Kashihara turns its Capcom deal into a Street Fighter street
The Nara city that produced Capcom's founder is expanding its statues, murals and station decorations into a tourist trail for World Heritage visitors.
The Nara city of Kashihara has said it will push its Capcom collaboration further, turning the area around Kintetsu Yamato-Yagi station into a "Street Fighter Street" aimed at the visitors arriving for the region's newly minted World Heritage sites.
The city announced the expansion on 19 October 1. Kashihara sits almost in the centre of Nara Prefecture and is the gateway to the Asuka-Fujiwara sites, four of which — including the Fujiwara Palace ruins — were added to the UNESCO World Heritage list in July.
How a fighting game ended up in a heritage town
The link runs through Capcom founder Kenzo Tsujimoto, who was born in the city. In 1995, for the 1300th anniversary of the Fujiwara capital, Capcom built a pavilion at the Romantopia Fujiwara-kyo '95 event and screened an original anime short, Street Fighter II: Yomigaeru Fujiwara-kyo, in which Ryu, Ken, Chun-Li and E. Honda are thrown back in time to the ancient capital.
The two sides signed a comprehensive partnership agreement on 30 August 2022, and the city has been layering Street Fighter onto its public spaces ever since.
What is already on the ground
- Four bronze statues: Ryu, Chun-Li, Ken and E. Honda, the last unveiled at Kintetsu Kashiharajingu-mae station in November 2025 2.
- Design manholes, decorated station nameplates and a city sightseeing map built around the characters.
- An in-game crossover inside Street Fighter 6 that ran from 15 April to 7 May this year, plus a one-off graffiti artwork donated by the game's design team.
The newest piece is at Yamato-Yagi, the station most visitors will use. Its north wall carries a mural roughly 2.7 metres tall and 9 metres wide, with 29 characters arranged like a character-select screen, and the stairs and waiting rooms are wrapped in game art. Since 31 July, station announcements voiced by Ryu and Chun-Li's Japanese actors have been pointing passengers at local sights, in a run scheduled to last a year.
The next statue is being crowdfunded
Kashihara is now raising money for a fifth object and beyond through the corporate version of the furusato nozei hometown tax scheme, under a project explicitly named for building the street 2. Chun-Li's statue was itself paid for by a government-backed crowdfunding campaign, and the city is again asking companies to buy into the idea rather than funding it from the general budget.
City officials have floated ideas that go past statues, including a Honda-version "Tobidashi-kun" — the standard Japanese road-sign boy who warns drivers about children — as a traffic-safety mascot.
A city official quoted by AUTOMATON said the partnership has relied on Capcom's cooperation and on individuals, companies and groups, and that the work is "still only halfway there", with plans to spread the decorations from the station forecourt into the rest of the city 1.
Our opinion
Most game-branded civic projects read as a council trading dignity for footfall, and this one is not immune: a heritage town papering its station in a fighting game is a bet that people who came for sixth-century capitals will stay for a character-select wall. What makes Kashihara's version more interesting than a billboard is the money. The statues were crowdfunded, the fifth object is being crowdfunded, and the city is openly asking companies to buy into a street it will not fully pay for itself — either clever civic financing or an admission that the branding has outgrown the budget. The mural is the piece worth defending. Twenty-nine characters arranged as a roster is the one place the joke lands on the town's terms: Kashihara is presenting itself as a selectable fighter, not a backdrop.