A Japanese graphic designer has made it his life’s work to design an improbably realistic and detailed map of a city that doesn’t exist.Nagomuru City, located in a country called Naira that very closely resembles Japan but isn’t quite the same place, has everything you could want from the city you live in, from house numbers to subways to convenience stores to art colleges to 1970s housing complexes to ancient temples, except the possibly desirable quality of actually existing in three dimensions.Regrettably the text of the site is all in Japanese and I can’t slap up a full translation here, but Nagomuru’s creator, Imaizumi Takayuki, writes “…That sense of place you savor when you go somewhere: wondering what it is, how it came about, what surrounds the place…figuring that out through mapmaking is what imaginary maps mean to me.” Is Nagomuru a utopia? No, it’s just a city, as real as it can be made. At what address there does he reside? Everywhere there, as he focuses on each given location, and nowhere, as he wanders through the city at will.The city is created through imagining, imagined through creating, in loving detail.Imaizumi (a freelance graphic designer/cartographer) has been working on the map since he was ten years old The first map, predating this actual city, is from when he was seven or eight and features a train line, the population of various neighboring towns/villages (poor Hase, or possibly Nagatani, Village, which only has 154 people), and the student distribution of a highly rural school with one classroom for students from first through eleventh grades.Then there are a series of well-colored bus route maps, with stop names betraying a child’s limited knowledge of Japanese characters, as he points out (I feel for the postman who has to deliver to the neighboring 河部、何部、阿部、and 東部), and a contour map, followed by several rather beautiful hand-drawn maps of Nagomuru proper (dated from 1997 on). (The city was named after a school friend called Nakamura, with a twist on the pronunciation to spare the friend’s blushes.) Click on each map for a larger window.You can see the whole map here , scrolling, in segments, or as a PDF.Here’s a map of the city as it was in 1978 and here are the contents of some wallets lost in the city: a college student, a businessman, an old lady. If you are one of those weird people who prefer buses to trains, here are some buses and bus routes Here is an exquisite bird's-eye view of the city in the 1930s, drawn by Nakata Takumi.There have been several art exhibits in Japan featuring Nagomuru City, and Imaizumi has published a book about it, including discussion of cartography both real and imaginary. This page provides links to other people’s imaginary city maps, in varying levels of detail; click on the maps or links to jump. Most are in Japanese, but there are also a couple of links to English-language imaginary maps: Jerry Gretzinger’s vast and mysterious fantasia previously ) and stadtkreation , the latter sadly a dead link at the moment although it worked up until quite recently. While Imaizumi doesn’t link to it, maybe also take a look at the related Google-maps style world full of lots of people’s different fictional maps here previously ). I looked hard for anything in English about Nagomuru City itself and couldn’t find anything; thanksfor letting me know, with mod hat on, that this awkwardly explanatory style of post would be acceptable for, um, my first FPP.)