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Tokyo is to anime what New York is to American film, which means most lists of anime set here are really lists of anime. What is more useful, if you live in the city or plan to visit it, is knowing which shows are set in a specific neighbourhood you can stand in, and which ones drew the place accurately enough that you will recognise the crossing.
So this list is arranged by district rather than by rank. Ten shows, ten parts of Tokyo, with a note on each about what is real and what the animators moved. Where each one streams in the US is at the end of every entry. If you only want the famous one, it is Akira, and it is at the bottom because the Tokyo it shows has not been built yet.
The 10 Picks at a Glance
| Title | Format | Length | MBTI | The neighbourhood |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Steins;Gate | Anime series | 24 episodes | INTP | Akihabara, drawn building by building |
| Durarara!! | Anime series | 60 episodes (2 seasons) | ENTP | Ikebukuro, gangs, and a headless rider |
| Jujutsu Kaisen | Anime series | 59 episodes (2 seasons) | ESTP | Shibuya, on Halloween, taken apart |
| Weathering with You | Anime film | 112 min | ISFP | Shinjuku, in a summer that will not stop raining |
| Tokyo Godfathers | Anime film | 92 min | ESFJ | Shinjuku's homeless, on Christmas Eve |
| Odd Taxi | Anime series | 13 episodes | INTP | The city at night, from the driver's seat |
| Kaiju No. 8 | Anime series | 23 episodes (2 seasons) | ESFP | Tachikawa, the western suburb that gets flattened |
| Tokyo Revengers | Anime series | 50 episodes (3 seasons) | ENFP | Shibuya's biker gangs, twelve years apart |
| Sarazanmai | Anime series | 11 episodes | ENFP | Asakusa, and its kappa |
| Akira | Anime film | 124 min | ISTP | Neo-Tokyo, 2019, from a film made in 1988 |
Nine of the ten are on a major US subscription right now. Tokyo Godfathers is the exception and is free with ads on Tubi. Every row links to its full entry, and four link to a full review on this site.
1. Steins;Gate
| Format | Genre | Length | Emotional tags |
|---|---|---|---|
| Anime series | Sci-fi, Thriller | 24 episodes | Slow-burn, Devastating |
A self-declared mad scientist running a tiny lab above a television repair shop in Akihabara discovers that his microwave can send text messages into the past. The first half is a comedy about a group of friends abusing this. The second half is what it costs.
Aired in 2011. The lab is a real building on the back streets behind the main avenue.
The Most Accurate Tokyo in Anime
Here is the thing about Akihabara in this show: it is not a backdrop, it is a set of coordinates. The Radio Kaikan building, the shrine on the roof of a department store, the Ueno Zoo road, the specific vending machines. When the story starts moving between timelines, the district's small changes are how you tell which one you are in.
It made the neighbourhood a pilgrimage site to the point that the local business association started leaning into it. If you visit, the building at the centre of the plot has been rebuilt since 2011. Fans consider that a plot point.
| Service (US) | Status |
|---|---|
| Crunchyroll | Streaming |
| Netflix | Not available |
| Hulu | Not available |
| Amazon Prime Video | Not available |
| HBO Max | Not available |
| Disney+ | Not available |
| Apple TV+ | Not available |
Streaming on Crunchyroll, and as the Crunchyroll add-on channel inside Amazon Prime Video.
2. Durarara!!
| Format | Genre | Length | Emotional tags |
|---|---|---|---|
| Anime series | Urban fantasy, Ensemble | 60 episodes (2 seasons) | Chaotic, Affectionate |
A boy moves to Ikebukuro for high school and is told on his first night about the colour gangs, the information broker, the bartender who throws vending machines, and the motorcycle courier with no head. All of it is true, and all of them are connected.
Adapts Ryohgo Narita's light novels, with the first season in 2010.
A Show About a Neighbourhood
Ikebukuro is the second-biggest station in the world and almost nobody outside Tokyo has heard of it, which is roughly the joke of the show. Durarara treats the district as a character with a personality: West Gate Park, the Sunshine 60 tower, the Russian sushi place that actually exists and now has a sign about the show.
It is an ensemble piece with too many characters and it knows it. The pleasure is watching the city's random collisions turn out to have been planned by someone, usually the information broker, and Ikebukuro is the right size for that: big enough to get lost, small enough that everyone eventually meets.
| Service (US) | Status |
|---|---|
| Crunchyroll | Not available |
| Netflix | Not available |
| Hulu | Streaming |
| Amazon Prime Video | Not available |
| HBO Max | Not available |
| Disney+ | Not available |
| Apple TV+ | Not available |
Streaming on Hulu, and as the Crunchyroll add-on channel inside Amazon Prime Video.
