Tomonoura

Where it sits. Tomonoura is a small port at the tip of the Numakuma Peninsula, about 14 kilometres south of Fukuyama Station in eastern Hiroshima Prefecture, with a population of roughly three and a half thousand. Its position is the whole reason it exists. The tidal currents of the Seto Inland Sea flow in from east and west and meet here, then reverse; in the age of sail, ships waited at Tomo for the tide to turn, which is why it was known as the port of waiting for tides. The harbour is a tight, almost circular basin ringed by stone quays, with the wooded islands of Bentenjima and Sensuijima directly offshore and the mountains of Shikoku visible across the water on clear days. Tomonoura lies inside Setonaikai National Park, designated in 1934 as one of Japan's first.

Why it is historically unusual. Most Japanese ports modernised their waterfronts out of existence. Tomonoura kept all five elements of an Edo-period harbour, the only place in the country where the complete set survives: the jōyatō, a stone lighthouse-lantern of about eleven metres erected in 1859 that still marks the quay head; the gangi, stepped stone landings that work at any tide; the tadeba, a dock where hulls were careened and burned clean; the funabansho, the harbour office; and the hatoba, the jetty. Around them the streets are narrow enough that cars struggle, lined with plastered warehouses, latticed merchant houses and small temples. The written record runs deep: eight poems in the Man'yōshū concern Tomo, Nunakuma Shrine is named in the tenth-century Engishiki, and Ashikaga Yoshiaki based his exiled shogunate here after Oda Nobunaga expelled him from Kyoto. In 1867 Sakamoto Ryōma's steamer Iroha Maru sank after a collision offshore, and the negotiations that followed were held in a merchant house in the town, now open with the room preserved.

On screen, honestly. Of all the Ghibli location claims, this is the most solid. Hayao Miyazaki stayed in Tomonoura for around two months in 2005, in a house on the slope above the harbour, while developing what became Ponyo (2008). The stay is documented and the studio has never disputed it. What is not true is that the film's town is a copy of Tomonoura: the seaside settlement in Ponyo is a composite, its geography is invented, and no single street matches. What transferred was the relationship between a small port town and the sea immediately below it — the sense of a place where the water is not scenery but a neighbour that can rise. Tomonoura also carries an unrelated screen credit: The Wolverine (2013) shot here, and the town has appeared in Japanese film and television for decades. Local businesses lean on the Ponyo connection heavily; the town itself, sensibly, does not depend on it.

What you actually see. The walk is short and dense. From the quay, a steep flight of stone steps climbs to the Taishōden hall of Ioji temple, which gives the postcard view straight down onto the circular harbour and out to the islands — the single best vantage in the town. Fukuzen-ji's Taichōrō reception hall, built in 1690, opens onto the same water from a lower angle; a Korean envoy in 1711 called the view the finest in the country, and the calligraphy recording it hangs there. The Ōta Residence, an Important Cultural Property, was the brewery of hōmeishu, a medicinal herb wine that has been made in Tomo since the seventeenth century and is still sold in the town. A five-minute ferry crosses to Sensuijima for coastal walking and a beach; the boat is painted as a replica of the Iroha Maru.

A fight worth knowing about. For decades a plan existed to bridge the harbour for a bypass road. Residents split bitterly, the case reached the Hiroshima District Court, which blocked the plan, and the prefecture eventually abandoned the bridge in favour of a tunnel route. The dispute put Tomonoura on the World Monuments Watch in 2002 and 2004 and led to the restoration of a nineteenth-century merchant house, Uoya-Manzō, now an information centre and guesthouse. The harbour you see is the outcome of that fight.

Getting there and timing. Fukuyama is a Sanyō Shinkansen stop; local buses run from the station's south side to Tomonoura in about 30 minutes. Driving is possible but the lanes are extremely tight and parking is limited to a few lots at the edge. April to June and September to November are comfortable; summer is hot and humid, and the light in late autumn afternoons across the harbour is the reason photographers come.