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There is a word in Japanese, inaka, that means countryside and also means the place you are from and left. Most of the anime on this list were made by people who left, and the shows are about going back: to a grandmother's house, to a village with one bus a day, to a summer that lasted longer than summers do now.
I grew up in one of those places, so I have sorted these by how honest they are about it rather than by how pretty. Some of them are pretty. The best ones are also about the boredom, the gossip, the single convenience store and the fact that everyone knows your family. Where each one streams in the US is at the end of every entry.
The 10 Picks at a Glance
| Title | Format | Length | MBTI | What kind of countryside |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Only Yesterday | Anime film | 119 min | INFJ | Tokyo office worker, safflower farm |
| Natsume's Book of Friends | Anime series | 86 episodes (7 seasons) | INFP | Sees spirits, rural Kumamoto |
| Wolf Children | Anime film | 117 min | ISFJ | Half-wolf kids, raised in the mountains |
| Non Non Biyori | Anime series | 36 episodes (3 seasons) | ESFP | A school with five pupils |
| My Neighbor Totoro | Anime film | 86 min | ENFP | The film that invented the anime inaka |
| Summer Wars | Anime film | 114 min | ESFJ | A huge family house in Nagano vs the internet |
| Kiki's Delivery Service | Anime film | 103 min | ENFP | Leaving home at thirteen |
| Laid-Back Camp | Anime series | 37 episodes (4 seasons) | ISTP | Solo camping around Mount Fuji |
| Super Cub | Anime series | 12 episodes | ISTJ | A used motorbike, a town with nothing |
| Flying Witch | Anime series | 12 episodes | ISFP | A witch in Aomori, mostly gardening |
Nine of the ten are on a major US subscription, split between HBO Max for the films and Crunchyroll for the series. Flying Witch is the exception and lives on HIDIVE. Every row links to its full entry.
1. Only Yesterday
| Format | Genre | Length | Emotional tags |
|---|---|---|---|
| Anime film | Drama, Slice of life | 119 min | Reflective, Adult |
A twenty-seven-year-old woman takes her holiday from a Tokyo office to help with the safflower harvest on relatives' land in Yamagata, and spends the train ride and the fields remembering herself at ten. The film moves between the two ages until they meet.
Isao Takahata directed it for Studio Ghibli in 1991. It was not released in the US until 2016.
The Countryside as a Decision
Most of the films on this list treat rural Japan as somewhere you are from. This is the only one that treats it as somewhere you might choose, and it takes the choice seriously: the work is hard, the farmer she meets is blunt about the economics, and the film does not pretend the fields are a cure for a city life. The safflower harvest is drawn from a real farm and the process is accurate to the step.
It was an adult film released in a market that did not know what to do with one, and it is now the Ghibli film that people my age here rewatch most. That says something about what happened to that generation.
| 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.
2. Natsume's Book of Friends
| Format | Genre | Length | Emotional tags |
|---|---|---|---|
| Anime series | Supernatural, Slice of life | 86 episodes (7 seasons) | Gentle, Melancholy |
An orphan who can see yokai, and has been passed between relatives who found him strange, moves to a rural town and inherits his grandmother's book of the spirits she defeated and bound. He spends seven seasons giving their names back, one at a time.
Aired from 2008. The setting is modelled on the author's home in Kumamoto, and the town has a walking map of the locations.
The Longest, and the Kindest
Here is where I have to be honest about a bias. This is the show I put on when I cannot sleep, and I have never once finished an episode angry. It is episodic almost to a fault, one spirit and one small sadness per week, and the countryside in it is the specific rural Kyushu of rice fields, shrines nobody tends and a town where a strange child gets talked about.
What makes it more than comfort is that Natsume's loneliness is real and the show never solves it. He gets a family, slowly, and the spirits remain the only ones who saw him first.
| 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.
3. Wolf Children
| Format | Genre | Length | Emotional tags |
|---|---|---|---|
| Anime film | Drama, Fantasy | 117 min | Tender, Hard |
A university student falls for a man who turns out to be a werewolf, and after his death is left alone in Tokyo with two children who cannot always control what they are. She moves them to a collapsing farmhouse in the mountains where nobody will look too closely.
Mamoru Hosoda directed it in 2012. The house is based on one in Toyama, near where he grew up.
The Most Accurate Move to the Country
The wolf premise is the hook and the actual film is about a city woman failing at farming until the neighbours, who are suspicious of her for a full act, decide to teach her. The old man who shows up to criticise her potatoes is the truest character in any film on this list. Every village has him.
It is also honest that the countryside is where the children go to find out which one of them is a wolf. Hosoda lets the mountains be a place a child can vanish into, and the film ends with a mother deciding to allow it.
| 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.
