Where to Go in Tokyo After Watching the Backrooms Movie

What to Do With the Feeling It Leaves You

The film lingers because its spaces are not invented. Strip away the yellow walls and fluorescent tubes and what remains is one condition: a place built for people, with the people gone. Tokyo has an enormous supply of that.

Not to scare yourself, but to check where the feeling actually lives. In that sense, the few days after seeing the film are the best possible time for a walk.

Tokyo Is One of the World's Densest Liminal Cities

There are reasons for this. First, the sheer volume of underground space. Passages linking station to station and building to building form a dense mesh, and almost all of it exists purely to be walked through.

Second, the extreme swing in population by hour. Places packed at midday are completely empty after midnight. Tokyo is unusual in how thoroughly the same space wears two faces in one day.

Third, the housing estates and shopping streets built en masse during the postwar boom are quietly reaching the end of their working lives. Not decayed, just unused — which is the Backrooms condition exactly.

Real Tokyo Spots Recorded on LIMap

These are places actually recorded on LIMap. Open a card for the map and details.

For underground passages: the corridor at Kiyosumi-shirakawa Station, known as the model for the game Exit 8, and the Keiyo and Musashino line connecting passage at Tokyo Station. The first is about the uniformity of tile and fluorescent light; the second is about the sheer distance you are made to walk. For housing estates and shopping streets, Kirigaoka Chuo Shotengai in Kita ward. And as transit infrastructure that has finished its job, the former Kawano Station of the Okutama Lake ropeway.

None of these are haunted spots. They are recorded as places to look at the space itself, not to frighten yourself.

Related spots on LIMap 清澄白河駅の不気味な通路（8番出口のモデル地） 東京駅 京葉線・武蔵野線連絡通路（渋すぎる入口） 桐ケ丘中央商店街 奥多摩湖ロープウェイ 川野駅跡

Practical Notes Before You Go

Station passages and shopping streets are public, but they are also where people live and work. No tripods, nothing that blocks the way, and no shots where individuals are identifiable. Photographing late at night can itself prompt someone to call the police.

Decommissioned facilities are almost always private land. The default is to look from outside the fence. Do not enter anywhere marked off-limits.

Whether this hobby survives comes down to manners. Not shrinking the set of places people are allowed to photograph is worth more than any single picture.

If You Shoot It, Put It on the Map

A great deal of Tokyo is still unrecorded. The passage you walk through every morning may be exactly what someone else is looking for.

LIMap is a map for sharing those places with photos and locations. People who found this feeling through the film tend to make the best recorders of it.