Miki Takasuna. History of the Human Sciences. Volume 25, Issue 2, May 2012.
The history of psychology in Japan from the late 19th century until the first half of the 20th century did not follow a smooth course. After the first psychological laboratory was established at Tokyo Imperial University in 1903, psychology in Japan developed as individual specialties until the Japanese Psychological Association was established in 1927. During that time, Tomokichi Fukurai, an associate professor at Tokyo Imperial University, became involved with psychical research until he was forced out in 1913. The Fukurai affair, as it is sometimes called, was not documented in textbooks on the history of Japanese psychology prior to the late 1990s. Among earlier generations of Japanese psychologists, it has even been taboo for discussion. Today, the affair and its after-effects are considered to have been a major deterrent in the advancement of clinical psychology in Japan during the first half of the 20th century.
Introduction
In 1998, a Japanese horror film The Ring was released. It was based on a namesake novel, written by Koji Suzuki and published in 1991; both media contain a scene that depicts a psychiatrist conducting a public experiment with a supposedly psychic woman. Later in the story, both are accused of deceiving people. Though little known by most Japanese, this scenario actually took place, except that it was not a psychiatrist but a psychologist who conducted the experiment, and it thus deserves a place in the history of psychology in Japan.
It was not happenstance that Koji Suzuki (1991) incorporated this bit of authenticity in his fictitious tale. He knew the story of Tomokichi Fukurai (1869-1952), an elite psychologist in the first decade of 20th-century Japan, after coming across his biography (Nakazawa, 1986) while searching for references on parapsychological experiments (Yoshida, 1994). Suzuki incorporated two aspects of Fukurai’s reality: his involvement with public psychical experiments, and his belief that ‘an idea is an organism’. The latter conviction compelled Fukurai to carry out peculiar experiments on what he called nensha, which he translated as ‘thoughtography’ or, later, ‘nengraphy’.
To better understand the rise and fall of Fukurai, a brief explanation of spiritualism in late 19th- and early 20th-century Japan is necessary.
Spiritualism during the Meiji era
From the late 19th to the early 20th century, a boom of spiritualism was observed among people in Japan, and its effects were played out in two phases. The first phase, beginning in the late 1880s, corresponds to about two decades into the Meiji era (1868-1912). It is portrayed as a period of rapid modernization or westernization. By 1890, kokkuri-san, a Japanese style of Ouija board, had been in popular use for years. Although there are several explanations as to when and from where the original Ouija board was imported, various accounts concur that it first arrived in Japan via the United States around 1884 (Ichiyanagi, 1994a). During this time, the kokkuri-san did not spark any serious debate about the existence of spirits either for or against; it was just a fun game, a diversion from reality, which was instead based on scientific principles.
Historically, seances were never as popular in Japan as in the West. However, culturally speaking, in Japan there is a traditional woman medium called an itako in the northern area, specifically in the Aomori prefecture. Before the Second World War, being an itako was a typical occupation for blind or weak-sighted women in Aomori where most of the women engaged in agriculture. However, becoming an itako was no afterthought because special training was required. Such mediums still exist and are called out today. A recent investigation among outpatients in southern Aomori showed that more than 30 per cent had also visited an itako (Fujii et al., 2002). The majority wanted to consult about health, either the individual’s or that of his or her family. This suggests that the major role of itako in our modern world is more as a counselor than healer. Since itako are not considered ‘true shamans’ (Blacker, 1986: 140), which are those said to be able to communicate with dead people, the itako may be considered a precursor to the medium found in the western spiritualist movement.
Spiritualism in the 1880s was also demonstrated by the emergence of hypnotism. Though ‘mesmerism’ had already been described in an English-Japanese dictionary published in 1873 where it was translated as dobutsu jishaku ryoku [animal magnetism] (Shibata and Koyas, 1873: 706), ‘hypnotism’ did not become an entry until 1881 when Tetsugaku-jii, the first English-Japanese dictionary of philosophy, included both ‘mesmerism’ and ‘hypnotism’ (Inouye et al., 1881: 40, 54). Ichiyanagi (1994b) listed publications on mesmerism or hypnotism during the Meiji era and identified Japan’s first book on hypnotism as Dobutsu jiki gairon [Outline of Animal Magnetism] (1885). It was a translation of a book by Franz Anton Mesmer (1734-1815) (Mesmer, 1885). However, as was the case for most books translated into Japanese by about the 1890s, the book did not identify the source for translation or exactly how it was translated. The Mesmer book soon gave way to Hypnotism (1889) by Albert Moll (1862-1939), one of the most popular books referred to on the subject in late 19th- and early 20th-century Japan. It also reflected the flourishing of hypnotism, in that Ichiyanagi listed 50 different titles on hypnotism and related books that were published between 1903 and 1905 (Ichiyanagi, 1994b). Most hypnosis theories introduced to Japan during this period employed a supposedly scientific explanation of the process in terms of physical, physiological and psychological factors.
