What is the Shimokitazawa time slip?
The Shimokitazawa time slip incident refers to accounts of “walking through foggy streets late at night in Shimokitazawa, Setagaya, Tokyo, and wandering into the Showa era.” It was introduced on TV Tokyo’s program Uso ka Honto ka Wakaranai: Yarisugi Toshi Densetsu (Urban legends: true or false?), broadcast late on the night of December 20, 2025, and became a huge topic, with many YouTube and social media videos analyzing and investigating it.
The program showed that two different people had very similar experiences ten years apart, which drew attention: “Why two people?”
Chuei’s experience (2008)
Chuei of the comedy duo Nagareboshi moved to Tokyo around 2000. When he was performing street comedy in Shimokitazawa, he noticed that about once a month there was a day when “fog covered the town and there were unusually few people,” he said.
Late one night in 2008, he and his girlfriend at the time went into a ramen shop near the station. It had only a counter, and ramen cost 200 yen. The CRT television in the shop showed static, and the newspapers lying around were from the Showa 50s (1975–1984). A woman customer’s legs seemed transparent, and the owner seemed lifeless. Yet when he visited the same place the next day, it was a vacant storefront that looked as if it had been empty for decades, the story goes.
The second experience (2018)
The program also introduced the experience of a female livestreamer. Late one night in May 2018, she went to Shimokitazawa to eat; again fog covered the town, and the streets were unusually empty, she said.
In the yakiniku restaurant she always went to, retro posters were on the walls; she talked with a Showa-style office worker and was given a note reading “June 25 (Wed).” When the program checked, one of the years in which June 25 fell on a Wednesday was Showa 55 (1980), which also matched Chuei’s “Showa 50s,” and this became a talking point.
Why two people? Places about 30 m apart
According to the program, the two shops were only about 30 meters apart. Although ten years apart, the experiences had much in common, “late at night,” “fog,” “empty streets,” “the Showa 50s,” and people wondered whether there was something special about the area.
The program did not identify the shops by name or exact location. If you visit the area, never do anything that bothers nearby shops or residents.
Follow-up reports (2026)
A spring 2026 special broadcast a follow-up on the Shimokitazawa time slip incident. It featured the account of the yakiniku restaurant owner, who had at first refused to be interviewed, and a person said to be the grandson of the man met in the 2018 experience who had a notebook, as well as another person’s strange experience: “I walked straight back from Shimokitazawa toward Shindaita, yet somehow ended up at Shindaita Station.” A further follow-up aired in an autumn special in September 2026.
A time slip, or a parallel world?
In the follow-up, Professor Yasunori Nomura, a theoretical physicist at the University of California, Berkeley, explained the physics idea of parallel worlds (the multiverse), and a theory was presented that what happened in Shimokitazawa was not a slip into the past but a visit to a very similar different world.
Other theories included “a distortion of the land’s magnetic field” and a fortune-teller’s “memory of water” idea. Shimokitazawa is low-lying land where rivers such as the Kitazawa River once flowed, now covered over as underground culverts. The idea is that “water stores memories, and people passing there picked up the memory of the land.”
Made up? Skeptical views
On the other hand, some residents say they have never seen such fog in Shimokitazawa, and since the accounts cannot be verified, some see them as fabrications or misremembering. As the program’s title says, it may be best enjoyed as a story “you can’t tell is true or false.”
Shimokitazawa’s maze of narrow alleys, mixing old buildings and new shops, has a strange atmosphere that can throw off one’s sense of time. That may be one reason such stories are born and told.
Similar strange stories
There are many stories of slipping into the gaps of time and worlds: Kisaragi Station, a station that does not exist; the man of time and space, who sends people back from an empty world; kamikakushi, people suddenly vanishing; and John Titor, who claimed to come from the future. For parallel worlds, see also the Mandela effect, and for ways to reach another world, the elevator game.
