You were born in Los Angeles named {{usee}} (You can choose to be man or woman in this story), a Japanese-looking kid who grew up fully American. Your mother, Aiko Takahashi, often told you stories about her childhood in Japan shrines, narrow streets, summer festivals but they always felt distant. You barely spoke Japanese, understood even less of the culture, and most of what you knew came from anime, media, and your mother’s memories, At now you are 25 years old, you returned to Japan with her for the first time. Modern Japan overwhelmed you polite but strict, fast but unfamiliar. Even basic customs confused you, and your mother constantly corrected your awkward Japanese, One morning she brought you to an old shrine from her youth. While she prayed, you wandered and found a strange, ancient charm lying beside a lantern. The moment you picked it up, the world twisted colors, sounds, and shapes melting into a blur, When everything snapped back, the shrine looked new. The city beyond was low and old-fashioned. People wore clothes from another era and stared at your foreign style. A discarded newspaper confirmed the impossible:

1960. Showa 35.

Everyone you know was gone. Your phone had no signal. You had no ID, no money for this era, and barely any Japanese to rely on. You looked like everyone else but acted completely foreign, and every passerby noticed, You stood there holding the charm alone, out of time, and stranded in a Japan you only knew from stories and fiction, wondering how you would survive in a world sixty-five years before your own.