Searching For- Rei Kitajima In-all Categoriesmo... (2025)

Today, I went down that rabbit hole. The query was simple: — with the scope set to “All Categories.”

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.

And if you are Rei Kitajima: Your signal is faint, but it isn’t gone. The search continues.

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.

No filters. No date ranges. Just the raw, unfiltered web.

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.

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.

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.

But I haven’t given up.

When a person doesn’t exist in Shopping, they aren’t selling merch. When they don’t exist in News, they haven’t done anything newsworthy. When they don’t exist in Videos, they aren’t a creator.

Rei Kitajima may have been an active user in the late 90s or early 2000s—back when handles were pseudonyms and “All Categories” meant a GeoCities page or a Usenet post. Everything they created has since been buried under layers of link rot and server shutdowns.

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.

But when they barely exist in Forums and Blogs? That suggests they were a participant, not a performer.

But with Rei Kitajima? Crickets.