3. Jujutsu Kaisen
| Format | Genre | Length | Emotional tags |
|---|---|---|---|
| Anime series | Action, Supernatural | 59 episodes (2 seasons) | Brutal, Kinetic |
A high school student swallows a cursed finger to save his friends and becomes the vessel for a demon, then enrols at a school for sorcerers who fight the curses born from human fear. The second season builds to a single night in Shibuya.
Aired from 2020, with the Shibuya arc in 2023.
Why the Shibuya Arc Hit Differently Here
The second season's long arc takes place inside Shibuya station and the crossing above it on Halloween night, and the studio drew the actual station: the platforms, the Hachiko exit, the specific escalators. For anyone who has been in that crowd on October 31st, watching it get sealed off and dismantled floor by floor is not a fantasy image.
Shibuya Halloween was, in real life, restricted by the ward the year after the arc aired, for unrelated reasons. Japanese fans have not stopped joking about it.
| Service (US) | Status |
|---|---|
| Crunchyroll | Streaming |
| Netflix | Streaming |
| Hulu | Streaming |
| Amazon Prime Video | Streaming |
| HBO Max | Not available |
| Disney+ | Not available |
| Apple TV+ | Not available |
Streaming on Netflix, Hulu and Crunchyroll, and included with Amazon Prime Video.
4. Weathering with You
| Format | Genre | Length | Emotional tags |
|---|---|---|---|
| Anime film | Romance, Fantasy, Drama | 112 min | Rainy, Defiant |
A runaway from the islands arrives in Tokyo during a summer of endless rain and finds work with a small occult magazine. He meets a girl who can clear the sky for a few minutes by praying, and the two of them start selling sunshine.
Makoto Shinkai's follow-up to Your Name, from 2019.
The Tokyo Where It Rains
Shinkai draws Tokyo more lovingly than any director working, and this film is the one where the love is for the ugly parts: the Kabukicho back alleys, the internet cafe, the abandoned building on the Yoyogi side with a shrine on its roof. The rooftop is real, or was. It has since been demolished and the fandom mourned it.
It is also the only film here whose subject is the climate, and it takes a position that surprised people on release: the city can flood and that is fine, as long as the two of them are all right. Japanese critics argued about that ending for a year.
| Service (US) | Status |
|---|---|
| Crunchyroll | Not available |
| Netflix | Not available |
| Hulu | Not available |
| Amazon Prime Video | Not available |
| HBO Max | Streaming |
| Disney+ | Not available |
| Apple TV+ | Not available |
Streaming on HBO Max, and free with a library card on Hoopla.
Read the full review: Weathering with You (full review)
5. Tokyo Godfathers
| Format | Genre | Length | Emotional tags |
|---|---|---|---|
| Anime film | Comedy, Drama | 92 min | Warm, Rough |
Three homeless people, a middle-aged drunk, a former drag queen and a teenage runaway, find an abandoned baby in the rubbish on Christmas Eve and set out across Tokyo to return her to her mother. Every coincidence in the city bends toward them.
Satoshi Kon directed it in 2003. It is the only one of his films set in an entirely real Tokyo.
The Tokyo Most Anime Leaves Out
The cardboard settlements under the elevated roads around Shinjuku were a real feature of the city in the early 2000s, and Kon drew them without softening. The film's route, from the park to the hospital to the wedding hall, is walkable, and the city in it is cold, crowded and unexpectedly kind.
It has become a Christmas film here for a certain kind of viewer, and it deserves to be one abroad. The three leads are among the best-written adults in animation, and none of them is who they claim to be.
| Service (US) | Status |
|---|---|
| Crunchyroll | Not available |
| Netflix | Not available |
| Hulu | Not available |
| Amazon Prime Video | Not available |
| HBO Max | Not available |
| Disney+ | Not available |
| Apple TV+ | Not available |
Free with ads on Tubi and free with a library card on Hoopla. Not currently on any of the seven services above.
Read the full review: Tokyo Godfathers (full review)
6. Odd Taxi
| Format | Genre | Length | Emotional tags |
|---|---|---|---|
| Anime series | Mystery, Drama | 13 episodes | Dry, Tense |
A taxi driver who is a walrus works the night shift in a Tokyo where everyone is an animal, and his passengers, an idol, a comedian, a gangster, a college student chasing internet fame, are all connected to a girl who has gone missing.