On one level, it seems obvious that hypnotism would be included not as an example of spiritualism but more as a psychotherapy prototype. Yet academics debated whether the practice should or should not be limited to medical doctors. The first academic book on the topic, Saimin-jutsu to suggestion ronshu [Collected Treatises on Hypnotism and Suggestion] (1904), spanning two volumes, was edited by Kokka-Igakukai, a national society for medicine. Among the 11 papers written by 7 authors, Fukurai was the only psychologist who defended the right of non-medical specialists to practise hypnotism (Fukurai, 1904). In 1908, however, hypnotism became the subject of legal control.
The second phase of spiritualism in Japan was already under way in the first decade of the 20th century, as shown by an increased number of psychical research publications. The early 1910s was an especially vocal time for debating the topic. For example, newspapers carried a series of debates on parapsychological power, referencing findings from the Society for Psychical Research in England. Academic researchers, such as physicists, expressed a belief that modern science could explain psychical phenomena, while mentalists and religious people argued that science could not thoroughly explain such phenomena. It was within this context that Fukurai began his research in parapsychology.
The life of Tomokichi Fukurai
Tomokichi Fukurai was born on 3 November 1869, in Takayama, Gifu, central Japan. He first attended Third High School in Kyoto, then transferred to Second High School in Sendai, the reason for the change being unknown. Nevertheless it was fortuitous because he met and married a daughter of the judge who had offered him a room in Sendai (Nakazawa, 1986). Fukurai entered Tokyo Imperial University in September 1896 and began studying western philosophy at the College of Literature. In July 1899, he graduated from Tokyo Imperial University and began pursuing hypnotic theory, as proposed by William James (1842-1910) in the college’s graduate course on psychology. That James influenced Fukurai was further indicated by the published translations of Psychology (James, 1902) and Talks to Teachers on Psychology (James, 1908).
Meanwhile, Tokyo Imperial University soon established the first psychological laboratory in 1903 under the direction of Professor Yujiro Motora (1858-1912). Motora obtained a PhD under G. Stanley Hall (1844-1924) at Johns Hopkins University in 1888 and became the first experimental psychologist in Japan. As such, Fukurai was studying psychology at the only institute in Japan that, at the time, enjoyed up-to-date equipment for psychological research comparable with that in Europe and the USA.
After practising hypnosis and conducting experiments, Fukurai completed a dissertation entitled ‘Psychological Research on Hypnosis’, which he submitted to the university in July 1904. In July 1906, Fukurai became a lecturer at Tokyo Imperial University and began teaching in abnormal psychology. A month after the lectureship, he was awarded a PhD from Tokyo Imperial University. It was one of the first cases of a Japanese psychologist obtaining a doctoral degree without having studied abroad. His book Saimin shinrigaku [Hypnotic Psychology], was published in 1906 following his PhD award (Fukurai, 1906). It was thought to be the only scientific textbook on hypnosis in existence by the end of the Second World War (Ichiyanagi, 1994a). In July 1908, Fukurai was promoted to associate professor at Tokyo Imperial University.
While lecturing on abnormal psychology, Fukurai continued to pursue hypnosis research, soon becoming involved with psychical research. Had he gone abroad to study like many of his colleagues, he would have been more likely to cast a critical eye on psychical research. Instead, from 1910 to 1911, he carried out experiments on clairvoyance, aided mainly by three female subjects. These experiments eventually caused a major dispute among academics, not only psychologists but physicists as well.
