Spiritual Therapies in Japan

8/13/2019 Spiritual Therapies in Japan

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As the media-driven spiritual boom that hit Japan in the last decade starts

to ade away, the therapies that this phenomenon popularized among anso everything termed spiritual continue to be carried out in small circles opractitioners and their most ervent clients. Tis article places these spiritualtherapies within the long history o healing rites in Japan by showing thattheir current appeal can be explained by two actors. First, these therapies areconspicuously similar to techniques used by New Religious Movements inJapan. Secondly, the cultural criticism promoted by these therapies remainscharacteristic o modern occult theories and practices and has only beenreadapted today to suit the peculiar symbolic vacuum o post-Aum Japanesesociety. Finally, the author ocuses on the sel-cultivation element that remainscentral in Japanese healing methods, and argues that spiritual therapies seemto have simplified sel-cultivation to such an extent that they reinorce a gen-eralized discourse about ethnicity and about whose way o lie (Japanese orAmerican) is best suited to a Japanese clientle.

: spiritualhealingnew religionsnihonjinronsel-cultivationEhara Hiroyuki

Ioannis G is a postdoctoral researcher at Kokugakuin University and an associ-ate researcher at the White Rose East Asia Centre (Universities o Leeds and Sheffield).

Japanese Journal o Religious Studies/: Nanzan Institute or Religion and Culture

Ioannis G

Spiritual Terapies in Japan


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O in August , I ound mysel in Enoshima,1sharing an afer-

noon coffee with an eclectic group of eight people. Te setting was

almost perfect for the discussion that was to follow. Te Italian res-

taurant where we all met offers an isolated space in its backyard patio com-

posed of three tables protected from the sun by a large wooden roof. he

summer heat, the smell of freshly-made pizza, and the shrilling of the cicadas

brought back personal memories of summers spent in Southern Europe, butfor the rest of the group the location was probably giving rise to different sen-

sations. Considered to be one of Eastern Japans most famous power spots,

our visit to Enoshima was also meant, I was later informed, to regenerate our

vital energies.

Te encounter had not occurred by chance. It had been, in act, the idea o

one o those present that day, Ms. Momoyama,2to invite me to one o her meet-

ings with three ellow spiritual therapists (all women in their thirties) and their

most regular clients (two women, one in her early orties and one in her fifies,

and one man who was in his late twenties). Te plan was to allow me to ollow

up on my interview with Ms. Momoyama and her sister, Ms. Chikamatsu (both

in their orties), who run a healing salon together in central okyo, and peer

deeper into the workings o the spiritual business in Japan.

A description o some o the people present that day should clariy what I

mean by spiritual therapies. wo o the participants o this debate were stu-

dents at Teta Healing Japan, a newly established school, acting as the Japanese

branch o the Idaho-based Teta Healing Institute o Knowledge. On the official

website o Teta Healing, practitioners are said to be using a technique thatconnects their own theta, or meditation brainwaves, with universal healing

* I would like to thank Ian Reader and the anonymous reviewers o theJJRSor their valuablecomments. I also would like to express my gratitude to my doctoral thesis supervisors in the ,Victor King and Mark Williams at the University o Leeds, or their constant support. Fieldworkor this research was unded by the Japan Foundation. Te support o the s Economic andSocial Research Council (), Arts and Humanities Research Council (), and the HigherEducation Funding Council or England () is grateully acknowledged. Tis work wasundertaken at the White Rose East Asia Centre ().

. Enoshima is a small island south o okyo and a popular resort area, as the nearby beachesare the closest to the capital.

. All names that are preceded by Ms. or Mr. are pseudonyms o inormants.


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energy to create physical, emotional, and spiritual healing.3Te official blog othe same institution describes a typical session o theta healing as ollows:

A typical session will begin with the healer discussing your issue with you.Tey will then use muscle testing4to identiy limiting belies hidden withinyour subconscious mindthe kind o belies that could be preventing yourom achieving your goals. I you are willing to change these belies, the healerwill hold your hand and do the energy work. Most clients report eeling calmand relaxed during a healing and many experience instant relie rom theirphysical pain or symptoms. Some begin to view their lives rom a whole newperspective. Sessions are generally an hour long and the theta healer can workon physical healing, changing belies, instilling positive new thoughts and

emotions, clearing spaces, angel readings, and much more.5

Te third therapist was a reconnective healer specializing in a therapy that itsinventor Eric Pearl, originally a chiropractor rom Los Angeles, is said to havediscovered inadvertently afer a gypsy reconnected his bodys meridian linesto the grid lines on the planet.6He subsequently realized that he could healpeople by holding his hands near their bodies without ever touching them. Tetherapy has been particularly popular in the last decade around the world and inJapan since , when Eric Pearls seminars began to be offered. According to

the most recent data, there are currently one hundred and fifeen officially reg-istered reconnection practitioners in the country, twenty-six o whom are basedin okyo.7

Besides the two sisters who invited me to this debate and who practice a vari-ety o therapies, rom raindrop (a type o oil massage) to spiritual counseling(see Ehara Hiroyukis sessions below) and past-lie reading (a type o hypno-

. http://www.thetahealing.com/about-thetahealing.html (accessed March ).

. Tis muscle testing is the bi-digital o-ring test, an interesting example o the flow o

occult practices in and out o Japan. Tis patented method o illness diagnosis was inventedby a Japanese doctor named Omura Yoshiaki who believes that the body o the patient can givehints towards the presence o illness through the relative ease with which the patients two fin-gers orming an O are pulled apart when the doctor probes the patients body. It is interestingto note that this technique, allegedly invented in , only became popular among New Agecircles o therapists afer Omura moved to the United States at the beginning o the s. Sincethen, it has reentered Japan and only a ew therapists in Japan know that it is o Japanese origin.

. http://www.thetahealing.com/blog/help-with-healing-in-womans-day-magazine.html(accessed July ).

. Lisa Suhay, IN PERSON; Prophet or Profiteer, Tis Doctors In Now. Te New York imes, April . http://www.nytimes.com////nyregion/in-person-prophet-or-profiteer-this-doctor-s-in-now.html?pagewanted=&src=pm (accessed July ).

. See http://www.naturalspirit.co.jp/Recoonnection/herodb/herodb.cgi?table=directory(accessed July ).


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| Japanese Journal o Religious Studies / ()

therapy), the remaining three participants, although introduced as just longtimeclients, seemed to be well versed in the vocabulary used in spiritual therapycircles.

Te discussion lasted or about three hours and most o it concerned opinionsabout amous spiritual therapists or techniques that have influenced the practiceand worldview o those attending. Te atmosphere resembled that o a meetingbetween booksellers talking about their avorite novels or dissecting recent tradetrends, subjects that probably remain o little interest to regular book readers.

Consider the ollowing excerpt o a discussion rom that aternoon. heyoung man admitted that or a long time he had been very unhappy with his lieand particularly with his job as a systems engineer.8Tis particular job is ina-

mous in Japan or the stress, the long hours, and the lack o career opportunitiesthat it entails.

Man: I was depressed when I arrived at Ms. Momoyamas salon or the firsttime. But at that first session, I woke up [mezameta] and realized thatI could ace the issues at my workplace differently, because I was different.Ms. Momoyama: Yes, you are different. We are different. Lets hope that slowlyall o humanity will also wake up. [She turns to me] What do you think o theAscension that is supposed to happen in ?9

Me: Err... I am not sure. I hear a lot o theories. [urning to everyone else]

What do you think?

Te bulk o my fieldwork research in Japan was mostly spent in okyo in interviewing nearly seventy o these practitioners whom I have been callingspiritual therapists. Te location was chosen because o it being evidently thecenter o this type o business: a look at one o the online inventories o spiritualtherapists that I used to contact my inormants at the time listed two hundredand thirty-seven practitioners in the okyo area corresponding to approximatelyone-fifh o the total o listed salons (G , , ootnote ). Inter-

views lasted or two to three hours and were semi-structured around three basicquestions: Who are these people?; What are they doing?; and o whom are

. Te occupation o systems engineer is similar to that o programmers, consultants, and project managers. Te job is popular in Japan because, as two women holding this proessionat two different companies have explained to me, Japanese systems engineers are not necessarilyrequired to have an engineering degree or have technical knowledge. Teir duties involve nego-tiating under strict rules and deadlines with both the client side and the programmers side, andfinding solutions to problems that arise with the sofware and network systems that their com-pany sells. Te act that both o these women had a background in oreign languages (one held adegree in Portuguese studies and the other a degree in English studies) supports their evaluationo their respective jobs.

