Japanese Ghost Stories: Spirits, Hauntings, and Paranormal Phenomena Page 4
Not interested in founding her own sect, she initially cooperated with the Konko sect, but when they ignored one of her automatic writing messages, she broke with them and erected a small shrine at her home in Ayabe, Kyoto. This act was considered unlawful by a government which had already begun to exercise strict control over religious activities and individuals with perceived special powers. By the time she died in 1918, at the age of eighty-one, Deguchi Nao, who had never attended school and who could not read or write, had produced one hundred thousand sheets (each about twenty-five by thirty-five centimeters) of automatic writing, which talked mainly of the need to change humankind and develop the three worlds of the phenomenal, the intimated, and the sacred. The sheets were made more legible by her son-in-law, Deguchi Onisaburo, who, with strong psychic strengths of his own, succeeded her as leader of Omoto.
Academic interest in the supernatural was evinced by Inoue Enryo, who in 1888 founded the Research Society for Supernatural Phenomena at Tokyo Imperial University (now Tokyo University). Around the same time, researchers at Meiji University began to introduce the results of Western psychic research to Japan. Books on psychic abilities were increasingly published.
One enthusiastic author and translator was Asano Wasaburo, the son of a doctor. Born in 1874, Asano studied English literature at Tokyo Imperial University, where he sat in on classes taught by Lafcadio Hearn. After graduation he became an English teacher at a naval school, building a career and reputation by writing many literary criticism papers. In 1915, however, he was so impressed by Omoto that he decided to give up teaching and join the sect full-time. Convinced that Deguchi’s psychic gifts such as automatic writing were genuine, he published two books about the sect in 1921. Increasingly he came to believe in the power of spiritualism, and in 1923 he left Omoto to establish the Society for Psychic Science, with about twenty core members. Completely dedicated to the subject, he took part in the International Spiritualist Federation held in London, Great Britain, in 1928. The following year he founded the Tokyo Spiritualist Association, publishing a newsletter called Spirit and Life, and many related books.
Among the people who joined Asano’s spiritualist studies in 1923 was Fukurai Tomokichi, perhaps the best known investigator of the psychic in Japan. He is especially remembered for his pioneering work in nensha, or thoughtography, the ability to psychically project thought images. Born in Takayama City, Gifu Prefecture in 1871, Fukurai studied psychology at Tokyo Imperial University, where he also taught after graduation, receiving a doctoral degree for his thesis on psychology and hypnosis. He married the daughter of a wealthy family, and his wife’s constant financial support enabled him to pursue his passion for psychic research for the rest of his life.
In 1910 Fukurai Tomokichi began examining the clairvoyant Mifune Chizuko, the first time such testing had ever been tried in Japan. Born in 1886 in Kumamoto, on the island of Kyushu, Mifune was married in 1908 at the age of twenty-two to a military man who three weeks later was sent to Manchuria. In developing her clairvoyant gifts Mifune was aided by her brother-in-law, Kiyohara Takeo, who trained her in breathing and concentration. She was soon able to see through solid surfaces and to locate missing objects. As word spread, people began queuing outside her house to undergo psychic healing. Together Mifune and Kiyohara would accept three patients every morning; Mifune would look through the body and put her hand on the ailing or diseased part. Whenever she focused on the patient her hand would spontaneously tremble. Fukurai, who was to test her clairvoyant abilities on more than seventy separate occasions, considered her one of the world’s greatest benefactors.
Pleased with the results of his observations, he arranged a five-day-long investigation together with a colleague from Kyoto University. Newspapers reported on the tests, and this press coverage inspired another clairvoyant, Nagao Ikuko, regarded as the first person in the world to demonstrate nensha, the projection of thought images onto undeveloped phtographic dry plates. Born into a high-class family in Yamaguchi Prefecture in 1871, she was seventeen when she married Nagao Yokichi, who became a judicial officer and finally a judge. After his retirement in Tokyo, the couple moved north to Tochigi Prefecture, and it was there that Nagao’s clairvoyant powers became evident. When she was twenty, Nagao suffered the loss of her firstborn son, and she increasingly turned to inner faith to live. She became a devout worshipper of the Japanese sun goddess, Amaterasu Omikami, and would offer prayers every day for thirty minutes. When she read about Mifune in the newspapers, Nagao realized she had similar gifts; these were confirmed in experiments with Fukurai, who also recorded her nensha abilities.