4. Non Non Biyori
| Format | Genre | Length | Emotional tags |
|---|---|---|---|
| Anime series | Comedy, Slice of life | 36 episodes (3 seasons) | Slow, Funny |
A girl transfers from Tokyo to a village so small that the school has five students across all grades, one classroom and one teacher. Nothing happens, at great and deliberate length, across three seasons and a film.
Aired from 2013. The village is based on real locations in Saitama, and the bus stop has a sign.
Boredom, Done Correctly
The joke of this show is the pacing. A scene will hold on a girl trying to decide whether to walk to the store for a full minute, and the store is forty minutes away, and that is the episode. Japanese viewers who grew up somewhere like it recognised the specific texture of a summer with nothing in it, and the show became a cult on that basis.
The youngest character, Renge, is one of the great child characters in the medium: strange, deadpan, and genuinely a child rather than an adult's idea of one. The show's best episodes are the ones where it lets her be weird alone.
| 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 HIDIVE.
5. My Neighbor Totoro
| Format | Genre | Length | Emotional tags |
|---|---|---|---|
| Anime film | Fantasy, Family | 86 min | Warm, Anxious |
Two sisters move with their father to an old house in the country to be near the hospital where their mother is being treated. The house has soot spirits in it and the forest next door has something larger.
Hayao Miyazaki, 1988. The landscape is the Sayama Hills west of Tokyo, which a foundation now buys up piece by piece to preserve.
What It Is Actually About
Every rural anime made since is in conversation with this one, and the thing they mostly leave out is the fear. Totoro is a film about two children whose mother might die, in a house where the adults are distracted, and the forest spirits are what the younger one turns to when nobody else is watching her. The countryside is comfort because the alternative is the hospital.
The Sayama Hills are real and forty minutes from Ikebukuro. The Totoro forest fund has been buying the land since 1990, which means the setting of a children's film is now a conservation project. I have walked it. It looks like the film.
| 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.
Read the full review: My Neighbor Totoro (full review)
6. Summer Wars
| Format | Genre | Length | Emotional tags |
|---|---|---|---|
| Anime film | Sci-fi, Family, Action | 114 min | Rousing, Chaotic |
A shy maths student is brought to a sprawling old family house in the mountains of Nagano to pose as the boyfriend of a classmate at her great-grandmother's ninetieth birthday. Over the same weekend, an AI hijacks the world's online infrastructure, and the family turns out to be the only people positioned to stop it.
Hosoda, 2009. The house is modelled on a real one in Ueda.
The Extended Family, As a Weapon
This is on the list for the house. A Japanese rural extended family, thirty people across four generations arguing in one enormous tatami room, has never been drawn better, and the film's real subject is that a family like that is an organisation with a chain of command. The great-grandmother's phone calls are the best scene.
The online action is fun and dated. The dinner table is not dated. Watch it for the way the old woman runs the room.
| 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.
7. Kiki's Delivery Service
| Format | Genre | Length | Emotional tags |
|---|---|---|---|
| Anime film | Fantasy, Coming of age | 103 min | Bright, Homesick |
A thirteen-year-old witch leaves her village, as witches must, to spend a year alone in a town of her choosing. She picks a seaside city, starts a delivery business on her broom, and finds that being good at flying is not the same as being good at anything else.
Miyazaki, 1989. The city is a composite of Stockholm and Visby, but the opening is pure inaka.
The Rural Film That Leaves
It is on this list for its first ten minutes and its ending, which are about the same thing: a child from a small place deciding to go, and the parents letting her. Every rural Japanese viewer who has taken that train knows the scene where she waves from the broom. Most of us waved from a bus.
The city she arrives in is the anime version of everywhere you go at eighteen, and the point of the film is that it does not care whether you came. She makes it care. That is the story.
| 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.
Read the full review: Kiki's Delivery Service (full review)
8. Laid-Back Camp
| Format | Genre | Length | Emotional tags |
|---|---|---|---|
| Anime series | Slice of life, Comedy | 37 episodes (4 seasons) | Cosy, Practical |
A girl who camps alone in winter, by preference, is gradually joined by a loud transfer student and a school outdoor club. The show is a tour of real campsites around Fuji and the Yamanashi lakes, with the gear and the prices.
Aired from 2018. The campsites are all real and several have had to expand their car parks.
The Countryside as a Weekend
This is the countryside from the other side: the Tokyo-adjacent kind you drive to, camp in, and leave. It is accurate to a degree that became a joke here, with the exact hot-spring price and the specific brand of gas canister, and the show has done more for Yamanashi tourism than the prefecture's own office.
It is also quietly a show about introversion. Rin camps alone because she likes it, and the series never once suggests she is wrong to. The friendships happen at her pace.
| 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.
9. Super Cub
| Format | Genre | Length | Emotional tags |
|---|---|---|---|
| Anime series | Slice of life | 12 episodes | Quiet, Precise |
A high school girl with no parents, no money and no friends buys a second-hand Honda Super Cub for a suspiciously low price and, for the first time, has a way to leave the town she lives in. The show is about the radius of her life growing.