Professor Motora tried to dissuade Fukurai from further pursuing parapsychological research but Fukurai insisted that clairvoyance and ‘thoughtography’ existed. He coined the latter term after finding that one of his subjects could project her thoughts onto a camera’s photographic plate. After Motora’s death in 1912, Fukurai published Toshi to nensha [Clairvoyance and Thoughtography] (Fukurai, 1913). The book begins in a defiant tone, essentially translating as follows: ‘Despite swarms of academic opponents in front, I declare that clairvoyance is real and so is thoughtography’ (ibid.: 1). An English-language version of the book was later published in 1931 but suffered criticism among academics because it did not follow standard scientific method, which requires verification. Though Fukurai was fed up with colleagues disparaging his work, he resigned his post at Tokyo Imperial University in October 1913 only because he was essentially forced out.
Nevertheless, that did not stop Fukurai from continuing his own pursuit of thoughtography. By the mid-1920s, Fukurai had relocated to Osaka where he became principal of Senshin Women’s High School (1921-6). In July 1926, he was appointed as professor at Koyasan College, a Buddhist college of the Shingon School in Wakayama. In September 1928, he traveled to London to the third meeting of the International Spiritualists’ Federation where he talked about his experiments on clairvoyance and thoughtography. His presentation, in English, was later published in Dutch (Fukurai, 1929). It appears that this particular presentation and the audience response was the impetus for his publishing an English version of Clairvoyance and Thoughtography (1931). Fukurai retired from Koyasan College in 1937. After the Second World War, he returned to Sendai, the north-eastern city of his early schooling and his wife’s birthplace where, in 1946, he established the Tohoku Psychical Research Society. On 13 March 1952, at the age of 82, he died of pneumonia.
After his death, the Fukurai Memorial Museum was established in September 1956, near his birthplace of Takayama. In June 1960, an active, incorporated foundation, the Tohoku Psychical Research Society, was founded, which in October 1983 was renamed the Fukurai Institute of Psychology (Nakazawa, 1986). To this day, seminars on parapsychology continue to be held there regularly.
Fukurai’s parapsychological experiments
During his life, Fukurai conducted parapsychological experiments with more than a dozen subjects, though he detailed the results of only four (Fukurai, 1913, 1917).
Chizuko Mifune
The first subject, Chizuko Mifune (1886-1911), was born in Kumamoto, a western part of Japan. She was said to be very religious and emotionally sensitive. Her brother-in-law, who had been practising hypnosis since 1903, hypnotized the 22-year-old one day in 1908, using hypnotic suggestion to convince her that she was clairvoyant. It worked. He then trained her to develop her ability without hypnosis. By 1909, Ms Mifune was locally famous for her ability to identify people’s physical problems using clairvoyant powers.
In the spring of 1910, Fukurai was informed about Ms Mifune by Mr Iseri, the principal of the high school she graduated from in Kumamoto. As Fukurai was based a long distance away and was skeptical of Ms Mifune’s talents, he initially asked the principal to conduct some experiments with her using sealed envelopes. Each envelope included a name card or a sheet of paper printed with Chinese characters or figures. At first, Fukurai thought she was so perceptually sensitive to reading characters in a sealed envelope that he often covered the inside papers with tin foil before sealing the envelope. After 10 trials of these correspondence experiments, Fukurai was convinced of her abilities and decided to conduct further experiments. Professor Shinkichi Imamura (1874-1946) of Kyoto Imperial University, another academic who became interested in Ms Mifune, traveled to Kumamoto in February 1910 to conduct similar experiments in person. As a medical doctor, Professor Imamura wanted also to evaluate her physical condition, since she became easily weary during an experiment. The positive results of the experiments convinced Fukurai to conduct experiments with her by himself.
In April 1910, Fukurai and Imamura collaborated on experiments with Ms Mifune in Kumamoto; the results were published as a series of newspaper reports written by Professor Imamura. In these experiments instead of an envelope Fukurai employed a tin can in which a name card was inserted. The results showed around 65 per cent of success, in which ‘success’ signified an entire correct reading of Chinese characters written on the paper, while failure included ‘incorrect characters’, ‘omission’, ‘cannot read entirely’ and ‘can see but cannot read clearly’ (Fukurai, 1913: 100-1).
