up in the rain, rolled his window down, and after calling out “Ojisan” (a respectful reference to a senior man), he handed me an umbrella and drove off into the rain. A saint in a Toyota Corolla.

We continued through the town, working our way back to the train station using the small paths (kinkotsu meguri, or “blood-and-bone paths”) that bisect the town’s neighborhoods. These paths are integral when playing the game and, if you choose to walk them, should be used respectfully because of their proximity to occupied houses.

There are sections where you need to crouch to pass under bridges, homes, and shops, but they are still legitimate passageways.

In Kanayama, you can feel that pressure in the stillness. Not emptiness—stillness. The town isn’t frozen in time. It’s moving very slowly, politely, carefully, as if speed itself would be rude.

I haven’t played Silent Hill f . I know how it ends, but, I’ve been told not to share. Now having walked Hida-Kanayama, I understand why it looks the way it does. Some towns don’t haunt you because something terrible happened there. They haunt you because nothing did—and life went on anyway.