Discovery Lab Answers

The sources retrieved for this question cover several distinct areas where Japanese researchers and Japan-connected data appear in the parapsychology literature. The picture is not uniform — the topics range from survey research to field experiments to reincarnation case documentation.

Survey Research on Anomalous Experience

McClenon (1993) conducted cross-cultural surveys comparing anomalous experience rates among Chinese, Japanese, and American samples ^[2]. The study was administered at Tsukuba University (with Japanese-language questionnaires) alongside samples from the University of North Carolina at Greensboro. Among the findings: religious Japanese students reported night paralysis episodes at a significantly higher rate than less religious Japanese students ^[2]. The work situates Japan within a comparative sociology-of-religion framework rather than a laboratory psi paradigm — it documents what people report experiencing, not whether those experiences reflect anomalous causation.

Field RNG Experiments at Baseball Games

Shimizu and Ishikawa, both of Meiji University in Tokyo, published a study using random number generators (RNGs) placed at Japanese professional baseball games to test whether large, emotionally engaged audiences produce anomalous deviations in random output ^[4]. The study used hardware called “Random Streamers” (including models Rpg102 and Rpg105) and was supported by the Bial Foundation. The design follows the broader “field RNG” or “Global Consciousness”-style paradigm: audience size and collective emotional engagement are the independent variables, RNG deviation is the outcome measure. The retrieved excerpts show the experimental setup and the statistical formulas used, but the cumulative result figure appears in a passage where the OCR text is broken at the key calculation line — I won’t report that figure, and readers should consult the paper directly (doi available via ^[4]) for the headline result.

Reincarnation Case Documentation

The largest cluster of Japan-relevant work in the retrieved sources concerns reincarnation-type cases (CORT), with two distinct threads:

Masayuki Ohkado has become the primary researcher documenting Japanese CORT. Matlock (2022) lists multiple Ohkado publications from 2013 through 2022, covering individual Japanese child cases and a same-family case ^[5]. Wehrstein (2025), reviewing Ohkado’s book Katsugoro: And Other Reincarnation Cases in Japan, notes that Ian Stevenson — the field’s most prolific CORT investigator — published only one Japanese case in his lifetime, making Ohkado’s systematic documentation of Japanese cases a significant expansion of the geographic record ^[1]. Ohkado also conducted an experiment in which native Japanese raters judged whether Burmese children who recalled past lives as Japanese soldiers had more Japanese-looking facial features than Burmese children generally — the study reportedly returned positive results ^[1][3].

Japan as a source culture in cross-national cases appears in survival-hypothesis discussions more broadly. Nahm (2021) cites Burmese twin sisters who reported remembering the lives of two Japanese soldiers killed in World War II ^[3], and the Leininger case (a U.S. child) involves memories of combat against Japanese forces near Iwo Jima ^[5] — though those are not Japanese-researcher publications.

The Survival Hypothesis page on ESP-Nexus discusses Ohkado’s work in the context of reincarnation case research more broadly, and is the relevant deeper dive for that thread.

Statistical / Meta-Analytic Contributions from Japan-Adjacent Work

Jessica M. Utts — whose profile is on ESP-Nexus — presented work to Japanese statistical audiences: the retrieved page notes conference presentations at the Japanese Behaviormetrics Society annual meeting (Tokyo, 2006) and the Japan Joint Statistics Meeting (Sendai, 2006). These were methodological presentations on statistical evidence for anomalous cognition, not new empirical studies, but they document engagement between psi-research statistics and mainstream Japanese statistical audiences.

What Is Not Settled or Not Covered Here

• The survey data in McClenon (1993) involved multiple significance tests without correction for multiple comparisons, which the source itself flags ^[2] — the individual comparisons should be read with that caveat.
• The Ohkado facial-feature experiment is a single study by the same researcher who collected the cases; independent replication has not been published in the retrieved sources.
• The RNG baseball study’s headline result is not confirmable from the retrieved excerpts alone due to OCR damage at the key line.
• The sources retrieved here represent a sample of what exists on Japanese contributions to this literature; the library’s share of the full published record on this question has not been measured, and the picture here should not be read as a complete inventory of Japanese psi research.