From August to October, Ms Mifune traveled to Osaka, Kyoto and eventually Tokyo, to participate in another series of experiments. In September 1910, in Tokyo, a dozen academics witnessed the experiments; among them was Professor Kenjiro Yamakawa (1854-1931), the former president of Tokyo Imperial University. He was a physicist and the first Japanese to conduct X-ray experiments. The couple of other physicists present reflected the interest in invisible rays, a popular subject among physicists in the early 20th century. From the experiments in Tokyo, Fukurai attempted a new trial with a lead tube instead of an envelope or a can. After a paper with various numbers of Chinese characters had been inserted into the tube, both ends were welded so that no one could see inside without using a saw to cut away an edge. Overall results with the welded lead tube showed a vague success. In three trials Ms Mifune was not able to read anything in the first trial, but could read all the three characters correctly in the final trial. The second trial proved rather enigmatic, since her reply did not correspond to the correct characters in the tube to be read, but to the ones in another tube for a habituation trial. While her clairvoyant ability was not unconditionally proved, the witnessing academics did not cast aspersions. Publicity from the mass media made Ms Mifune a sensation among the public. Afterward, Japan’s newspapers carried brief articles almost weekly about various psychics living in the country.
Amid the hoop-la, Fukurai was concerned about one major defect in his experimental procedure. During an experiment, Ms Mifune needed to be alone in a room with the sealed container because she made mistakes when other people were present. Although there was no evidence that she opened an envelope or other container, some academic researchers doubted her paranormal powers, among them Dr Nakamura. While never having attended an experiment himself, he commented that there were ‘several traces of breaking the seal or substituting’ (Fukurai, 1913: 135). On 18 January 1911, Ms Mifune committed suicide by way of poison. It is surmised that she became desperate, what with being overshadowed by the notoriety of Mrs Nagao, a new subject of Fukurai’s, media backlash, and personal troubles in her own family as a direct result of her so-called talent.
Ikuko Nagao
News articles about Ms Mifune inspired Mrs Ikuko Nagao (1871-1911), another psychic woman, to conduct clairvoyant trials on herself. Beginning in October 1910, newspapers reported on Mrs Nagao, which brought her to the attention of Fukurai and Imamura. She was married to Yokichi Nagao, a lawyer who became a judge at Marugame District Court. On 12 November 1910, the two researchers visited her in Marugame, Shikoku, a western region of Japan. Fukurai believed that Mrs Nagao’s parapsychological ability was much greater than Ms Mifune’s. In clairvoyance experiments, Fukurai and Imamura employed the dry photographic plate of a camera instead of papers and cans. The plate’s merit was that no one could recognize the characters or figures on the plate until it was developed, just like modern photographic film. In these experiments, they found a strange light had developed around the figure on the plate, though the whole plate was never developed. This phenomenon impressed Fukurai so much that he coined the term ‘thoughtography’ or projection of thoughts.
Then on 27 December 1910, Fukurai designed a new series of thoughtography experiments with Mrs Nagao. The general procedure began with Fukurai first bringing a new photographic plate with him to the Nagao house. He put the unused plate in an ordinary white cardboard box. Then he drew a character or a figure to be projected on a sheet of paper and attached it to the front of the box. He handed her the box with the paper, which she held on her lap and stared at for a minute. Finally she closed her eyes and concentrated. For the inaugural trial, she was asked to project a single Chinese character on the photographic plate. This resulted in a picture of vague shape ‘without incident light but corresponding to the idea’ (Fukurai, 1986: 5). In the following trial, she was asked to project a circle, a square and a cross, which was successful (the photos of the results were published in Fukurai, 1913). Two days later, Fukurai asked her again to project Chinese characters, and it appeared that once more she was successful.
On 8 January 1911, Fukurai and others conducted open experiments with Mrs Nagao on thoughtography, with various academics assembled at her house in Marugame. Among them was Professor Yamakawa. During the main experiment with the academics, the photographic plate had not been inserted into the camera while she tried to project her image. She announced that there was no plate within, whereby Dr Fuji, an assistant physicist to the experiment, was accused of tampering so the experiment would fail. The Nagao family was so offended that they refused to allow their daughter to participate in any new trial with which Fuji was associated. A few days later, Fukurai persuaded the Nagao family to conduct an experiment with Fukurai in the presence of a few newspaper reporters. On 12 January, the experiment was performed, but the day after, the undeveloped plate was stolen, seemingly by an unknown visitor of the Nagaos. All that was found was a brief note threatening the Nagao family.
