Do the Backrooms Exist in Japan? Looking for Places With That "Yellow Room" Feeling

What Are the Backrooms? A Quick Recap of the 4chan Legend

The Backrooms is an urban legend (creepypasta) that spread after a single photo was posted to the anonymous imageboard 4chan in 2019. The premise: an empty, yellow-wallpapered office-like space that stretches on forever like a maze — somewhere you might accidentally "noclip" into from reality. The defining details are almost always the same: the low hum of fluorescent lights, and the smell of damp carpet.

The concept quickly expanded online, with fans adding a whole hierarchy of "Levels" and creatures of their own. A feature film adaptation is also known to be in the works, turning what started as a single forum post into a full-blown piece of internet culture.

To Be Clear, the Backrooms Aren't Real

Let's get this out of the way first: the Backrooms isn't an actual place — it's a fictional urban legend from the start. Just like Exit 8, there's no officially confirmed "real location" it's based on, so there's no single yellow room out there waiting to be found.

That said, plenty of people describe a nagging sense of familiarity when they see Backrooms imagery. Tracing that feeling back leads to real places with a surprisingly similar atmosphere.

What "Liminal Space" Has to Do With That Yellow Room

Part of why the Backrooms resonates with so many people is that it takes the feeling known online as a "liminal space" and pushes it to an extreme. A liminal space is that unsettling feeling when everyone suddenly vanishes from a place that's normally full of people (we go deeper into this in What Is a Liminal Space?).

An empty office lit only by fluorescent tubes, a train platform at 2am, a shopping mall after closing — the Backrooms' yellow room might just be the most distilled, abstracted version of that same feeling.

Real Places With a Similar Atmosphere Do Exist Across Japan

The room itself doesn't exist, but real places with a similar atmosphere are scattered across Japan. LIMap already has several of them recorded.

Take Capsule Inn Osaka, the world's first practical capsule hotel (opened 1979) — a surreal, uniform space where identical pods repeat endlessly down the corridor. Or Higashi-Narita Station, once a terminal stop for Narita Airport and now a quietly frozen-in-time station with a dim, empty concourse. Or the former Nogi Hospital in Tochigi, its abandoned ward hallway lined wall-to-wall with decades of graffiti. Each one carries that same feeling: nobody's there, but something still lingers.

Related spots on LIMap カプセルイン大阪（ニュージャパン梅田店） 東成田駅（旧成田空港駅） 旧野木病院（廃病院）

If one of these catches your interest, you can check its exact location and how to get there right on the LIMap map. And if you find your own "Backrooms"-like place, record it and share that feeling with everyone else looking for it too.