Chizuko Mifune
A humble farm woman from Kumamoto prefecture named Chizuko Mifune married in 1908, and soon afterward learned through hypnotism experiments conducted by her brother-in-law Takeo Kiyohara that she may have possessed a talent for clairvoyance -- basically, the psychic ability to see through solid matter, or otherwise see things that are not readily visible. Supposedly, she was tasked with using these powers to catch some glimpse of the soldiers from Kumamoto's Sixth Division, who were fighting in the Russo-Japanese War at the time. She claimed to have "seen" these soldiers ship out from Nagasaki, then turn back shortly thereafter due to unexpected complications. This was later confirmed to be accurate and, at least theoretically, unknowable.

This incident proved to Kiyohara that Mifune had latent abilities, so he began teaching her meditation and breathing techniques that he believed would help her focus her powers. Mifune learned and utilized these techniques, and in less than two weeks, she claimed to be able to "see" worms in a nearby tree, hidden beneath its bark. When the bark was stripped away, worms of roughly the same length she described were found right where she said they would be.

After this point, she slowly gained more and more renown, joining Kiyohara to form something of an "alternative medicine" practice utilizing hypnotherapy and clairvoyance. She was eventually featured in the August 14th, 1909 edition of the Tokyo Asahi Shimbun newspaper for her treatment of former Kyoto Imperial University president Hiroji Kinoshita.

This caught the attention of a professor at Kyoto Imperial University named Shinkichi Imamura, who would later in life come to be regarded as a pioneer in the field of mental illness. Imamura wished to test Mifune's abilities scientifically, and began running a series of well-documented experiments with her on February 19th, 1910 involving cards in sealed envelopes. These tests proved fruitful, as Mifune was able to "see" the words or phrases written on these cards with a high degree of accuracy.

Tomokichi Fukurai
Imamura contacted an acquaintance of his, Dr. Tomokichi Fukurai of Tokyo Imperial University, and upon their joint visit to Kumamoto in April 1910, a more rigorous series of experiments was conducted. Although some of these experiments resulted in failure (leading to sporadic bouts of depression on Mifune's part), the testing process was slowly altered and refined with elements such as colored ink, foil, thick stacks of paper, cards with nothing written on them, cards with thoughts projected onto them, etc. to help ascertain the limits of Mifune's powers. This ultimately led to record high success rates in subsequent testing, encouraging all involved to proceed even farther with their research and experimentation. All of the procedures employed during these tests were thoroughly detailed in Fukurai's book, "Clairvoyance and Thoughtography," which has since been made available in English.

Upon Fukurai's return to Tokyo on April 25th, he published his findings and gained a fair deal of notoriety, putting Mifune in the limelight as well. This led to Mifune visiting Tokyo a few months later on September 14th to "perform" in public before a panel of scientists and journalists. However, the test materials prepared by these observers were allegedly switched out for others prepared by Fukurai himself, leading many to speculate that the two were orchestrating a hoax together. (Interestingly, these experiments are among the few that aren't covered or even mentioned in Fukurai's book, which skips from September 5th all the way to November 17th.)

She attempted the experiments again over the next couple days with her usual high success rate, but the damage had already been done, and the scientific community found themselves understandably hesitant to trust her abilities. This was perhaps also due in part to her unfortunate habit of undergoing psychic experiments from a closed room with no witnesses, generally with the sealed envelope in her possession, leading many to suspect deception.

Despite this, Mifune steadfastly declined to conduct clairvoyance experiments with others present. The only compromise she'd make was allowing an "audience" to witness her actions from the next room through a sliding screen, with her back to them so they were completely out of her line of sight. And after making this concession, her accuracy seemed to suffer (though her success rate was still quite high).

Her public discrediting, however, seemed to affect her deeply -- and though Fukurai still believed in her abilities, he also had begun turning his attention toward another psychic by the name of Ikuko Nagao, which may have piled on top of existing family issues and put her into a state of depression. Whatever the case, Mifune allegedly committed suicide by poisoning a few months later on January 18th or 19th, 1911 (the exact date seems to vary depending on the source). Even after death, however, she and Nagao frequently bore the brunt of attacks from the mass media and various scientific organizations, causing the last few years of her life to become forever intertwined with the Clairvoyance Controversy yet to come.

Ikuko Nagao
kuko Nagao, the second of Fukurai's research subjects, was the daughter of a retainer to the Tokuyama Daimyo and wife of Yokichi Nagao, a renowned judge from the city of Marugame in Kagawa prefecture. She was 40 at the time, and had taken up devout worshipping of the Shinto sun goddess, Amaterasu, as well as the Buddhist god of mercy, Kwanjeon, following the death of her first son. Supposedly, these practices opened her eyes to her own innate clairvoyant powers, and resulted in her accurately predicting future tragedies for several years, granting her some degree of infamy (both good and bad) among her friends and neighbors. When news of Chizuko Mifune's experiments was brought to her attention, she began undergoing similar experiments with notable success. This, in turn, brought Nagao to the attention of Fukurai, who then consulted with Imamura once more to carry out experiments on this new subject, perhaps hoping for better results than what Mifune had been providing as of late.