After these incidents, Dr Fuji, the accused assistant, and others staged a counter-attack, arguing that all the experiments with Mrs Nagao were fraudulent. Again, Mrs Nagao’s experiments suffered the same procedural defect as Ms Mifune’s; no one was allowed to be with her in the room during the thoughtography. Thereafter, the favorable tone newspapers had been giving to stories about psychics changed to a skeptical and negative one. It was during this period of dispute that Ms Mifune committed suicide. The end of January 1911 marked the beginning of the end of Mrs Nagao. She caught influenza, which deteriorated into pneumonia, and, one month later, she was dead.
Media excitement also died down. Dr Fuji and other physicists then published a book about the Nagao experiments, taking a negative view on the existence of parapsychological ability (Fuji and Fujiwara, 1911). Undaunted, Fukurai continued his next set of experiments with a new subject.
Sadako Takahashi and Koichi Mita
Fukurai followed up with more experiments, this time with Mrs Sadako Takahashi, whose thoughtography ability impressed him. Since no one else witnessed the work, Fukurai’s records comprise the only documentation (Fukurai, 1913). From reading these records, her behavior during the experiments more closely resembled that of a typical medium performing a seance, as described in western literature. It is no coincidence that her first name, Sadako, was also the name of the main psychic character in The Ring.
In 1917, Fukurai published a paper entitled ‘An Idea is an Organism’ (Fukurai, 1917), which expressed his belief that the phenomenon of thoughtography could not be explained in a physical way like X-rays or radium emanation. The paper began with an historical outline of the theories of mind-body relationships from Francis Bacon (1561-1626) and René Descartes (1596-1650) to psychophysical parallelism advocated by various modern psychologists such as Harald Høffding (1843-1931) and Wilhelm Wundt (1832-1920).
In contrast to psychophysical parallelism, which Fukurai considered almost equal with epiphenomenalism, he argued a new theory, ‘ideo-organism’. Fukurai’s theory consisted of three concepts: first, ‘an idea is a demand’, meaning that an idea demands self-realization on a substance; second, ‘an idea is a force’; and third, ‘an idea is ku-sei’, meaning emptiness or a void as it is derived from Buddhism (Fukurai, 1917: 167). He advocated that anything with demand but without force or vice versa cannot be considered as an organism.
In the second half of the same paper, he presented experimental results with Mr Koichi Mita (1885-1943), to whom Fukurai paid his highest tribute for having the greatest psychical potential. Mr Mita was said to express his thoughtographic power during various occasions, including a public experiment in Ogaki. Fukurai first used ‘nengraphy’ in an English-language paper in memory of Mr Mita after his death.5 Fukurai renamed thoughtography ‘nengraphy’, since an idea (kan-nen or nen in Japanese) was not similar to a thought, and he was unable to translate into English successfully. According to him, the ‘nen cannot be perceived by our sense organs, but it is possible to act upon the matter in transcendent ways, i.e. possibly beyond the present-day physical laws’ (Fukurai, 1986: 5).
Fukurai’s leave amid academic and personal conflicts
Fukurai obtained an official announcement of temporary leave from his position on 27 October 1913. After that, he responded in a newspaper:
Being called up to the house of Dr Tsuboi, dean of the College [of Literature], in November 1910, after finishing experiments on clairvoyance and thoughtography with Ms Mifune and Mrs Nagao, I was told that my studies on clairvoyance and thoughtography were problematic because, as a faculty member of the College, such work would arouse superstition [among the general public]. … Then in May 1911, I was called to Dr Motora, my mentor, and told that ‘it is good for you and also for the college that you will temporarily study clairvoyance research in a position separate from the college, since your thoughts on the topic are very different from those of other college professors. Psychologists are not sympathetic to your research now.’ ([Anonymous], 1913: 3)
Motora persuaded Fukurai in this way to lie low for a while but the damage was done. Fukurai, an elite psychologist who was in line to become the next professor at Tokyo Imperial University, lost out because of the controversy. Immediately after Professor Motora’s death in December 1912, the chair was offered to Matataro Matsumoto (1865-1943), a former student of Motora and a Yale University graduate (PhD awarded in 1899). At the time, Matsumoto held a chair of psychology at Kyoto Imperial University. In 1913, he moved to Tokyo whereupon he took up the position and ‘declared that the department’s psychologists should focus on normal phenomenon [sic] so that they might regain lost credibility’ (Sato and Sato, 2005: 61). Once Fukurai took his leave, lectures on abnormal psychology were removed from the curriculum. When his temporary leave expired in October 1915, precisely after two years, he was automatically dismissed from his professorship.
