Kameido's 'Three Minutes Slow' Block: The Clocks Across the Street That Used to Mark Its Edge Now Slow Too
In the Kameido 3-chome block where every clock was found to run three minutes slow, previously reported on the 13th, a routine TDA re-measurement on the night of the 19th turned up the same three-minute delay at a shop across the road that had, until now, marked the block's edge. The size of the delay has not changed, but the affected area has grown for the first time, and covert patrol officer Iori Kiryu, 29, previously reported in these pages, was again on the rounds that found it.
On the night of the 19th, the TDA carried out a scheduled routine re-measurement of the Kameido 3-chome block where every clock was found running three minutes slow, previously reported on the 13th. As previously reported, every clock on the far side of the single road marking the block's boundary had read normal — but this latest measurement found that the register clock at a general goods shop just across that road was now reading three minutes slow as well. The discovery was made by covert patrol officer Iori Kiryu, 29, who first noticed the anomaly, as previously reported on the 13th. "I checked it against the same standard-time-synced chronometer as last time. That spot had matched exactly before, so at first I thought I'd simply misremembered," she said.
The shop's owner, 68, recalled, "It's not like I only noticed today or yesterday. Since around last week I'd had a feeling the register clock was off from customers' phones, but it was only three minutes, so I let it go."
According to the TDA, the newly confirmed delay is, as before, exactly three minutes — the size of the delay itself has not changed. Only the affected area has grown, now adding the one shop across the road to the previously reported 28 households. A TDA spokesperson called this the strangest part of the latest finding — "the amount stayed the same; only the range moved" — and repeated, as before, that neither the mechanism nor the cause can be explained, adding that no sign pointing to Yuragi has turned up this time either.
One resident of the block said, "We'd gotten used to the idea that three minutes slow was fine, but hearing that it's spreading now does unsettle me a little again." The shop owner, for his part, laughed it off: "Thinking we might be joining the club doesn't bother me as much as you'd expect. We're practically in the same boat as everyone over there now."
Kameido is already known for another unsolved puzzle, the previously reported 'vanished alley' — one that exists on the ward's old maps but has slipped from residents' memory entirely. Some residents now point to a possible link with today's expanded delay zone, but a TDA spokesperson repeated the agency's stance: "They are simply close geographically; there is no basis to connect them." Still, the spokesperson stopped short of flatly denying it, adding only, "I can understand the feeling that too many coincidences are piling up here."
"People say the job is not being heard," Kiryu said. "This time again, it wasn't sound but something visible — a clock — that I had to rely on." She added, evenly, "If the range is moving, all we can do is keep watching how far it goes next." The TDA plans to step up the frequency of re-measurements for buildings along the boundary road for now. Kameido's mystery remains unsolved, its outline only slightly wider than before.
