Kisaragi Station Returns to Japanese TV, Alongside Someone Who Says They and Two Friends Wandered Into 'a Strange World' Near Kawasaki

? What’s claimed

Accounts, testimony and theories, as told by the people who tell them.

The Kawasaki “strange world.” As Fuji TV and TRILL describe it, the person and two friends strayed together into a strange world around Kawasaki Station. The published accounts give no further details.

Hasumi’s night. According to Enshū Railway’s retelling, Hasumi rode a train that didn’t stop for more than 20 minutes and arrived at the unfamiliar Kisaragi Station. There was nothing around it, and she had no idea where she was. She decided to walk home and ran into one strange phenomenon after another. Her last post said her phone battery was running low, and then she disappeared. A Sept. 6 post on the Japanese blog masato-t.com, which revisited the case, adds the details that have made the story famous: drums and bells in the distance, and a tunnel called “Isanuki.” By the blog’s reading of the posts, she got off at Kisaragi at about 12:34 a.m. on Jan. 9 and reached the tunnel at about 2:45 a.m.

Saginomiya. Hasumi’s posts mentioned a train out of Shin-Hamamatsu. Because Enshū Railway’s Saginomiya Station is about 20 minutes from Shin-Hamamatsu and its name mixes in hiragana, people have whispered that Kisaragi is Saginomiya, the railway says. The company has leaned in. It sells limited Kisaragi tickets every Jan. 8, and since May 2025 it has run a Kisaragi-themed wrapped train. A note on its website says: “You won’t arrive at Kisaragi Station, so please ride with peace of mind.”

The ghost railway theory. The Sept. 6 blog revisits a theory that the author says surfaced on an earlier episode of the show: that the model was not Saginomiya but Sagisaka Station, on the long-gone Kōmyō Electric Railway in what is now Iwata, Shizuoka. According to the blog, the line opened in 1928 and was abandoned in 1936. Its Iori Tunnel survives and is still used by today’s Tenryū Hamanako Railway. The blog notes that Enshū Railway’s line has no tunnels. It also points to the “sagi” sound shared by Kisaragi and Sagisaka, and to the character 伊 (“i”) that begins both Isanuki and Iori.

That leads to a time-slip reading. If Hasumi really arrived at Sagisaka, the blog says, she stepped off a 2004 train at a station that had been gone for some 70 years.

The author labels each link unproven, writing that no document could be found showing Sagisaka was the model, or that Isanuki was based on Iori. The Iori Tunnel sits roughly 12 kilometers in a straight line from the old Sagisaka site, which the author says would be a hard walk in the time Hasumi’s posts describe. The blog’s own conclusion: Sagisaka “is not Kisaragi Station itself,” but it is “a very interesting real station” for thinking about the story.