Fish Out Of Temporal Water / Anime & Manga

• Amakusa 1637 is about six Kobe teens who somehow find themselves Trapped in the Past.... and in the Shimabara of 1637, right before the horrible massacre of the local Japanese Christian colony. As they gather, they decide to work on averting such a tragedy and more or less succeed.
• Amatsuki is all about modern day city kid Tokidoki being trapped in a computer simulation of the Edo Period.
• Angel Beats!: The Heaven's Door manga implies this is the case with Shiina, a feudal era ninja who ended up in an afterlife modeled on a modern highschool.
• C.C. from Code Geass, after she loses her memories and reverts to the mentality of a preteen from the Feudal era. In one scene, she accidentally turns on a TV, then freaks out at what she sees... though in her defense, it was Japanese television she was watching.
• Human Popsicle Faye Valentine of Cowboy Bebop has a brief scene during her spotlight flashback episode, "My Funny Valentine", when she fails to properly identify several basic appliances just after being unfrozen. The trope is invoked again to a more tragic bent near the end of the series in "Hard Luck Woman", when she regains the memories of her past life and tries to go back home. After almost a century. Yeah, it doesn't go well.
• This is part of Maia's secret hidden in her forgotten memories in Daphne in the Brilliant Blue.
• In DNA², Karen gets sent from the future to 20th-century Japan. It's unclear how far along from the future she is, but science has evolved far enough that a person's DNA can be altered through medication. She was sent to this point in time to change the DNA of the legendary Mega Playboy that had 100 children with 100 different women, which caused quite a problem due to the overpopulation in the future.
• In a Doraemon chapter, Nobita and Doraemon brought Nobita's ancestor, Boastful Nobi, to the present-day Tokyo. Originally, they brought him here so that they could listen to his Tall Tales, but they obliviously freaked him out with modern tech like TV, boiling kettle, military vehicles and skyscrapers. Eventually, they had to send him back to the past, resulting in his telling his experiences to everyone, thus gaining his reputation as "Boastful Nobi".
• Dr. STONE has an interesting case where it's both Past -> Future and Future -> Past. The main character Senku is from modern day Japan, and ends up being turned to stone in an incident that basically ended human civilization. He revives 3000 years later and discovers a small village of people descended from those who managed to escape the apocalypse, but they're still a Stone Age-level society.
• Haruhi Suzumiya: Mikuru Asahina is from a future that has passed The Singularity. While she's not allowed to talk about it, she has absolutely no understanding of modern technology more complicated than a teapot. Not only does she consistently fail to make any type of machine operate, but she doesn't even know how boats work, leading Kyon to assume that the future has moved past buoyancy. Yuki Nagato (an alien) notes at one point that terrestrial humans could make a non-physical computer without too much difficulty, and Mikuru awkwardly says she can neither confirm or deny that. Mikuru's friend Tsuruya eventually reveals that she figured out Mikuru's origin on her own; it's pretty obvious if you're paying attention.
• Sai from Hikaru no Go is a humourous example, being the ghost of a master Go player from feudal Japan who was woken up by the titular Hikaru. His bewilderment at television and telephones is played for humour and he laughs hysterically when Hikaru tells him that humans have been on the moon.
• Inuyasha:
  • Kagome goes through this when she first visits the Feudal era, but given how much time she ends up spending there, she soon adapts.
  • Inuyasha himself also visits the modern from time to time and also occassionally expresses interest in artifacts Kagome brings back from the present, most notably instant ramen. One such incident had him amazed at the sight of a TV:
    Inuyasha: This is the strangest box I've ever seen!
• Iroduku: The World in Colors: Hitomi Tsukishiro is from 2078. When she gets sent to 2018, she gets confused by everything. For example, she tries to open a window by waving her hand over it, expecting it to be automatic.
• Jin tells the story of a brain surgeon in present-day Tokyo who gets sent back to 19th-century Japan, just as the Tokugawa era was ending and the country was beginning to open to foreign influences. He has to adjust to the social codes, but manages to fast-forward medical progress by several decades with the earlier introduction of germ theory and modern surgical methods.
• Shaorin in Mamotte Shugogetten. She spent 400 years in a ring and on her first night out ended up destroying an oven and a TV. The next day she destroys an entire school. Her destroying the TV actually happens differently in each adaptation. In the anime, she attacks it when it shows a criminal threatening the camera with a gun; in the manga, a dog takes down the criminal and Shao takes the TV apart because she wants to reward him with a treat. Amusingly, when her longtime rival Ruuan joins the cast, she accidentally turns on the TV and Tasuke freaks out in anticipation of a repeat, only for the slightly more on-the-ball Ruuan to instantly figure out what's going on.
