Shortly afer 8:00 p.m. on May 10, 1911, a spirit medium named Takahashi Sadako 高橋貞 (b.1875) prepared to give a demonstration of her psychical powers in front of a group of Japanese academics led by Fukurai Tomokichi 福来友吉 (1869–1952), a professor of psychology at Tokyo Imperial University. Tree days earlier, Takahashi had entered a trance and spoke with the voice of a possessing tengu 天狗 (goblin), which told her audience that at the appointed time she would be able to project a particular thought-image (nensha 念写) onto a photographic plate. On the evening in question, she chanted a prayer to Nichiren and visualized the kanji for “heaven” (天) in front of a prestigious audience including not just Fukurai and his wife, but also the famous philosopher Inoue Tetsujirō 井上哲次郎 (1855–1944), the Shinto intellectual and legal scholar Kakei Katsuhiko 筧克彦 (1872–1961), the physicist and educator Gotō Makita 後藤牧太 (1853–1930), and the psychologists Kubo Yoshihide 久保良英 (1883–1942) and Kuwata Yoshizō 桑田芳蔵 (1882–1967), among others. Fukurai judged the experiment to be a success, but this particular medium chose to give no further demonstrations. Nevertheless, it was far from the only such psychical experiment orchestrated by Fukurai and his team, which at times even involved the one-time president of Tokyo University and pioneering physicist Baron Yamakawa Kenjirō 山川健次郎 (1854–1931) as well as the founding father of Japanese religious studies Anesaki Masaharu 崎正治 (1873–1949). 1 Fukurai did not portray these séances as indigenous traditional animist or shamanic rituals; rather, he described them as modern and suggested that Japan needed to catch up with foreign paranormal research, arguing that, by contrast, “in the European countries and in America the psychic science has been developing with great rapidity day afer day” (Fukurai 1931: 8). Although Fukurai eventually fell into disrepute afer one of his psychic mediums was accused of fraud and then committed suicide, he would go on to elaborate a theory of psychical powers that he saw as an extension of especially Western insights into the nature of spirits. Nor was he wrong about this tradition’s Western pedigree, for similar kinds of research were indeed being carried out by a range of infuential European and American thinkers including physicists such as Marie Curie (1867–1934), philosophers like Henri Bergson (1859–1941), and famous psychologists such as 2 Te Mystical “Occident” or the Vibrations of “Modernity” in the Mirror of Japanese Tought Jason Ā. Josephson-Storm