BODY: Step out of Kintetsu Yamato-Yagi Station in Nara Prefecture and the first thing you may notice is not a seventh-century palace ruin but Ryu, Chun-Li and 27 other fighters lined up on a wall like a character select screen. Kashihara City wants a lot more of that.
On October 19, the city announced it will keep expanding town planning built around Capcom's Street Fighter series — an unusual municipal strategy with a very specific origin. Capcom founder Kenzo Tsujimoto is a Kashihara native, and the relationship goes back to 1995, when Capcom set up a pavilion at "Romantopia Fujiwara-kyo '95," a festival marking 1,300 years since the founding of the Fujiwara-kyo capital, and screened an original anime titled Street Fighter II: Fujiwara-kyo Reborn — Fighters Who Leapt Through Time. The two sides formalized things with a comprehensive partnership agreement on August 30, 2022.
Since then the city has installed bronze statues of Ryu, Chun-Li, Ken and E. Honda, laid down designer manhole covers, decorated station nameplates on both Kintetsu and JR lines, and published a Kashihara × Street Fighter tour map. The Chun-Li statue was funded through government crowdfunding via the furusato nozei hometown tax donation system.
The timing is deliberate. In July 2026, "Asuka-Fujiwara: Archaeological Sites of Japan's Ancient Capitals and Related Properties" — including the Fujiwara Palace site and three other locations in the city — was inscribed as a UNESCO World Cultural Heritage site. Expecting a surge of autumn visitors, Kashihara is pushing its "Street Fighter Street" concept at Yamato-Yagi, the gateway station. Already there: a roughly 2.7-meter by 9-meter mural with 29 characters, decorated stairwells and platform waiting rooms, and station announcements recorded by Ryu and Chun-Li's voice actors, running through July 2027. Donations are now open for a fifth statue, with floated ideas including an E. Honda version of the tobidashi-kun child-shaped road safety sign.
The insider take
Yamato-Yagi is where the Kintetsu Osaka and Nagoya lines cross — one of Kansai's busiest transfer points, and a place most travelers have historically passed through without stopping. That is the real problem Kashihara is solving. Nara's chronic tourism headache is the day-tripper who sees deer in Nara Park and sleeps in Kyoto, and a World Heritage listing alone rarely fixes it. Using a fighting game to turn a junction into a destination is savvy precisely because it is not reverent: the heritage draws the itinerary, the Hadoken draws the photo.
Originally reported by AUTOMATON (Japanese).