Today, I went down that rabbit hole. The query was simple: — with the scope set to “All Categories.”
Here is what I found (and what I didn’t). Usually, when you search for a person in “All Categories,” you expect a split second of algorithmic certainty. Wikipedia. Instagram. LinkedIn. A news article. A sports statistic.
Was that them? Maybe. Maybe not. The internet is not a library. It is a landfill with occasional treasures. Searching for “Rei Kitajima in All Categories” is a reminder that most digital lives are not archived—they are simply abandoned.
There is a unique kind of digital archaeology that happens when you stumble upon a name that feels important but yields nothing but static. Searching for- Rei Kitajima in-All CategoriesMo...
But I haven’t given up.
But with Rei Kitajima? Crickets.
The search results page looked like a waiting room. A few obscure forum mentions. A broken link to a now-deleted Pixiv account. A single mention in a 2014 manga scanlation credits page that read: “Special thanks to R.K.” When a person exists in the margins like this, you start to develop theories. After two hours of clicking through “All Categories”—Images, News, Shopping, Videos, Blogs, Forums—I landed on three possibilities. Today, I went down that rabbit hole
And if you are Rei Kitajima: Your signal is faint, but it isn’t gone. The search continues.
If you know a Rei Kitajima—a photographer, a programmer, a poet, a player of obscure rhythm games from 2006—send them this post. Tell them someone is looking.
In creative circles (doujinshi, indie game dev, underground music), a single name sometimes masks a rotating group of collaborators. “Rei Kitajima” could be a project name, not a person. Searching “All Categories” fails because the signal is scattered across different mediums: a song on Niconico, a texture pack for a 2007 RPG Maker game, a recipe on a long-dead food blog. Wikipedia
No filters. No date ranges. Just the raw, unfiltered web.
But when they barely exist in Forums and Blogs? That suggests they were a participant, not a performer.
I found one thread from 2009—a Japanese text board about retro PC-98 games. A user named “Kita_Rei” posted a walkthrough for a dungeon crawler no one has heard of. The account was never used again.