47 Fun Facts About Your Name

What career is Taki working towards in Your Name?

Architect: his habit of sketching buildings pays off when he has to draw Itomori's landscape from memory, the only clue he has for finding the town.

What is the Japanese title of Your Name?

Kimi no Na wa means 'Your name is...', and it is the question Taki and Mitsuha finally put to each other in the film's closing line.

What does Mitsuha do after her unhappy trip to Tokyo, to her friends' shock?

She cuts her hair short as soon as she is home, having found a Taki who did not know her; Tessie and Sayaka are stunned when they see it on festival day.

In which prefecture is Mitsuha's hometown in Your Name?

Gifu: Itomori is fictional, set in the prefecture's mountainous Hida region, and Taki's search for it runs through the real Hida city, whose station and library fans now visit.

What does Mitsuha wish for, just before the swapping begins?

To be reborn as a boy in Tokyo is what Mitsuha shouts into the night, sick of small-town life; the next morning she wakes up in Taki's body.

In which Tokyo ward is the Italian restaurant where Taki waits tables?

Shinjuku: the restaurant is modelled on a real café beside Shinjuku Gyoen park, and its Italian name is a nod to the title of an earlier Shinkai film.

How do Taki and Mitsuha communicate during the body swaps?

Notes on paper, their phones and their skin carry the messages, which soon turn into house rules: she tells him to mind her skirt, he tells her to stop spending his money in cafés.

In Your Name, while living in Taki's body, Mitsuha sets him up on a date with whom?

Miki Okudera, his co-worker, senses on the date that Taki is preoccupied with someone else.

How is kuchikamizake, the Miyamizu shrine's ritual sake in Your Name, made?

Chewing rice and spitting it out lets enzymes in saliva start the fermentation; it is one of Japan's oldest ways of making sake, and Mitsuha is mortified to do it in front of classmates.

What is the name of the comet in Your Name?

Comet Tiamat comes round once in 1,200 years; as it passes on the night of the autumn festival a fragment breaks away and falls on Itomori.

In Your Name, who recognises Taki's sketch of Itomori and drives him there?

A ramen-shop owner spots the drawing just as Taki, ready to give up, stops to eat; the man comes from Itomori himself and takes him to see what is left of it.

How many years apart are Taki and Mitsuha living?

Three years separate them: Mitsuha's days are in 2013 and Taki's in 2016, which is why his calls never connect and why her town is already gone when he finds it.

What does Taki find in the records of the Itomori disaster?

Mitsuha's name is on the list of the dead, with those of her family and friends among some 500 victims; soon afterwards Taki's own memories of her begin to fade.

What has Taki been wearing as a lucky bracelet without knowing where it came from?

Mitsuha's kumihimo braid was the cord she wore in her hair: she threw it to him on a Tokyo train before he knew who she was, and he hands it back when they come face to face on the mountain.

What does Hitoha reveal on realising Taki is inside Mitsuha?

Body-swapping runs in the family: Hitoha recalls having the same strange dreams as a girl, and says Mitsuha's mother had them too.

How do Mitsuha's friends try to force Itomori's evacuation in Your Name?

A blackout and a fake broadcast: Tessie blows up the power substation while Sayaka, from the school broadcasting club, takes over the town's emergency loudspeakers to order everyone out.

What does Mitsuha find written on her hand instead of Taki's name?

Instead of his name Taki had written 'I love you' (suki da) on her palm; night fell during their twilight meeting before she could write hers on his hand.

Who finally orders Itomori's evacuation in Your Name?

Mayor Toshiki Miyamizu, Mitsuha's estranged father, had told residents to stay put; after she confronts him he orders the evacuation that saves the town.

Where do Taki and Mitsuha finally meet in the last scene?

On the steps of Suga Shrine in Tokyo: the two glimpse each other from passing trains, jump off at the next stations and search the streets until they meet on the stairway.

Who voices Taki in the Japanese version of Your Name?

Ryunosuke Kamiki, a former child actor who had voiced Studio Ghibli characters, won Best Actor at the Seiyu Awards for Taki, and Shinkai cast him again in his next two films.

Who voices Mitsuha in the Japanese version of Your Name?

Mone Kamishiraishi, known until then as a screen actress, won Best Actress at the Seiyu Awards for Mitsuha, on the same night her co-star took Best Actor.

Which earlier Shinkai film does Mitsuha's teacher Yukari Yukino come from?

Yukari Yukino was the heroine of Shinkai's 2013 film The Garden of Words, voiced by Kana Hanazawa in both; here she teaches the class the word 'kataware-doki', the twilight hour.

What is the name of Mitsuha's younger sister?

Yotsuha means 'four leaves': the Miyamizu women are numbered in birth order, from grandmother Hitoha (one) and mother Futaba (two) down to her elder sister, the third.

Which real disaster inspired Shinkai to conceive Your Name?

The 2011 Tōhoku earthquake and tsunami: visiting the wrecked fishing village of Yuriage that July, Shinkai thought 'this could have been my town' and imagined swapping places with its people.