An original series from 2021. The animal designs are not a stylistic choice, which the last episode explains.
Tokyo as a Web of Taxi Fares
This is the show for people who know the city by its late-night geography: the ride from a club in Roppongi to a flat in the suburbs, the fare that goes silent past Shinjuku. Odd Taxi is structured as a set of those rides, and the mystery is assembled out of the small talk.
I have written about it elsewhere on this site as a one-season recommendation. Here it belongs for a narrower reason: nobody else has drawn the specific loneliness of a Tokyo taxi at 2am.
| Service (US) | Status |
|---|---|
| Crunchyroll | Streaming |
| Netflix | Not available |
| Hulu | Not available |
| Amazon Prime Video | Not available |
| HBO Max | Not available |
| Disney+ | Not available |
| Apple TV+ | Not available |
Streaming on Crunchyroll, and as the Crunchyroll add-on channel inside Amazon Prime Video.
7. Kaiju No. 8
| Format | Genre | Length | Emotional tags |
|---|---|---|---|
| Anime series | Action, Sci-fi | 23 episodes (2 seasons) | Loud, Likeable |
In a Japan where giant monsters are a routine natural disaster, a thirty-two-year-old who cleans up their remains gets a second shot at joining the Defense Force, and is also, inconveniently, turning into a monster himself.
Aired from 2024. The Defense Force base is in Tachikawa, in the western suburbs.
Why Tachikawa, of All Places
Most kaiju stories destroy the centre. This one is set forty minutes west, in a commuter town that non-residents mostly know for a large park and an army base that used to be American. The author is from there, and the affection is visible: the station, the monorail and the shopping streets are drawn exactly, then stepped on.
It is also the rare shonen with a protagonist in his thirties, which is part of why it took off here. He is tired in a way teenagers in this genre are not allowed to be.
| Service (US) | Status |
|---|---|
| Crunchyroll | Streaming |
| Netflix | Not available |
| Hulu | Not available |
| Amazon Prime Video | Not available |
| HBO Max | Not available |
| Disney+ | Not available |
| Apple TV+ | Not available |
Streaming on Crunchyroll, and as the Crunchyroll add-on channel inside Amazon Prime Video.
8. Tokyo Revengers
| Format | Genre | Length | Emotional tags |
|---|---|---|---|
| Anime series | Action, Drama, Time travel | 50 episodes (3 seasons) | Loud, Sentimental |
A twenty-six-year-old loser learns that his middle-school girlfriend has been killed by a gang, is pushed in front of a train, and wakes up twelve years earlier in his own teenage body, with one chance to change the gang's history from inside.
Aired from 2021, adapting Ken Wakui's manga.
The Tokyo of a Specific Generation
The neighbourhoods here are Shibuya and the residential wards behind it, but the real setting is a year. 2005 Tokyo, flip phones and bleached hair and the last of the biker gang culture that had mostly died out by then, drawn by an author who was in it. Japanese readers of the right age found it uncomfortably exact.
The show is melodramatic and the time-travel rules do not hold up. It is on the list because its Tokyo is a period piece about a period most people did not know had ended.
| Service (US) | Status |
|---|---|
| Crunchyroll | Streaming |
| Netflix | Not available |
| Hulu | Streaming |
| Amazon Prime Video | Not available |
| HBO Max | Not available |
| Disney+ | Not available |
| Apple TV+ | Not available |
Streaming on Hulu and Crunchyroll.
9. Sarazanmai
| Format | Genre | Length | Emotional tags |
|---|---|---|---|
| Anime series | Fantasy, Comedy, Surreal | 11 episodes | Absurd, Tender |
Three middle-school boys in Asakusa are turned into kappa, the river spirits of Japanese folklore, and made to fight zombies by extracting a shirikodama through the back end. The mechanics are exactly as strange as that sounds. The show is about secrets.
Kunihiko Ikuhara directed it in 2019.
The Old Tokyo, on Purpose
Asakusa is the tourist district with the big temple and the rickshaws, and Sarazanmai is set there because it is the part of the city where the old folklore still has a foothold. The kappa statues are real. The bridge is real. The Sky Tree is in every shot, looming over the old town like a joke about scale.
It is also an Ikuhara show, which means the plot is a metaphor and the metaphor is about desire, and if you are not ready for that, start somewhere else on this list. If you are, it is eleven episodes and one of the most specific portraits of a Tokyo neighbourhood ever animated.
| Service (US) | Status |
|---|---|
| Crunchyroll | Streaming |
| Netflix | Not available |
| Hulu | Not available |
| Amazon Prime Video | Not available |
| HBO Max | Not available |
| Disney+ | Not available |
| Apple TV+ | Not available |
Streaming on Crunchyroll, and as the Crunchyroll add-on channel inside Amazon Prime Video.