. For a detailed analysis o the belies around the coming o a New Age o consciousness(ofen reerred to as ascension) and the significance o the year , see G .


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they doing it? From there, depending on the willingness o the therapist to dis-cuss these questions, my interviews covered several aspects o Japanese spiritualtherapies: rom inormation on the practitioner him/hersel (lie history, beliesregarding alternative therapies), to the details o the business side o his/heractivities (pricing, advertisements, and so on) and finally to opinions about theclients and the popularity o these practices in Japan.

Considering that the majority o my inormants opened their salons at thebeginning o the new millennium (with hal o them having started businessrom onwards), my research confirmed the existence o a sudden inter-est, i not also popularity, o these spiritual therapies in contemporary Japan.o explain this phenomenon, I have in the past (G ) chosen to

build my argument on the changing socioeconomic conditions o Japan dur-ing the span o years that my inormants reported to have been involved withsuch therapies. Hence, I distinguished three generations10o therapists. Te firstgeneration was composed o those who, during the economic bubble o the lates, spent their relatively easily-earned income on such alternative hob-bies in order to escape a stable but alienating routine. Te second group cor-responded to those who, having suffered rom the post-bubble economic crisis,saw in their hobbies an opportunity to earn an additional income. Finally, thethird group o ans/practitioners, I suggested, grew up in a new organizational

setting (what I called a spiritual ba, adapting Mary C. Bs term [])in which entering the spiritual business seemed a legitimate option and led insome cases to a relatively good living.

In other words, I suggested that this spiritual business was becoming aproper proession. I have offered a detailed analysis elsewhere (G), drawing a general picture o the structure o and the costs involved in thestages that a therapist must go through to earn his/her income. In my conclu-sion, I borrowed well-known concepts rom the discipline o religious studiesin order to argue that the spiritual business in Japan can be consideredas the

commercialization o the experience o therapyas something sacred. I thussaw the spiritual business as an activity o receiving a this-worldly benefit com-parable, or example, to the purchase o an omamori(protective talisman) thatassures good health or good exam results. Tis argument hinted at the idea thatspiritual therapies can be placed in the long legacy o healing rites that populatethe Japanese religious landscape.

Considering the recent appearance o the aorementioned spiritual therapistsand the lack o research on the subject, the objective o this article is to exam-ine their practices and place them within the long history o aith-based heal-

ing rites in Japan. For this purpose, and considering the influence o Western

. For what I mean by generation see G , , ootnote .


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esoteric ideas on the development o Japanese healing rites since the modernperiod, I will identiy a common eature o modern and contemporary popular-ized orms o esotericism such as nineteenth-century spiritualism, the New AgeMovement, and the recent spiritual boom in Japan. Tis common eature is thecultural criticism that these orms express through localized discourse and prac-tices. I will eventually demonstrate that spiritual therapies, while sharing manyo the eatures characterizing healing techniques in modern and contemporaryJapan, also express countercultural ideas using concepts and nuances that reso-nate with todays Japanese society and which may explain why these spiritualtherapies seemnew.

he irst section o this article explains the complex nuances o the term

spiritual (supirichuaru,), which has become a major buzz wordin post-Aum Japan. I will argue that the word represents attempts to talk aboutwhat might previously have been discussed under the rubric o religion, butas religion became a problematic topic afer the Aum Shinriky incident oMarch , new terminologies were brought in to replace it. In other words,considered against the religious background o post-Aum Japan, supirichuaruexpresses both religiosity and a counter-religious sentiment, its secondmeaning bearing more value among spiritual therapists. Te second section othe article shows that spiritual therapies fit well with how New Religious Move-

ments (rom hereon s) have developed in the twentieth century in terms otheir countercultural characteristics, their healing practices, and in terms o thecommercialization o those practices. My discussion could have stopped at thispoint, but I would have then ignored the voices o the spiritual therapists them-selves. In the third section I show that, as hinted by Ms. Momoyama in the con-

versation above, spiritual therapists claim to be different and superior to othermagico-religious practioners and even to other people. I highlight their mixtureo nationalistic nostalgia or a Japanese innate spirituality together with a naive