In the epilogue of Your Name, what is an older Taki struggling to do?

Land a job: his search is going badly, and all the while he is nagged by the feeling that he is really looking for someone he has forgotten.

Which Rumiko Takahashi manga was among the inspirations for Your Name's plot?

Ranma ½: its hero turns into a girl whenever he is splashed with cold water, a gender-swap comedy Shinkai drew on alongside the Heian-era tale Torikaebaya Monogatari.

Which Christopher Nolan film did Shinkai cite as an influence?

Shinkai cited Interstellar (2014) as an influence: its time dilation and Cooper's messages sent back across the years to his daughter echo through the film's second half.

Which band wrote and performed the music for Your Name?

Radwimps wrote and performed the score and the four vocal songs; Shinkai asked the band for music that would supplement the characters' dialogue and monologues.

Where did Your Name have its world premiere?

Anime Expo in Los Angeles hosted the world premiere on July 3, 2016, weeks before the film opened in Japan on August 26; it came back to the city that December for a one-week Oscar-qualifying run.

Which company distributed Your Name in Japan?

Toho took on the project after Shinkai pitched it in 2014, and opened the film across Japan on August 26, 2016.

Which studio produced Your Name?

CoMix Wave Films is a Tokyo studio known above all for Shinkai's films; in 2024 the company that distributed Your Name bought a stake in it.

Which film did Your Name dethrone as the highest-grossing Japanese film worldwide?

Spirited Away, released in 2001, held the record until Your Name passed it in January 2017; the two have swapped places since as re-releases added to both totals.

What happens to Mitsuha's messages on Taki's phone when he reaches the ruins of Itomori?

They vanish before his eyes, entry by entry, just as he tries to show his friends proof that she is real; before long his memories of her start to go as well.

Your Name became the highest-grossing Japanese film ever in which huge market in December 2016?

China: about two weeks after opening there in December 2016, Your Name passed Stand by Me Doraemon to become the country's top-grossing Japanese film.

In the epilogue of Your Name, Taki overhears Tessie and Sayaka in a café planning what?

Their wedding: the two friends who helped save the town are engaged and living in Tokyo, and Taki half-recognises them without knowing why.

Which distributor released Your Name in North American cinemas in April 2017?

Funimation opened the film in North American cinemas on April 7, 2017, but that 2017 run earned only about $5 million, a sliver of the film's worldwide total.

How did Your Name fare in the Best Animated Feature race at the 2017 Academy Awards?

It was not nominated, even though a leading American critics' group had just named it the year's best animated film; the Oscar went to Disney's Zootopia.

Which producer announced a Hollywood live-action remake of Your Name in 2017?

J. J. Abrams and his company Bad Robot announced the remake with Paramount in 2017, with Arrival writer Eric Heisserer adapting it; the script and the director's chair have both changed hands since.

How does Taki manage to wake in Mitsuha's body one last time?

By drinking her ritual sake, which he had carried up to the mountain shrine while in her body; he collapses, sees her life pass before him and wakes on the morning of the festival.

Which two later Shinkai films complete the so-called 'disaster trilogy'?

Weathering with You and Suzume followed in 2019 and 2022; Taki and Mitsuha both turn up in the first of them, she as a jewellery saleswoman in a Tokyo mall.

For Your Name's American release, what did the film's Japanese band do with its four songs?

Sang them again in English: frontman Yojiro Noda, who had lived in America as a child, wrote new English lyrics himself, and the dubbed film uses those versions.

Which actress, the voice of Sailor Moon in the modern English dub, also voices Mitsuha in Your Name?

Stephanie Sheh plays Mitsuha opposite Michael Sinterniklaas's Taki, and both actors returned to the roles for the characters' cameos in Shinkai's next film.

In Your Name, Mitsuha's friend Tessie reads Mu, a monthly Japanese magazine devoted to what?

Mu covers the occult and paranormal; Tessie's hobbyist interest in mechanics and engineering comes in handy when the trio tries to force Itomori's evacuation.

What is Taki's surname in Your Name?

Tachibana is Taki's family name; the others belong to his friends Tsukasa Fujii and Shinta Takagi and to Katsuhiko Teshigawara, whose mouthful of a surname is why everyone calls him Tessie.

Which film beat Your Name to Animation of the Year at the 40th Japan Academy Prize?

In This Corner of the World, Sunao Katabuchi's wartime Hiroshima drama, took Animation of the Year in March 2017, while Your Name won Screenplay of the Year for Shinkai.

When Your Name became Japan's fourth-biggest film ever in 2016, which two Hollywood films ranked above it, behind Spirited Away?

Titanic and Frozen stood between them. Your Name's ¥25.17 billion haul made it the first anime not directed by Hayao Miyazaki to pass ¥10 billion.

In Your Name, what does Hitoha call the power that ties together threads, people and time?

Musubi: Hitoha explains that knotting cords, joining people and the flow of time are all one power, an idea Taki remembers when he needs a way back to Mitsuha.