In reflecting on the course of the Fukurai affair, at least two aspects need to be discussed: concerning the research and the political dimensions. From a research perspective, Fukurai’s ousting was part of the process of modernizing psychology in Japan, to declare psychology a science and to distinguish between authentic psychological research and the pseudoscience of parapsychology. Despite Fukurai’s intention of using a scientific approach to investigate parapsychological phenomena, his research (typically represented by experimental reports performed with Mrs Nagao) was not rigorous enough to be anything but dismissed by physicists (Fuji and Fujiwara, 1911).
Fuji and Fujiwara’s book contains one letter from Professor Yamakawa (dated 28 January 1911) and three prefaces written by Dr Nakamura, Dr Tamaru, and the authors as well as a postscript by Dr Ishihara. All of these six physicists had a connection with the physics faculty at the College of Science at Tokyo Imperial University. While Yamakawa did not explicitly deny the existence of clairvoyance or thoughtography, he did write that ‘research fields confirming the facts should not be occupied by psychologists but rather, I am convinced, it is appropriate for physicists’ (Fuji and Fujiwara, 1911: iii). Accordingly, the book expressed the consensus of physicists at Tokyo Imperial University, the core institute for physical research in Japan. With these statements, they declared that parapsychology study was the proper realm for physicists, not psychologists or psychiatrists. However, these physicists never actively engaged in parapsychological experiments thereafter. Yamakawa, in particular, was busy with academic pursuits such as the Sawayanagi affair (see below) just after Fukurai left the university.
From a political perspective, the late Meiji era as well as the early Taisho era comprised a period of some conflicts between imperial universities and the government – for example, in the early 20th century, the Tomizu affair in Tokyo and the Sawayanagi affair in Kyoto. The Tomizu affair took place in August 1905 when the Ministry of Education forced Professor Hirondo Tomizu of the College of Law at Tokyo Imperial University to take leave of absence. Apparently, this was due to his firm pro-war stance and, especially, because he criticized the Cabinet for demonstrating wimpish diplomacy during the Russo-Japanese War (1904-5). Following protest by faculty members at the College of Law, Tomizu was reinstated in December of the same year. During the conflict, Professor Yamakawa, the above-mentioned physicist who was then president of the university, took responsibility for the debacle and resigned (Miyamori, 1998). Note that since imperial universities were established by the Japanese government, professors were hired as personnel of the national public service. As such, only a university president, in this case Yamakawa, not a government official, was qualified to dismiss a professor and even then a special procedure had to be followed. Here, Yamakawa faltered because he was unfamiliar with the political aspect.
The Sawayanagi affair, which took place in July 1913, involved seven professors at Kyoto Imperial University who were fired by Masataro Sawayanagi (1865-1927), the new university president. Although the mass action was considered born from conflict over the autonomy of a faculty or college, there was certainly a demand to reform the system of higher education in order to adapt to the new age of modernization. As of 1913, only four imperial universities were established in Japan, and it was not until 1918 when the Daigaku-rei [College Law] was enacted, that private universities and colleges were able to gain academic equivalency to the university system. During May 1913, there was a change in presidents at all four imperial universities. Sawayanagi, who moved from Tohoku Imperial University to Kyoto Imperial University, had argued that being a first-class scholar should be the number one priority of a university professor. But once ensconced in his new position at Kyoto, he discovered that not even professors’ retirement was clearly stipulated. A few of the mass media voiced support for President Sawayanagi’s decision to dismiss the professors, since ‘it was obvious that there were more than professors at imperial universities who were unqualified’ (Tachibana, 2005: 351). Apparently, these professors lectured on outdated information and lacked the background to cover recent issues. Consequently, for the university system to become competitive with the rest of the world’s top schools, implementing the new law would be key for academic reform. However, before the law could be enacted, dubious professors needed to be removed because they were stifling progress. It needs to be emphasized, though, that the exact reason and criteria Sawayanagi used to base his decision on those 7 professors is unclear (Ito, 1998).
When two decades later Fukurai was dimissed ‘due to an administrative matter different from his study problem’ (Matsumoto, 1933: 806), Matsumoto recalled that he was an easy target to get rid of, having been discredited both by academics and by the mass media. Coincidentally, Yamakawa returned to Tokyo Imperial University in May 1913 as its president. Not only did he oppose Fukurai’s series of parapsychological experiments but he was also still bitter from his forced resignation during the Tomizu affair. This time around, the outcome would be different with his successfully expelling the associate professor.
