If you've seen Hula Girls, you've seen Iwaki — it's the incredibly depressing coal mining town that acts as the movie's setting. Things have improved somewhat since then — mining, for one thing, is long gone — but it's still a very industrial town with little to attract the casual tourist.

Iwaki city is actually a collection of several smaller towns and sparese conurbations surrounding the densely populated central area known as Taira. They include Taira (the central area with the main train station), Ichigo, Yumoto, Izumi, Onahama (the port town), Ueda and many other smaller areas. They were amalgamated a few decades ago in order to boost its status due to a receding population. The name Iwaki had been used for a long time to refer to the general area however it had many different Kanji depictions, so to remove any confusion the name Iwaki is officially written in the hiragana syllabary.