Where The Hell Is Springfield / Anime & Manga

• Futari wa Pretty Cure is set in Wakabadai, an amalgam of various suburbs surrounding Tokyo on different sides. There is a real town by that name, but it's not anywhere particularly near Tokyo.
• Yes! Pretty Cure 5 is set in a city that is supposedly somewhere in Japan. But it’s full of French signs, and some fans have noted that it looks like The Theme Park Version of London.
• Just like the Devil May Cry games' fictional settings, it's difficult to pinpoint the locations of Capulet City and Morris Island, the respective named settings of Episodes 3 and 8 in Devil May Cry: The Animated Series. Although, being named after Romeo and Juliet from the British Author William Shakespeare hints that the former has British influences.
• Dragon Ball is heavy on Worldbuilding, but it’s still not clear where on Earth much of the action is taking place. None of the nations are named or specified, and cities have names like “East City” and “Ginger Town”. The series started out based on Journey to the West, so the setting (especially early on) feels like a fantasy hybrid of Japan and China. It's not even clear if their "Earth" is even the same planet as ours, or they just happened to have it called the same thing, as pretty much nothing on Dragon Ball's world resembles anything like ours. On the rare occasion that Earth is clearly visible from space in the franchise, at the very least the land masses roughly correspond to real life.
• Ojamajo Doremi has Misora Town (or “Misora City”), which is claimed to be in the Kanto region of Japan (i.e. near Tokyo). There is a real Misora Town, but that’s in Otsu, in the Kansai region.
• Triangle Heart 3: Sweet Songs Forever and Magical Girl Lyrical Nanoha are both set in Uminari City; all we know about it is that it’s somewhere on the coast of Japan. Magical Girl Lyrical Nanoha INNOCENT places it somewhere in the Tokyo area.
• Princess Tutu is set in the town of Kinkan, which is translated to "Gold Crown" in the English dub. But nearly all the text in the series is in German. Only in the last episode did we see a clue as to its location, where a town map named the town "Goldkrone" — German for "Gold Crown". This implies that it's either in Germany or a fantastic equivalent. It appears to be based on the real-life German town of Nördlingen.
• The town that D.N.Angel is set in is a strange case. All the characters have Japanese names and they seem to follow Japanese customs, but the town's architecture makes it look like a seaside European village. The anime added a character who claimed to be an exchange student from America, but otherwise countries aren't really mentioned. The audio commentary for the English dub has two of its voice actors asking, "Where is this set, anyway? France?"
• It's never revealed what country the jungle in Haré+Guu is in. It does have Indonesian flowers, bears, and orangutans, but the rest of the wildlife is totally bizarre.
• Prétear is set in the fictional Awayuki Town, somewhere in Japan. We're shown that the town appears to be on a small island connected to the main part of Japan by a bridge, but it's hard to tell much else.
• Negima! Magister Negi Magi features Mahora Academy. All that can be determined of its location is that it's likely somewhere in the Kanto region of Japan (so somewhere near Tokyo).
• Panty & Stocking with Garterbelt: Daten City and neighboring Oten City are equally vague. The setting itself is an Americasia, so while we see several Eagleland references, Daten City also has parts that look just like a Tokyo suburb.
• Yu-Gi-Oh! is mostly set in Domino City, which is almost definitely somewhere in Japan. Some speculate that it’s a fictitious Tokyo. Yu-Gi-Oh! ZEXAL takes place in Heartland City, and all we know about it is that it’s somewhere else in Japan. Yu-Gi-Oh! ARC-V, the first season at least, takes place in Maiami City, which looks more like U.S.A.'s Miami, although the school and cram schools makes it feels more like they're in Japan. And Yu-Gi-Oh! VRAINS is set in Den City, which is even more ambiguous, as it's never even stated to be in Japan, and the only houses seen don't really resemble Japanese houses, yet everyone have clearly Japanese names.
• Most of the race locations in Initial D are actual mountains, but Akina is a notable exception. It’s somewhere in Gunma and looks kinda-sorta like the real-life Haruna; beyond that, details are sketchy at best. The closest settlement is “S City”, which doesn’t help. The course in the manga also doesn’t match the Haruna course in the video games.
• Umi no Misaki is set on what is for all intents and purposes a fictional small island in the vicinity of Okinawa.
• Mitakihara, in Puella Magi Madoka Magica, is one of the stranger examples of this trope: there's a lot of very recognizable architecture, but it puts the series setting in thirteen different cities on four different continents. ^note Dubai, New York City, Taipei, Shanghai, Tokyo, Frankfurt, Singapore, Curitiba, Shinzuku, Milan, Cologne, Moscow, and Yokohama. While by all accounts it and other cities in Madoka, such as the neighboring Kazamino, Asunaro, Hohzuki, Kamihama, Takarazaki, Matsumiya, Kirimine Village, Futatsugi, and Yukuni are located in Japan, they don't have a confirmed location in Japan itself beyond some hints in some maps that Mitakihara and Kamihama are in the northeast of Japan's main island of Honshu, with some of the cities having relative locations to those cities at best. Puella Magi Tart Magica averts this as the locations visited are based on the real-life locations associated with Joan of Arc, who is the titular Tart.
• Is the Order a Rabbit? is supposedly set in Japan; everyone follows Japanese customs, eats Japanese food, and uses Japanese currency. But the town is modeled after Colmar, a town in Alsace – a region of France with a strong German influence, so there are both French and German influences in the show as well (like the German-style Christmas market). And the military rations shown in Episode 3 include things like raisin walnut, marshmallow fudge, and panna cotta, which the Real Life Kaiju Defense Force is unlikely to provide.
• Much of the Nasuverse media is set in or around three fictional Japanese cities: Misaki, Fuyuki, and Mifune. Fuyuki is a coastal city modeled after Kobe, while Misaki lies further inland, near Tokyo. Beyond that, we know nothing about where they might be.
• Gangsta.: While Ergastulum has quite diverse population, it mostly keeps to naming convection of European intermediate countries. No actual position is given and nothing is known about the outside world, aside from establishing an alternate history.
• Itomori in Your Name is located somewhere in the Gifu province in Nagoya, just east of Kyoto, but doesn't exist in real life (or maybe it did, but was wiped away by the comet and no one noticed).
• In JoJo's Bizarre Adventure: Diamond is Unbreakable, Morioh is stated to be a suburb of "S City" in "M Prefecture." This hints at it being an offshoot of Sendai in Miyagi Prefecture (where the series's author grew up), but nothing about either the town or what we see of the larger "S City" matches up with the real-life historic city.
• Tiger & Bunny: It is unclear exactly where Sternbild is. It appears to very similar to America culturally, but it has it's own currency (the sterndollar) and seems to be a man-made island in the ocean, meaning it's possibly a sovereign nation unconnected to any other.
• The Girl I Want is So Handsome! takes place in an unspecified part of Japan. The only time actual place names are mentioned is near the end, when Hanna upsets her girlfriend Rei by deciding to go to college in Hokkaido, which would force them into a Long-Distance Relationship for at least a year, since Hanna is a third-year and Rei is a second-year.

---