Experimental procedures began on November 12th, 1910, and while Nagao's accuracy was not quite up to par with Mifune's, she immediately proved a more outwardly convincing psychic due to her ability to "perform" in front of crowds, as well as her lack of need for any physical contact with the test materials. The two professors and other observers, impressed with these results, decided to up the ante a bit by introducing nensha, or "thoughtography" experiments into the mix. A relatively new concept at the time, thoughtography typically entails a psychically active subject projecting his/her own thoughts onto concrete objects -- in this case, undeveloped photographic plates -- effectively manifesting images or words from his/her mind into the physical world. Initially, these experiments came about by accident, as Nagao was being tested to determine if she could "see" writing which had been previously applied to photographic plates but left undeveloped, thus rendering it effectively invisible to the naked eye and existing only "in potentia." However, when some of the plates in question were later found to be partially or fully developed despite remaining completely covered and unexposed to light, Fukurai was convinced that Nagao had essentially developed them with her mind, and adjusted his experiments to confirm or deny this.

Amazingly, these experiments proved successful and were continued for quite some time, becoming progressively more complex as shapes, images and eventually complex kanji characters were clearly projected onto the undeveloped plates. As with Mifune's experiments, each of the tests Fukurai and Imamura conducted with Nagao have been meticulously documented, complete with photographs, in Fukurai's book "Clairvoyance and Thoughtography."

These experiments continued to yield more and more impressive results, and eventually an idea was proposed to replace the photographic plates with actual film. Upon attempting this substitution, however, the experiment was cut short by an alleged break-in and theft, which culminated with Nagao supposedly using her clairvoyance to find the stolen film, upon which a threat to her life was now written. This led Fukurai to conclude that someone was trying to interfere with his work, and the supposed interloper's actions would continue to be blamed for the troubles that were soon to follow.

Senrigan-Jiken
Due to the promise Nagao showed, Fukurai and Imamura fell into the same trap as before, accepting a request from Yale-educated physicist and former Tokyo Imperial University president Kenjiro Yamakawa to sit in on the clairvoyance and thoughtography experiments of January 4th, 1911. Noriatsu Fuji, a notable physics lecturer and skeptic, joined him for the purpose of scrutinizing both the location and all the materials that were to be used in the test. As it happens, Fuji was also responsible for preparing the experimental materials, but omitted the plate upon which the thoughtographs were to be projected that day (either by accident or with intent to sabotage the proceedings), bringing Nagao to tears as she desperately tried to convince those in attendance that she couldn't continue the experiment due to the most important item being absent from the sealed bag in the other room.

The whole day's events proved to be a disaster: Fuji had basically crafted this experiment as a trap, hiding numerous leaden crosses, lines of manganese and "the smoke of smouldering oil" on the bag to ensure that any tampering by a third party would be made readily apparent. And sure enough, in addition to the lack of the much-needed photographic plate, there was indeed evidence that someone had tampered with the bag -- though it was all very inconclusive and questionable. This led Nagao to distrust Fuji's methods, and Fuji likewise to distrust Nagao's abilities. As such, Nagao absolutely refused to conduct any further experiments with Yamakawa or Fuji ever again, and Fuji's published article on February 15th publicly denounced Nagao's thoughtography as little more than sleight-of-hand.

It didn't help, either, that rumors had begun circulating which suggested Nagao was having an affair with an up-and-coming hypnotism instructor named Takayuki Yokose, who had previously taken up lodging in her home. This quickly became the dominant topic of conversation, stealing any legitimate headlines Nagao might otherwise have seen and relegating the truth behind her clairvoyance and thoughtography abilities to the position of secondary footnote.

On February 26th, 1911, Ikuko Nagao died of septic pneumonia after a month-long struggle against influenza. This was less than two weeks after Fuji's article had gone public, leaving her unable to defend her reputation. Her husband attempted a rebuttal, but by this time the whole situation had become a veritable media circus. Between Nagao's private affairs and alleged hoaxing and Chizuko Mifune's suspect methodologies -- not to mention both of their inconveniently-timed and somewhat dubious passings -- psychic research throughout Japan had suddenly gotten a bad name. Clairvoyants in particular became a hot target for the mass media, who decried their abilities not only as unscientific, but almost as a threat to science. Virtually overnight, all opportunities to advance the studies of clairvoyance and thoughtography were lost as the general public came to regard such studies as foolish endeavors.

Despite this, Fukurai would continue his research for quite some time, taking other promising psychics under his wing (including Sadako Takahashi, whose life events famously inspired plot developments in the modern Japanese horror classic Ringu), but his credibility had plummeted to such an extent that any evidence he presented was promptly dismissed by the scientific community at large. Labeled a fraud by his peers, he eventually resigned from Tokyo Imperial University in 1919, electing to continue his experiments in private.

Prior to his death in 1952, Tomokichi Fukurai established a paranormal investigation agency in the Aoba ward of Sendai City known as the Fukurai Institute of Psychology, which survives to this day and serves as his legacy.