Aired in 2021. The town is Hokuto in Yamanashi, and the bike is drawn from the real model, part by part.
The Most Honest Portrait of Rural Isolation Here
The quietest show on the list, and the one that best understands what a vehicle means in a place with no train. Before the bike, the girl's world is the distance she can walk. After it, she can reach a river. The show treats that like the miracle it is, and the animation of the engine starting is given the weight of a first kiss.
It sold a lot of motorbikes. Honda noticed. It also, for a certain kind of viewer here, described a loneliness that other rural anime paint over.
| 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. Flying Witch
| Format | Genre | Length | Emotional tags |
|---|---|---|---|
| Anime series | Slice of life, Fantasy | 12 episodes | Drowsy, Sweet |
A fifteen-year-old witch moves in with relatives in rural Aomori to complete her training, and the training turns out to be mostly farming, foraging, and occasionally being visited by the Harbinger of Spring, who is exactly as strange as he sounds.
Aired in 2016. Hirosaki, where it is set, has a walking map of the locations.
Magic With the Pace of a Farm
The genre is called iyashikei, healing, and this is the purest example on the list: nothing is at stake, the magic is used to make a mandrake scream and to help with the weeding, and the show's real interest is the specific pace of a household in northern Japan where the snow decides the schedule.
It is on HIDIVE rather than the big services, which is a shame, because it is the show I would hand to anyone who found the others too eventful.
| 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 |
Streaming on HIDIVE, and free with a library card on Hoopla. Not currently on any of the seven services above.
US Streaming Comparison at a Glance
| Title | Crunchyroll | Netflix | Hulu | Amazon Prime Video | HBO Max | Disney+ | Apple TV+ |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Only Yesterday | ✕ | ✕ | ✕ | ✕ | ◎ | ✕ | ✕ |
| Natsume's Book of Friends | ◎ | ✕ | ✕ | ✕ | ✕ | ✕ | ✕ |
| Wolf Children | ✕ | ✕ | ✕ | ✕ | ◎ | ✕ | ✕ |
| Non Non Biyori | ◎ | ✕ | ✕ | ✕ | ✕ | ✕ | ✕ |
| My Neighbor Totoro | ✕ | ✕ | ✕ | ✕ | ◎ | ✕ | ✕ |
| Summer Wars | ✕ | ✕ | ✕ | ✕ | ◎ | ✕ | ✕ |
| Kiki's Delivery Service | ✕ | ✕ | ✕ | ✕ | ◎ | ✕ | ✕ |
| Laid-Back Camp | ◎ | ✕ | ✕ | ✕ | ✕ | ✕ | ✕ |
| Super Cub | ◎ | ✕ | ✕ | ✕ | ✕ | ✕ | ✕ |
| Flying Witch | ✕ | ✕ | ✕ | ✕ | ✕ | ✕ | ✕ |
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.
If the pace of these is what you are after rather than the setting, I have a separate list of ten wholesome anime that sit in the same register, with US streaming for each.
Almost every entry here is really about a household. If you want that without the animation, I sorted ten Japanese films about families, from Ozu's Tokyo Story to Shoplifters, with US streaming for each.
The live-action half of the same tradition is mostly on one US service. I sorted ten Japanese films on HBO Max, including Ozu's Good Morning and Mizoguchi's Ugetsu.
If you want somewhere specific rather than somewhere rural, the other city worth a list of its own is Kyoto. I sorted ten anime set in Kyoto by what each one actually uses, with US streaming for each.
The live-action tradition these anime are drawing on has one name at the centre of it. I sorted ten Yasujiro Ozu films about families in small towns leaving for the city, with US streaming checked for each.
The branch lines running through these places have their own anime, and several of the lines have since closed. Ten train anime are collected separately, with US streaming checked for each.
Wolf Children also appears on my list of anime about dogs, where it is the one entry about wolves raising a family rather than a pet.
Final Thoughts
If you want one film, it is Only Yesterday, which is the most honest thing Ghibli ever made about leaving Tokyo for a farm and is on HBO Max. If you want one series, it is Natsume's Book of Friends, which has been quietly running for seven seasons and never once needed a city.
Two that belong here and are not streaming in the US as of this writing: Mushishi, which is the best rural anime ever made and wanders the mountain villages of an invented pre-modern Japan, and Barakamon, about a calligrapher exiled to an island. Both have been on US services before and may return. If they do, put them at the top.
One last thing about the real places. Non Non Biyori, Super Cub and Laid-Back Camp are set in actual towns in Saitama and Yamanashi, an hour or two from Tokyo, and all three have become small pilgrimage destinations. The towns have mostly welcomed it. Bring cash. The bus is real too.
Streaming information was verified in the US region on September 7, 2026 and can change without notice. Check the service before you commit.
