Where Does A Silent Voice Take Place? Real Locations
Location Guide · 4 min read
Published September 17, 2026
A Silent Voice takes place in Ogaki, Gifu, the small canal city where manga artist Yoshitoki Ōima grew up. We have verified 33 real locations from the film: most of them in Ogaki itself, a smaller cluster in the neighboring town of Yoro, a handful in Gifu city, and two across the prefecture line in Kuwana, Mie. In Japan the story is known as 聲の形, Koe no Katachi, or "the shape of voice."
Where does A Silent Voice take place?
Ogaki carries 21 of the film's 33 confirmed spots, the largest cluster by far. That is not a coincidence: Ōima was born in Ogaki in 1989, and her mother worked as a sign language interpreter, the reason the story centers on a deaf character at all. The city she grew up in became the city Shoya and Shoko walk through.
Ogaki Station sits at the middle of the map and is worth knowing before you plan a route. It opened in 1884 and today is shared by three different operators: JR Central's Tokaido Main Line, plus the locally run Tarumi Railway and Yoro Railway, which both start their lines from here. Around the station, our catalog confirms Ogaki Park and its fountain, Marunouchi Park, and the Former Ibikawa Bridge, a nationally designated Important Cultural Property under its full Japanese name. Shino Bridge, Midori Bridge, and a run of small shops and pharmacies along the Kuruwamachi streets round out the rest of the cluster, the kind of everyday backdrop the film uses instead of a single landmark.
Yoro: waterfalls, an inn town, and a park built to throw off your balance
Six confirmed spots sit in Yoro, south of Ogaki on the Yoro Railway line. Yoro Station and Yoro Park anchor the area, with the ryokan-style Bairin Tei and Seifuro nearby and Yoro Falls a short walk further in.
The odd one out is The Site of Reversible Destiny, an experimental art park built inside Yoro Park by the artist Shusaku Arakawa and the poet Madeline Gins. Gifu Prefecture's own tourism site describes it as designed to make visitors lose their sense of balance while walking through it, and lists it as a short walk from Yoro Station, reachable from Ogaki Station on the same line. It is a strange, deliberately disorienting place to end up on an anime pilgrimage, and that is most of why it is worth the detour.
Gifu city and Kuwana: the wider frame
Four spots sit in Gifu city, on the same JR Central Tokaido Main Line as Ogaki: Gifu Station, Nobunaga Plaza of Dreams, Kogane-machi 7-chome, and a police box in front of Gifu Naka police station. Two more sit further out in Kuwana, Mie, across the prefecture line: Space Snack and Nagashima Spa Land, a large Japanese amusement park. Neither cluster asks for a special trip on its own, but both fit into a longer day built around the Ogaki and Yoro core.
Are Suimon Elementary and Tōchi High School in A Silent Voice real places?
No. Suimon Elementary School and Tōchi High School are the school names used in the story, according to the character sections of the Japanese Wikipedia article on the series, and our catalog has no matched real campus under either name. What is real is everything around them: the station platforms, the bridges, the parks. Visit those, and leave the actual schools out of it.
Getting to Ogaki and Yoro
Ogaki Station is the hub for the whole map. JR Central runs the Tokaido Main Line through it, connecting Ogaki to Gifu Station and on toward Nagoya. From the same station, Yoro Railway runs its own line south through Yoro Station toward Yoro Park, and Tarumi Railway serves a separate local route. None of this needs a car: a JR pass or a local ticket covers most of the map.
Which studio made A Silent Voice?
Kyoto Animation produced the film, directed by Naoko Yamada with a screenplay by Reiko Yoshida and music by Kensuke Ushio, adapting Ōima's manga of the same name. It premiered in Japan on 17 September 2016, which makes today its tenth anniversary to the day. The window for that anniversary hook is this week, not this month: publish late and the search spike belongs to someone else.
Keep exploring
- Which Prefecture Has the Most Anime Locations? Gifu's numbers next to every other prefecture on the map.
- Open the anime map. Every verified location in Japan, searchable by title.