longing or what they see as the advantages o American individualism. By plac-ing these belies both within the counterculture discourse o occult practitio-ners and within similar ideas advanced by much earlier proponents o Japanesespiritualism, I explain that such claims do not ultimately set these practitionersapart rom other aith-based healers. Finally, in the last section, I suggest that ispiritual therapies are different rom other healing rites in Japan, it is in the waythey have reduced sel-cultivation to mean getting in contact with the innersel, without providing models or ethical directives other than positive think-ing. Tis, I suggest, may account or the use o nihonjinrontheories promoting

the combination o a unique Japanese spirituality with the individualistic valueso the West, in order to fill the symbolic vacuum that is characteristic o post-Aum Japan.


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Spiritual Terapies in Contemporary Japan

It is now generally accepted among researchers o Japanese society and culture

that the Aum attack on the okyo subway and the ensuing and indiscriminatemedia bashing o religious groups in Japan marked a turning point in contem-porary Japanese history (B and R ). Indeed, as Matsudo hasargued, the Aum affair caused a great sociocultural shock by bringing to lightseveral social issues, such as incompetent police work, irresponsible mediaactivity, a loss o credibility o religious scholars, dubious ethical training inthe education system, [and] an increased level o violence under the influenceo comics and video games (M , ). Yet recent research on theJapanese religious landscape shows that although the Japanese public has dem-

onstrated an aversion towards the use o the term shky(religion) since (S , ), an interest in spiritualistic and occult phenomena didnot ade away as one might have imagined.

For example, in a study o religion and television in Japan, Ishii Kenji con-cluded that in and television shows centered on reinsha(aperson with spiritual abilities) and other individuals claiming supernaturalabilities had numbered twenty-seven and twenty-three respectively. Such showscontinued to be broadcast until the official announcement that Aums leader,Asahara, was caught by the police, two months aferthe sarin gas attack perpe-trated by the movement. Tereafer, these programs briefly disappeared rom thesmall screen, only to reappear in the ollowing year (I , ). Slowly,amous ortune-tellers and spiritualists such as Gibo Aikoand HosokiKazukoreappeared on television and went on, as Benjamin Dormanhas shown, to extract concepts such as ancestor worship rom the religious

vocabulary and present them as a common sense that should be perectly natu-ral to Japanese people (D , ; A ). It is in terms o thisincreased media coverage o the Japanese nonreligious religiosity (to borrow

the words rom Ama oshimaros popular book) that the use o the word spiri-tual needs to be understood.

At the beginning o the new millennium, together with the aorementioned

terebi reinsha, another figure succeeded in reaching media stardom by appealing

to the Japanese audiences interest in healing. Tis was Ehara Hiroyuki,alicensed Shinto priest who in the late s went to London to study at the Spiri-tualist Association o Great Britain. Tere he met one o the most amous Brit-

ish psychics o the past century, Doris Collins (). Collins, Ehara claims,

advised him as ollows: Like me in the UK, be the pioneer who will transmit

the truth to the people o Japan (E , ). Back in Japan, in Eharaopened a Research Center on Spiritualism, where, as a reinsha, he offered ses-

sions to clients.From the early s he started writing ortune-telling columns


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in womens magazines (K , ). He then did some brie televisedappearances in , beore making a break as a supirichuaru kaunser(, spiritual counselor) in two television shows: Letters romHeaven (engoku kara no tegami,), broadcast intermittently onFuji between and , and Te Fountain o Aura (ra no izumi, ), broadcast weekly on Asahi between and .

Eharas charisma launched a spiritual boom (W et al. ), in which

the spiritual, written in katakana and attached to words such as education,

ood, or even sex,11attempts to strip religious activity rom its distrusted con-

nection with membership to a religious organization (H ). Summarizing

Eharas thought, Koike Yasushi writes that according to Ehara,

Humans die, but their soul is eternal; we are all protected by a guardian spiritand are meant to learn the spiritual principles that will allow us to reach thestate o gods. Religions are no more than human-made cover-ups.