In December 1910, that same year, Nagao, too, agreed to a series of experiments with nensha: Although avidly written about by the newspapers, the tests were ridiculed by scholars, especially physicists. Fukurai was denounced as a fraud; the ensuing controversy became such an embarrassment for the Japanese academic world that the leading physicist of the day, Yamakawa Kenjiro (also a former president of Tokyo University), decided to investigate personally.
The experiments began on January 8, 1911, but got off to a bad start when Yamakawa forgot to insert the dry plate at the right moment, resulting in Nagao’s failure to accomplish nensha. The experiments were rescheduled, but public protest against this supernatural activity upset these plans. In addition, public opinion, fueled by media reporting, had turned against the two clairvoyants, who were widely perceived as frauds. In what would be her last experiment with Yamakawa, Mifune had inadvertently selected the wrong set of lead pipes to look through. Although she was successful with the pipes she used, the Hochi newspaper accused her of changing the pipes and of being nothing but a fraud. An accusation of fraud was also leveled at Nagao by the Osaka Jijishinpo, which ignored Yamakawa’s demand for a retraction. Mifune’s answer was to commit suicide on January 18, 1911, at the age of twenty-five. Next month, on February 26, the deeply discouraged Nagao, aged forty-one, also killed herself. Nor did the tragedy end there. Her husband, angered and demoralized, committed suicide one year later.
These events did not deter Fukurai, who began researching the clairvoyant Takahashi Sadako. In 1913 he published a book about the three women, entitled Clairvoyance and Thoughtography. In it, he stated that although “swarms” of scholars were against him, he knew that thoughtography and clairvoyance were facts. The result was an increased assault on his professionalism, which led to his resignation from Tokyo Imperial University. Writing that he had been expelled from the academic world, he voiced his loneliness as well as bewilderment at scholarly reaction to the observed facts in his experiments. Free of the university, he resolved to undergo spiritual training and so journeyed to sacred Mount Koya, in Wakayama Prefecture. He subsequently became a professor at the Buddhist Koyasan University, in 1926.
Still committed to psychic research, Fukurai started testing the nensha powers of Mita Koichi, who successfully projected a number of different images. The work convinced Fukurai of the existence of a spirit world and in 1923 he published Spirit and the Mysterious World, in which he explained the psychic power behind nensha and clairvoyance. Along with Asano, he attended the International Spiritualist Federation in London, and three years later, in 1931, his Clairvoyance and Thoughtography was published in English, gaining him fame as the founder of nensha. Experiments in England with the psychic William Hope led Fukurai to believe that nensha and spiritual photography were essentially the same except that the former was due to human psychic ability while the latter came from another world.
Fukurai retired from Koyasan University in 1940 to devote himself full-time to psychic research. In 1945, he and his family were evacuated to Sendai, where he was made adviser to the Tohoku Psychic Research Society. He died in Sendai at the age of eighty-two.
Mita Koichi was born in Miyagi Prefecture in 1885, the second son of a samurai. From childhood, he had shown psychic abilities, especially clairvoyance, and was described by the family’s Shinto priest as exceptionally pure-hearted a
nd joyful. After a stint as a traveling salesman, at the age of twenty-three he founded a new religious sect, Seishin Shuyodan (“Spirit Training Group”), a name that was later changed to Teikoku Jikakukai (“Imperial Awakening Society”). Through this sect he traveled widely, exhibiting his psychic powers around Japan.
Hearing about Nagao Ikuko, he became intrigued by nensha, and experimented in it from 1914. On October 16, 1916, before an audience of some two thousand people gathered in Gifu Prefecture, Mita demonstrated nensha using various images suggested by spectators. Among the images projected onto the dry plate was a picture of nearby Ogaki Castle, as well as Japanese kanji characters. The following year, Mita and Fukurai met for the first time, after which Mita became an experimental medium. Dramatic tests were performed before crowds of 3,000 to 3,600 people, with Mita projecting well-known buildings, as well as an image of a former prime minister, Katsura Taro.
