Miho, a high school student, refuses to approve of her widowed mother's potential husband when they meet each other at a restaurant. As she flounces out of the restaurant, she drops her cell phone. At the moment there is an earthquake, and she drops her cell phone down a staircase. The phone is found by Tokijiro, a boy that lives in 1912
Both movies have main characters who communicate with each other while living in different times. Communication in one leads to friendship but in the other leads to romance.
Both male leads are in contact with someone from the past and exchange pieces of information with each other through a specific machine. The big difference between these two is that they have completely different genres. Signal has little to no romance and focuses more on mystery suspense and crime while ditto focuses more on romance. Signal IMO is an outstanding drama, please do watch it if you have time.
Kazu Tokita works at the cafe “Funiculi Funicula,” which is run by her relative Nagare Tokita. A mysterious rumor about the cafe has been spread that if a customer takes a specific seat at the cafe, that customer can travel back to a time of their choice. The specific rules for going into the past are: 1) You can't meet people who haven't visited the café. 2) If you do something different in the past, it won't change the present. 3) Only one seat in the café is able to take someone into the past and if the seat is occupied, you have to wait until the customer leaves. 4) When you go back into the past, you stay in the seat. 5) The time you can stay in the past is until the moment the coffee gets cold. 4 miracles take place at the café.
Minato is a young girl who was traumatized at a young age by being abandoned by her parents and left with her senile grandmother. She frequently corresponds with a pen-pal named Night, a boy about the same age as her that she's never actually seen in person. Although Minato and Night are very different - Minato is upbeat while Night is brooding, they get along anyway and she regularly updates him on the happenings in her daily life. Minato is even willing to confide in Night that she's falling in love with a boy she's recently met named Sho.
College freshman Si Ying gets a part-time job at “Cafe. Waiting. Love” coffee shop, where she befriends Abusi, a tomboyish barista who can make any coffee the customers request, the beautiful and mysterious cafe owner, and Zeyu, the boy who always sits in the same spot in the cafe who seems to be very popular with girls and on whom Si Ying develops an instant crush.