Psychology and parapsychology after Fukurai
It was not only physicists who disapproved of Fukurai’s research; in general, psychologists were critical as well. For instance, Toranosuke Oguma (1888-1978), a psychology student who attended Fukurai’s lectures on abnormal psychology, published a book, Shinrei gensho no mondai [Problems of Psychical Phenomena] (1918), where he wrote in favor of more scientifically oriented psychology. As did Fukurai, Oguma became interested in the works of James as well as in parapsychology during his undergraduate studies, but the academic atmosphere at Tokyo Imperial University at that time did not allow him to express support for Fukurai or to conduct further parapsychological research.
Oguma eventually became the first president of the Japanese Society for Parapsychology, which was established in 1968, more than a half-century after the Fukurai affair. The second and present president of the society is Soji Otani (born 1924), another psychologist who also graduated from the University of Tokyo (renamed from Tokyo Imperial University in 1949). Despite the declaration by Fuji (besides the physicists involved in the Fukurai affair), it is psychologists who have been keeping the field of parapsychology alive. Yet, while the Japanese Society for Parapsychology has been accepted as part of the field of academic and applied psychology, it has no hope of ever achieving membership in the Japanese Union of Psychological Associations, an organization consisting of more than 40 major psychological societies (as of January 2011).
There is a disconnect in the time-line of parapsychology in Japan that occurred between Fukurai’s research and the development of parapsychology post-Second World War, the latter being largely stimulated by the translated works of J. B. Rhine (1895-1980) (Otani, 1986). Two likely culprits account for the disconnect. For one, the after-effects of the Fukurai affair or ‘allergy to parapsychology’ (ibid.: 12) shifted the subject from science to religion. In 1873, when the Japanese government officially acknowledged Roman Catholic and Protestant churches, Christianity was considered to be ‘the spirit of Western civilization and the source of Western success’ (Tipton, 2008: 52). Since Japan’s period of modernization was equated with westernization, mentalists and religious people who wearied of modern science were prone to argue that science could not thoroughly explain psychical phenomena. The spiritual movement of the Taisho era was based chiefly on older Japanese religions, and psychical research became increasingly connected with the new religious movement.
Consequently, academic researchers shied away from these themes while they gained prominence in the spiritual movement. For example, Fukurai increasingly referred to mystical terms. One of his largest tomes, Shinrei to shimpi sekai [Spirit and Mystical World], published in 1932, consisted of more than 570 pages divided into 5 parts: ‘Introduction’, ‘Psychic Phenomena’, ‘Ego’, ‘Mystical World’, ‘Spirit and Life’. Buddhist scriptures such as the Avatamska Sutra made up much of the cited literature, as was also seen in Fukurai’s paper (1917).
Also perpetrating the divide was that most parapsychology researchers no longer involved themselves with psychical research after the war. This is reflected in vocabulary entries in the largest encyclopedia of psychology in Japan, including ‘Shinrei kenkyu’ [psychical research] (Otani, 1981a) and ‘Cho-shinrigaku’ [parapsychology] (Otani, 1981b). Here, Fukurai’s name was referred to in the former, but not in the latter, entry though both were written by the same author. Additionally, the Fukurai affair was also not described in basic texts depicting the history of psychology in Japan, proof that the Fukurai affair was essentially being censored on more than one level.
Matsumoto, the author of Shinrigaku-shi [History of Psychology] (1937), and the professor who replaced Fukurai, was responsible for one of the largest textbooks in the history of psychology. This tome covered the field’s history in Europe and the USA, as well as in Japan. Though the references cited Fukurai’s name and abnormal psychology, no mention was made of his parapsychology work. No other Japanese book on the history of psychology refers to the Fukurai affair until decades later, when Sato and Mizoguchi (1997) included a chapter (Y. Suzuki, 1997). Other publications in English followed a similar trend. For example, History of Psychology: An Overview has a section on Japan (Misiak and Sexton, 1966: 282-98) but they are silent on Fukurai and parapsychology. Entries under ‘Japan’ in an English-language encyclopedia of psychology also do not refer to Fukurai (Imada, 2000; Tanaka, 1984). Subsequent editions of the Japanese encyclopedia or dictionary of psychology usually had a ‘parapsychology’ entry but, even so, Fukurai was seldom referenced. Only in the most recent decade have Fukurai and his psychical research been referred to in papers on the history of psychology in Japan (Sato and Sato, 2005; Takasuna, 2007).