Because many people remained skeptical, Fukurai decided to have Mita project thoughts of unfamiliar images, so he selected the dark side of the moon. On June 24, 1931, at 8:20 A.M., Fukurai prepared two dry plates in a case at his house in Osaka. From his own house in Hyogo Prefecture, at 8:30 A.M., Mita thought-projected the images that Fukurai had requested. Fukurai immediately developed the plates and captured the transmitted images. Similar experiments were again carried out, this time in front of audiences, in 1933. There was no way at that time to check the validity of Mita’s psychically projected images, but in 1959, the first space pictures of the dark side of the moon were taken. From 1969 to 1972 America’s Apollo spacecraft also took numerous shots of the moon’s dark side. Using these pictures, Dr. Goto Motoki, who served from 1960 to 1961 as president of the Agency of Industrial Science and Technology, confirmed the remarkable accuracy of Mita’s images.
Mita demonstrated nensha numerous times, even for bureaucrats in Korea. During Japan’s war with China he traveled to Manchuria in 1931 to do “dowsing” or locating water psychically. He was also involved in trying to locate sunken treasure. Although he, like Mifune and Nagao, was at times labeled a fraud, Mita fared much better than the two women. Becoming increasingly religious, he built a special altar in his house, an act which seemed to bring him good fortune. In 1943 he was named to the board of directors of an Osaka textile company, where he suddenly died of a stroke while talking with someone on the telephone. He was fifty-nine.
In 1946 the Japan Psychic Science Association was founded by scientists and mediums, and in 1952 the Fukurai Institute of Psychology was established. Around the same time, Motoyama Hiroshi founded the Institute for Religious Psychology to further investigate paranormal phenomena.
Although not tested by Fukurai, another contemporary of Mifune and Nagao was a woman named Chonan Toshie, who reportedly displayed remarkable supernatural abilities. Born in Yamagata Prefecture in 1863 to a samurai family, she became a domestic servant after her father died. She is believed to have vomited blood at the age of twenty-one and to have eaten less and less from the age of twenty-five. Despite this, she was incredibly strong, much stronger than even the male servants in the household, and she could effortlessly heft a barrel containing fifteen 1.8-liter bottles.
Chonan’s spiritual powers became evident when she was thirty, when she began psychically locating missing objects. At the age of thirty-one she is said to have stopped passing stool or urine. Her stomach and chest swelled up for forty days, after which time she experienced divine possession and miraculous healing powers. As her fame grew, so did government suspicion of her activities, and when she was thirty-two, she was arrested and imprisoned for a period of sixty days. The following October she was reimprisoned for another seven days. Throughout these nine weeks, she supposedly passed no stool or urine. Although she had by then almost stopped eating entirely, she was force-fed about seventy-five grams of raw sweet potato every day.
Locked away by herself in a prison cell, she could nevertheless cause the materialization of various objects, including sacred water, talismans, medicines, and even sutras. Prison officials are said to have heard the sound of wind instruments playing whenever Chonan prayed, and although she could not bathe or wash, her hair and skin remained clean and sweet-smelling. After being freed from prison, Chonan continued to be visited by people eager to receive her materialized sacred water. Visitors would bring small, empty bottles, before which Chonan would pray. The bottles would spontaneously fill with a multicolored liquid. People then took the bottles away for use in healing, a purpose for which they were apparently extremely effective. Not everyone could receive the colored liquid, however. A bottle belonging to someone about to die (destined to die soon, Chonan would say) would not fill. Also remaining empty would be the bottle brought by someone who came merely to test whether Chonan was real or a fake. This miraculous materializing talent disappeared whenever anyone stood directly behind her. Until she died at the age of forty-four, Chonan was perceived as looking about half her age. Foretelling her own death by two months, she died in 1907.
