Sacred Sites as Anchors of Presence: The Social Ontology of Fictional Entities, Public Space, and Archival Relicization in Otaku Media

This article reconsiders seichi junrei, a practice in Japanese otaku media culture often translated as “pilgrimage to sacred sites.” Rather than treating it merely as location tourism, contents tourism, or regional promotion, the article approaches it as a process through which fictional entities become socially attached to real public spaces. It defines yorishiro as an “anchor of presence”: a material, spatial, visual, or archival medium through which an absent, invisible, lost, or fictional entity becomes perceptible, shareable, and socially real. The article argues that sacred sites emerge before institutional recognition. Ordinary places such as stations, streets, shrines, lakes, bridges, shopping districts, and urban sites can first appear to invested readers, viewers, or players as points of contact with fictional worlds. This process depends on lifeworld realism, internal maps, implicit spatial connections, thresholds of legibility, and selective visibility. Combining social ontology with phenomenological description, the article proposes a staged model of sacred-site formation: fictional realism, discovery by early mediators, visitation and testimony, communal recognition, amplification by unvisited pilgrims, institutionalization as a tourist resource, and archival relicization after physical loss. Using STEINS;GATE’s Akihabara as a representative case, it further argues that photographs, pilgrimage reports, comparison images, anime backgrounds, game screens, and fan testimony can become secondary anchors of presence when physical sites disappear. Finally, the article situates anime and game backgrounds within a longer history of reconstructive visual documentation, including ukiyo-e.