Abnormal psychology declines; clinical psychology is delayed
After Matsumoto became professor of psychology at Tokyo Imperial University in the summer of 1913, he found that the Fukurai affair negatively impacted the faculty and the staff of the psychology laboratory. He wrote:
[It was] necessary to purify the air of the psychological laboratory in an academic way, to establish precise experimental methods and follow the clear route, to proceed with psychological studies in order to regain the confidence of the laboratory. So I shaped a general policy to study all the normal phenomena with normal methods and tried to realize the plan with Kuwata, newly recommended to associate professor, and Masuda, an assistant. (Matsumoto, 1933: 807)
As Matsumoto declared, all future psychology lectures delivered at Tokyo Imperial University did not mention abnormal psychology, though it had a long-term influence on the development of psychology across Japan. Other imperial universities followed suit, with lectures on abnormal psychology reduced to the minimum. And so, the era of abnormal psychology was finally over. The trend was most effectively reflected in the curriculum of universities. No lectures on abnormal psychology were to be had at four imperial universities in the 1920s and 1930s, though a few such talks were given at private universities (after the enactment of College Law in 1918, 7 psychological laboratories were established at private universities by 1940). ‘Psychopathology’ lectures were also presented at imperial universities but these were usually given by psychiatrists.
The decline of abnormal psychology may have hamstrung the rise of clinical psychology in pre-war Japan whereby no textbook on the history of psychology in Japan incorporated a single chapter on clinical psychology. It was not until 1931 that the first lecture ‘Rinsho shinrigaku’ [Clinical psychology] was delivered by Yuzaburo Uchida (1894-1966) at Hosei University. Uchida would go on to develop the Uchida-Kraepelin psychodiagnostic test in the 1920s and 1930s.
Finally, there is the field of psychoanalysis. While this branch was introduced to and had been known by psychologists during the Taisho era, because it was studied and practised mainly in psychiatry and outside of academic psychology for the most part, psychologists at universities were not involved in its development.
Concluding remarks
After the Meiji Restoration in 1868, Japan experienced a rapid period of modernization or westernization. During the 1860s to 1880s, not only were modern western knowledge and science imported into Japan, but also Ouija boards and spiritualism. Psychology was also imported from the USA around the 1870s, the first lectures on the ‘new’ psychology being presented by Motora at the Imperial University in 1888 (Oyama, Sato and Suzuki, 2001). The first psychology laboratory was established at Tokyo Imperial University in 1903, followed by the publication of Shinri Kenkyu [Psychological Research], the first journal of psychology in 1912, which was followed by the establishment of what was then named the Japanese Psychological Association in 1927.
As mainstream psychology was being incorporated into Japanese education as a discipline, Fukurai’s parapsychological research on clairvoyance and thoughtography was excluded. It was even taboo for psychologists of the time to voice an interest in abnormal psychology. The decline of abnormal psychology is connected to a delayed rise of clinical psychology. Even now, in the first decade of the 21st century, debate continues as to what qualifies one to be a clinical psychologist (including government certification).
Reflecting on Fukurai’s life, I find myself impressed by the fact that Fukurai actively pursued parapsychology throughout his life despite hostility from the academy. Occasionally, his earlier research has been picked up in papers or books on parapsychology, such as Otani (1986) in Japanese or Eisenbud (1977) in English. But after all his work, the truth about Ms Mifune and Mrs Nagao has never been revealed, unlike mediums, whose trickery was accepted if not completely uncovered. However, it is important to understand that it was not the alleged psychics themselves who impeded further psychical research in Japan during the Fukurai affair but the views of Japanese academics, including psychologists and physicists, toward psychical phenomena. Certainly, burying such pieces of the history of psychology does not contribute to a better understanding of the event. Even in today’s world, there is a chance for a psychologist like Fukurai to exist because contrary opinions about spiritual phenomena make for the kind of controversy prized by the media. For instance, I recall that at the end of the 1990s, a respectable psychologist often appeared on a television program in Japan to endorse a woman who was a self-proclaimed psychic medium. For at least these reasons, the Fukurai affair continues to have relevance as a pedagogical episode because, although it happened a century ago, it shows that even with the best of intentions, scientists can still lose their way, even if only briefly, on the path to discovery.