(K , )

Ehara expresses a cosmology amiliar to the literature o the New Age Move-

ment and its affiliated trends such as the Complementary and Alternative Medi-

cine () social movement (G , ). In an introductory volume to

the New Age Movement, Sarah Pike notes that New Agers believe that salvation

comes through the discovery and cultivation o a divine inner sel with the helpo techniques that can be learned rom books and workshops as well as spiritual

teachers (P , ). Such techniques and the spiritual therapies, including

Eharas spiritual counseling, can be also thought o as mind and body medicine.

Tis is a category o described on the website o the National Center or Com-

plementary and Alternative Medicine () in the United States, as practices

that ocus on the interactions among the brain, mind, body, and behavior, with

the intent to use the mind to affect physical unctioning and promote health.12

Despite the arbitrariness o s categorization (which groups under

its ourth type o other practices more techniques than in the first threetypes), and the debate over such an ill-defined phenomenon as the New AgeMovement, Japanese spiritual therapists discussed in this article are, on a techni-cal level, no different rom those one can most easily meet in mind-body-spiritestivals held regularly in Western countries,13and they certainly express opin-ions typical o New Age circles.

. One has to just flip through the pages o rinity, the most popular magazine in this genre,to observe this phenomenon; see http://www.el-aura.com/subscription/ (accessed July ).

. See http://nccam.nih.gov/health/whatiscam/types (accessed July ).

. See the website o Pathways Network or a regularly updated calendar o such events in theUnited Kingdom. http://www.pathwaysnetwork.co.uk/exhibitions.htm (accessed March ).


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In more general terms, however, what seems to have happened is that Ehara,by criticizing religion or having become an empty shell and arguing thatindividual spiritual experiences are the only real thing, has managed to linkthe post-Aum Japanese uneasiness towards religion to the most undamentalcharacteristic o occult thought: cultural criticism. And it is in this general con-ceptualization that I place my understanding o the New Age and the spiritualtherapy phenomenon in Japan.

Te New Age Movement in the West and the spiritual boom in Japan arepolemically constructed vernacular expressions that borrow popularly inventedterms available at the time to identiy ever-present belies that are critical oestablished sociocultural norms. Such belies are usually the subject o contro-

versies that have populated the printed media since the early nineteenth cen-tury. In a recent extensive and in-depth overview o the treatment o WesternEsoteric traditions in academia, Wouter J. H (, ) arguesthat the boundaries o the domain o esoteric spiritualities are vaguely definedand hard to pin down historically because they, in a sense, only become visiblewhen they are attacked by the two pillars o modern culture: doctrinal aith andrational knowledge.

I understand spiritual therapies in their alternative character o attempting

to find a third way to therapycountering religion and science taken individ-

uallybut based on an ideal combination o both these elements. For the Japa-nese public living in the post-Aum era, supirichuaruthereore may be another

word or religiosity (as Horie has argued). In spiritual therapy circles, moreover,

supirichuaruis significant or its countercultural use, namely its role in criticizing

organized religious traditions, all o which came to be seen through the prism o

Aum Shinriky afer the latters sarin gas attack on the okyo subway.

Continuity Between Japanese s and Spiritual Terapies

Despite their claims to the contrary, contemporary Japanese spiritual therapistsshare many characteristics with Japanese s. Tis section looks into existingresearch or elements that demonstrate the continuity between s and thesupirichuaruin at least three interconnected aspects: counterculturalism, heal-ing rites, and commercialization.

Since their first appearance in the early- to mid-nineteenth century, Japaneses have been characterized by their dependence on the leadership o charis-

matic ounders whose authority emerges rom their ability to attract ollowersthrough spiritual healing, revelation o new teachings, and serving as interme-diaries betweenthe lay membership and spiritual realms (R , ).


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Hence, what was particularly new about the s was the rather modern develop-

ment in which lay individuals ound themselves publicly bestowed with the heal-

ing powers that had until then officially been the monopoly o the proessionals

o established religious traditions. Janine Sawada describes this change as ollows:

In the late Edo period, people played an increasingly active role in creating andcontrolling their own religious lives. Te gradual spread o ways o thinkingthat emphasized the moral autonomy o the individual and the value o com-munalism, whether mediated by Conucian-inspired educators, rural nativ-ists, or divinely inspired leaders o new religions marked a rising discomortwith clerical and scholastic restrictions on religious knowledge ordinaryamily lie and work were ofen depicted in popular discourse o the time as

the ideal context or personal and social improvement. (S , )