• Nobunaga Concerto is about a modern day Japanese teenage slacker called Saburo who falls off a fence one day and lands in warring states era. By strange coincidence, he turns out to be the perfect body double of legendary Japanese warlord Oda Nobunaga, who has only just started his career as leader of the Oda clan and runs into Saburo as soon as he lands. Nobunaga can't handle the stress of leading his clan and asks Saburo to take his place while he runs away. Saburo then takes Nobunaga's place in history, even though he flunked history class and doesn't know much about what Nobunaga actually did during his life (for example he believes Nobunaga was the warlord who united Japan- but he's wrong). Saburo actually adapts surprisingly easily to living in the past, the transition eased by his high social status and his beautiful new wife, although he puts surprisingly little effort into actually trying to blend in (he gets away with it because nobody can question the leader of the clan, giving him a reputation for eccentricity). It also turns out that various other people from the modern era have ended up back in the past too.
• In the josei manga Oiran Chirashi, Haru Hanamori is an Office Lady trapped in the pre-Meiji Yoshiwara after she gets into a street accident. She reinvents herself as the High-Class Call Girl Ayame to survive there.
  • Ayame later finds out that her secret Love Interest, the brothel's hairstylist Shouhei, is in the same situation: in his case, he arrived to Yoshiwara after he fell off a cliff during a vacation trip, years before she fell there herself. Once she finds out, her almost lost hope to return home reignites and they promise to look for a way to come back together.
• The events of Ojarumaru begin when the eponymous character, a Heian-era prince, falls through the Moon Hole and gets sent to modern-day Japan after stealing Great King Enma's scepter and being pursued by him. In the present day, the prince meets Kazuma Tamura and his family and starts living with them, fascinated by all the things that are not from his time period.
• Carol Reed from Ouke no Monshou was the victim of a curse put on her, her mentor and an excavation team that was exploring an ancient Egyptian tomb. As a result, she gets thrown in the past and reaches Ancient Egypt...
• One Piece; Brook had been trapped in the One Piece equivalent of the Bermuda Triangle for fifty years by the time he meets the Straw Hats, so when he gets caught up to speed on Sabaody he comments that he remembers Gol D. Roger as some no-named rookie that was just starting out when Brook was in his prime.
• Pokémon: Lucario and the Mystery of Mew, had Lucario belong hundreds of years in the past until he was trapped in the staff by his master Sir Aaron. He's released at the beginning of the movie and is quite understandably confused (the kingdom he lived in is celebrating a festival, though when he last saw it, it was trapped between two armies; a place he remembers as a bedroom is now a museum, his master is dead, and basically nothing is as he remembers it.)
• Similarly, Yuri Suzuki from Red River (1995) is thrown into the Hitite Empire as a consequence of the Big Bad trying to use her as a part of a huge curse she plans to cast. Once she sorta gets used to her environment and begins to fall in love with the Prince that said Big Bad wants to eliminate, however, she decides to start fighting back...
• In Strike the Blood, Reina bumps into a glass door because in her time, all doors of this type are automatic. Whenever she runs into the present versions of people she knows, she's always shocked because they look so different.
• Coo from Summer Days with Coo spends 200 years as a fossil underground before being revived in modern day Tokyo. Of course, the fact that he's a Kappa probably causes more problems for him.
• Tamamo-chan’s a Fox!: Tamamo is a fox spirit from the Fushimi Inari shrine in Tokyo who disguises herself as a high school student to learn more about human society. She's fascinated by all sorts of modern conveniences that her fellow students take for granted, like subway trains and bicycles.
• Thermae Romae is about an Ancient Roman architect called Lucius who gets magically transported to modern day Japan via a time traveling spa house. Fortunately he can travel back the same way after spending time messing around with modern technology.
• Tora is this in Ushio and Tora. He was impaled to one spot for five hundred years, so when Ushio accidentally releases him, he's unfamiliar with modern day Japan. In one instance, he ends up getting hit by a truck because he's never seen vehicles.
• Ya Boy Kongming!: When Kongming initially wakes up in Shibuya, 1800 years after his death during the Three Kingdoms Era, he mistakes the various nightclubs around him for Hell. After meeting Eiko, who convinces him that he is, in fact, actually alive, he spends the next four hours straight bombarding her with questions, which seems to have been enough to acclimate him to the modern world (of course, one of the first things she taught him was how to use a smartphone, so he could probably use that to do plenty of research on his own later).
• Atem (Yami Yugi) from Yu-Gi-Oh! was an Egyptian pharaoh 5000 years before the events of the series (3000 years in the original version), which makes him a rather frightening arbiter of justice until Yugi "tames" him. Also happens in Yu-Gi-Oh!: Bonds Beyond Time, in which Yusei ends up in Judai's time, and then both of them end up in Yugi's time.
• A JMSDF Aegis destroyer and its crew is Trapped in the Past in Zipang, and they have to deal with the Values Dissonance between their pacifist and humanist values and the more war-oriented mentality of the time.
• Zombie Land Saga: The main cast is composed of zombies resurrected from various points in Japanese history. The majority of them come from the late 90s to early 2010s, but Junko and Yugiri stick out by being from the 80s and the 1880s. This later leads to an argument between Junko and Ai (from the late 2000s) when the two's images of idols from their respective eras clash.

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