Arrests and police surveillance of psychics and healers were common features of the Meiji period, which disliked ways of thinking which deviated from state-directed guidelines. Named for Emperor Meiji, this era in Japanese history is best remembered for its so-called Restoration in 1868, a concerted effort to completely restyle Japan by drawing on the technological expertise of the West. For more than two centuries immediately prior, Japan had been officially closed off from the rest of the world by the xenophobia of the Tokugawa shogunate. The country had experienced next to no contact with the West or Western ideas, but the Meiji Restoration sought to reverse this situation. Western knowledge, notably in science, medicine, navigation, and gunnery, was rapidly assimilated into a society eager to enter a new era.
But such zealous embrace of the new meant that much of the old was discarded. Supernatural activities were particularly suspect. In 1873, for example, a law was passed forbidding mediums and psychics to practice their powers. The following year another law made it illegal for faith healers and psychic healers to contradict acceptable medical practice by offering healing alternatives. Actually, medicine itself experienced a major upheaval at this time. For 1,500 years, kanpo, or Japanese herbal medicine in the Chinese tradition, had prevailed as the orthodox system of medicine in Japan. With the Meiji Restoration’s drive to catch up with the West, however, kanpo, despite its long history and proven clinical performance, was suddenly dismissed as unsophisticated and unscientific compared with such Western disciplines as anatomy and surgery. In 1875, in a move that almost destroyed traditional medicine in Japan, the Meiji government restricted the official licensing examination for all physicians to Western medicine. From 1906, only doctors thus licensed were permitted to prescribe kanpo. In 1882, another law stipulated that only patients already under a doctor’s care could even go to receive psychic healing.
Religion, too, was overhauled. Two of the main objectives of the Restoration of 1868 were to restore the emperor to direct rule, and to create a common spiritual basis for society and government. For centuries Shinto, a kami- centered faith, had been a communal form of worship intimately associated with daily life. It had no written creed that served as a religious guide, but shrines (the Japanese name for which is jinja, meaning “ kami dwellings”) were places where sacred spirits could be invited so that human beings could easily experience their presence. Dating from Japan’s prehistory, such shrines were tied to communities all over the country. The Meiji reforms drastically changed this focus.
Shrine Shinto, a native way of thinking spiritually, was replaced with “State Shinto,” a nationalized religion that made shrines state institutions and shrine priests government officials. The Meiji organization of a shrine system greatly reduced the number of shrines, which at the beginning of the twentieth century numbered almost two hundred thousand. Permitted shrines were assigned grades in 1871 according to their ties to the Imperial Family, hereditary priesthood was abolished, and the government took over t
itle to all shrine property, often selling off land. There was also an official but ultimately unsuccessful attempt to suppress Buddhism, which was seen as detracting from Shinto as the state cult.
On April 25, 1869, Emperor Meiji signaled the indivisibility of throne and Shinto by conducting a Shinto ceremony, and in 1875 the government even prepared standard prayers which were required to be used in the rites of all shrines. Until then, individual priests had composed prayers as they saw fit at each shrine. During World War II the nationalistic character of Shinto was intensified to suit military ends, but on December 15, 1945, after Japan’s defeat, the Allied Powers ordered a separation between shrine and state. From then, shrines once again became private, spiritual institutions supported by their local communities.
The establishment of a state cult meant, of course, that cults functioning outside of official sanction were considered a threat. The Omoto sect, which since its founding had grown large and powerful, perhaps inevitably became the target of unusually severe government persecution. In 1921 authorities imprisoned Deguchi Onisaburo and destroyed Omoto’s shrine at Ayabe. After his acquittal in 1927, he built a new shrine at Kameoka, Kyoto, which did little to calm government suspicion. On December 8, 1935, in a raid at 4 A. M., some 430 police surrounded Omoto’s facilities at Ayabe and Kameoka. They used the pretext that Omoto had armed itself with pistols and its young male members were trained to fight. Deguchi Onisaburo, then sixty-four years old, was rearrested and imprisoned, along with his son, and both were badly tortured. Police reports to the print media portrayed the cult as demonic, mysterious, and strange, and authorities publicly vowed that the leader would be executed or imprisoned for life. The police even went so far as to set up sex-related materials in Deguchi Onisaburo’s private rooms, and the media were then invited in to photograph this “evidence” of the suspicious cult leader’s “woman problems.” Karasawa Toshiki, the police chief, revealed the government’s intent to “rid the earth of the Omoto sect.”