Interest

Lucky Star Shrine Draws 470,000 During New Year's

Washinomiya Shrine, the Tokyo area's oldest shrine and a real-life backdrop for the Lucky Star anime series, attracted approximately 470,000 visitors over the first three days of the new year. The same number of people visited the shrine during the New Year's holiday period in 2011 and 2012.

The Washinomiya Shrine was used as the basis for a location in Kyoto Animation's 2007 television adaptation of Kagami Yoshimizu's manga Lucky Star. It has since become a popular destination for anime fans, who make "pilgrimages" to the shrine. The Kuki City neighborhood that also served as the backdrop the series has been hosting Lucky Star match-making events for Otaku since 2010, and the neighborhood held another event last year. The shrine also hosts a yearly "Moe Fes" festival celebrating moe subculture.

The attendance at the shrine during the first three days of the new year grew from 90,000 in 2007 to 300,000 in 2008 and then from 420,000 in 2009 to 450,000 in 2010.

Yoshimizu hung a wooden ema prayer plaque at the shrine on December 31. The plaque announced that the Lucky Star spinoff manga Miyakawa-ke no Kūfuku (The Miyakawa Family's Hunger) is getting an anime adaptation.

Source: Mainichi Shimbun's Mantan Web via Moe Ota-News Sokuhō