Shimokitazawa Time-Slip Case: The Notebook Owner's Grandson Writes In, and Asks the Search to Stop

? What’s claimed

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

The two shops. According to TV Tokyo’s recap of the first episode, Chuei walked into a counter-only ramen shop near the station late one night in 2008. Ramen was 200 yen, the CRT television showed static, and the hanging newspapers were dated in the Showa 50s, 1975 to 1984. A customer described as a major local landowner later told his then-girlfriend, “That shop closed 30 or 40 years ago.” The next day, the couple found an empty unit that looked unused for decades. “I time-slipped,” Chuei said.

Kanezaki says that in May 2018, on a misty, strangely empty night, she was seated on the first floor of her usual yakiniku restaurant instead of the second. Salarymen asked, “You’re a hostess, right?” and talked up “the newly opened Kinkonka” in Roppongi, a club she later learned had opened in 1978. One handed her the “June 25 (Wed)” memo, an invitation to his birthday party. Nobody had a smartphone, so she wrote her LINE ID in his notebook.

Two years later, the December recap says, a LINE message arrived from the man’s grandson, who had found the ID in his grandfather’s notebook. He said his grandfather had been in hospital since 2014 and couldn’t have been at the restaurant in 2018. “If this notebook turns up, the time slip might be proven,” Kanezaki said. TV Tokyo’s March recap names the notebook’s owner as Ichiro Takeda.

The grandson’s message. Kanezaki made the message public herself, months before the broadcast. In a video posted March 23, 2026, on Shimada’s YouTube channel, she read out a long message from the grandson, identified only as “R,” who wrote that he, his wife and his daughter live outside Japan. R said that, out of curiosity, he messaged the LINE ID in his grandfather’s notebook, and his daughter and dog vanished from inside the house. He was writing to Kanezaki to ask her to delete the contact when LINE showed that she had “left.” Minutes later, he said, his daughter and the dog were found crying in the bedroom. He wrote that this would be the last time he discussed the matter, and that his mother had said she would take the notebook to a temple, though he didn’t know whether she had. In follow-up messages, Kanezaki said in the video, he asked her to call publicly for the search for the notebook to end.

TV Tokyo’s Sept. 27 broadcast retold the same account. “Is the time slip proven?” the listing teased. According to the broadcaster’s Sept. 28 recap, R’s message reached the program’s staff as well as Kanezaki.

His daughter’s account, as TV Tokyo reported it: “I was playing in the house and then I was in a world of fog. I heard Japanese, and I walked, crying, holding the dog, among lots of signs in kanji and hiragana. When I came to, I was in the bedroom at home.”

Worried something more would happen to her, R sent Kanezaki a final message, the recap says: “Please don’t dig into this any further.” The broadcast added where the notebook may be: according to the recap, his mother most likely gave it to a temple in Kamakura for a memorial service.

The face at the shrine. A former resident, called Kondo (a pseudonym) in the recap, lived in Shimokitazawa from 2000 and described daytime mist that felt like tearing through a curtain, rainbow-colored surroundings, and a big face with big eyes and five feather-like hands coming from a shrine’s main hall. That shrine once held a 3-meter tengu mask, the recap says. Kondo also described a 2001 night like Kanezaki’s and a 2003 night at Chuei’s ramen shop.

The magnetic field. Yumii told the program, “The magnetic field around here connects easily to somewhere.” Chuei, she said, had walked into a place “where the magnetic field got strong and an entrance formed.” The program’s preview floated a new theory: not a slip into the past, but a wrong turn into a parallel world.