[6] The specific origins of contents tourism are unclear, but can be traced back with some stretching of the analogy to the existence of utamakura in waka poetry.
Series such as Sengoku Basara, Hakuouki, and Chihayafuru have caused a wave of new appreciation by young people for particular cultural artifacts and pre-existing heritage sites, sometimes by tapping into the reki-jo audience and creating appealing ikemen character designs for historic figures.
[8] This practice included tourism to the sites of on-location shoots, like Onomichi after it appeared in Tokyo Story and film sets like Toei Kyoto Studio Park.
Since the mid-2000s, Seichi Junrei, a phrase invented in the Japanese blogosphere which draws a comparison between anime tourism and pilgrimages to holy sites, has become more popular.
[11][12] After it gained popularity as a niche grassroots hobby among Japanese bloggers, local governments and chambers of commerce sought out deals with animation producers for scouting trips, collaborations, and licensing to facilitate an official embracing of seichi junrei as a means to drive local tourism and revitalization.