10. Akira
| Format | Genre | Length | Emotional tags |
|---|---|---|---|
| Anime film | Sci-fi, Action | 124 min | Overwhelming, Cold |
Thirty years after a psychic explosion destroyed the city, a teenage biker gang in the rebuilt Neo-Tokyo runs into a military experiment that turns one of their own into something the government cannot contain.
Katsuhiro Otomo directed it from his own manga in 1988. It is on Crunchyroll in the US.
The Tokyo That Was Predicted
The city in Akira is invented, but it is invented by someone who knew the real one, and the map is Tokyo Bay with the centre moved onto reclaimed land, which is roughly what happened. The film famously set its Olympics in 2020. Tokyo then won the 2020 bid, and then the pandemic postponed it, and Japanese fans treated the whole sequence as the film's last joke.
It is at the bottom of this list because it is the least useful as a guide to the actual city. It is at the top of most others, and for the animation alone it should be.
| Service (US) | Status |
|---|---|
| Crunchyroll | Streaming |
| Netflix | Not available |
| Hulu | Not available |
| Amazon Prime Video | Not available |
| HBO Max | Not available |
| Disney+ | Not available |
| Apple TV+ | Not available |
Streaming on Crunchyroll, and as the Crunchyroll add-on channel inside Amazon Prime Video.
Read the full review: Akira (full review)
US Streaming Comparison at a Glance
| Title | Crunchyroll | Netflix | Hulu | Amazon Prime Video | HBO Max | Disney+ | Apple TV+ |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Steins;Gate | ◎ | ✕ | ✕ | ✕ | ✕ | ✕ | ✕ |
| Durarara!! | ✕ | ✕ | ◎ | ✕ | ✕ | ✕ | ✕ |
| Jujutsu Kaisen | ◎ | ◎ | ◎ | ◎ | ✕ | ✕ | ✕ |
| Weathering with You | ✕ | ✕ | ✕ | ✕ | ◎ | ✕ | ✕ |
| Tokyo Godfathers | ✕ | ✕ | ✕ | ✕ | ✕ | ✕ | ✕ |
| Odd Taxi | ◎ | ✕ | ✕ | ✕ | ✕ | ✕ | ✕ |
| Kaiju No. 8 | ◎ | ✕ | ✕ | ✕ | ✕ | ✕ | ✕ |
| Tokyo Revengers | ◎ | ✕ | ◎ | ✕ | ✕ | ✕ | ✕ |
| Sarazanmai | ◎ | ✕ | ✕ | ✕ | ✕ | ✕ | ✕ |
| Akira | ◎ | ✕ | ✕ | ✕ | ✕ | ✕ | ✕ |
Checked against TMDB on September 7, 2026. Crunchyroll titles are also sold as a Crunchyroll add-on channel inside Amazon Prime Video for a separate charge, so Amazon is only marked where a title is included with Prime itself.
City Hunter is set a few streets from several entries here, and it exists as a film with real actors. I sorted ten live-action manga adaptations by how Japan received them, with US streaming for each.
Tokyo gets drawn because the studios are there. Kyoto gets drawn because somebody chose it, and the locations are close enough together to walk in an afternoon. I sorted ten anime set in Kyoto the same way, with US streaming for each.
Half of what makes Tokyo legible on screen is the rail network, and some anime make that the subject rather than the backdrop. I sorted ten train anime into the ones where the train is the whole story, plus four films where a single railway scene carries everything.
Final Thoughts
If you are actually coming to Tokyo, the two that will change how you see the city are Durarara!! and Steins;Gate, because Ikebukuro and Akihabara are drawn building for building and both districts are a short walk from a station you will use anyway. The Radio Kaikan from Steins;Gate was demolished and rebuilt after the show aired. The new one has a plaque.
The one I would recommend to a viewer who has never been here is Weathering with You, because it is the only film on this list that is about the weather, and the weather is the thing about Tokyo that nobody warns you about.
One thing you will notice once you start looking. Almost every show here is set within a few stops of the Yamanote line. Anime studios are clustered in the western suburbs, and the Tokyo they draw is the Tokyo their staff commute through.
Streaming information was verified in the US region on September 7, 2026 and can change without notice. Check the service before you commit.