Sawada argues, however, that these changes did not immediately translateinto an anticlerical spirit but at first led to a reinterpretation by the clericaland lay sectors o their mutual relation (S , ). Yet, as Japanese politi-cians and intellectuals sought to modernize Japan by, or example, adoptingwestern notions and practices o religion and scientific medicine, s cameto be slowly labeled as groups o charlatans promoting superstitious belies. LeviMcLaughlin in act argues that a distinct pattern o repeated scapegoating o

new religions punctuates the history o modern and contemporary Japan, and acycle o lashing-out against emergent religious groups has shaped the contourso prevailing distinctions maintained between traditional and new religions(ML , ).

Tis scapegoating intensified in the twentieth century with the amous suppres-

sion o Oomoto in the aish period and the cases o two s, Jiu and ensh

Ktai Jing Ky, in the immediate postwar years. Benjamin Dorman notes that

As psychology rom the early aish period was developing as a method ortreating all kinds o disorders, attacking groups that promoted healing practices

and espoused personal and societal change through spiritual means was one way

to justiy their claims. On the other hand, groups such as the New Buddhistsand other sectarian organizations were also keen to distinguish and define newreligions as antisocial in order to strengthen their own social standing.

(D , )

Dorman urther argues that in the postwar period prewar critics that raisedconcerns o superstitions and irrational thought were reormulated to fit in withthe new era o democracy (D , ). Jiu was, or example, psycho-

logically diagnosed as a socio-pathological phenomenon centered on a personpresumed to have certain pathological tendencies (Akimoto Haruo [],quoted in D , ) and ensh Ktai Jing Kys critics argued that


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the group targeted ollowers who were not able to discern true religions romalse ones (D , ).

Mirroring the theory described in the previous section, the countercultural-ism o new religions in Japan was largely brought to the surace in response tothe mostly media-driven attacks rom the modern institutions o traditionalreligion and rational science. Tis does not mean that the alternative charactero these groups was/is not real. Looking at the ideas that both s and spiri-tual therapists promote in terms o healing, as discussed in the ollowing sec-tion, we could hardly label these phenomena as mainstream. But it is importantto understand that their counterculturalism is constructed and defined againstwhat is perceived and believed to be traditional or mainstream ways o lie

and belies. Again, as Hanegraaff argues in the case o Western esotericism,Whereas anti-apologetic polemicists and their kindred spirits tend to suspectthe existence o a subversive pagan agenda, and try to expose it by bringing itsbasic doctrines to light, esoteric spiritualities are mostly creatures o com-promise: their enemies try to sharply exclude them as Other, but their repre-sentatives or sympathizers usually try to remain included.

(H , )

O course not all groups are creatures o compromise, and Aum was one

o these organizations. Although, as McLaughlin argues, the Aum affair mayhave introduced nothing entirely new to discourses on new religions in Japan(ML , ), or many people, and particularly or the spiritual ther-apists and their regular clients, the event contributed to the mainstreaming onew religions. In other words, as a orm o organized religion, s consistor spiritual therapistso just another example o what is bad about religionand, in contrast, what is good about the supirichuaru.

Consider, or example, two o the theories that the three therapists partici-pating in the debate in Enoshima seemed to espouse. One theory is that o Eric

Pearl, the inventor o the previously-mentioned reconnection, who claims thattheres no such thing as evil. Tere are no entities whose purpose or existence isto hang around and play havoc with your lie (P , ). And he adds:

We no longer need to throw salt to the our corners, smudge with sage, or call inentities or protection. We need not use our conscious minds in an attemptto determine what is wrong with a person so that we know how to treatthem. We may now allow ourselves to simply be[italics in the original]bewith the person and understand that the uncertainty will be taken care o.

(P , )Both religion and science, interpreted here by Eric Pearl as superstition

and thinking with our conscious mind respectively, are thus rejected in the


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classic cultural criticism trend o occult thought. Although different in practice,theta healing, the other spiritual therapy that was mentioned in my meeting atEnoshima and which has been very popular in recent years in Japan, expressesthe same concerns. Its inventor, Vianna Stibal (a ormer naturopath, massagetherapist, and intuitive reader) claims, according to her website, to have healedhersel rom a cancer that both conventional and alternative medicines (noticehere the criticism o ellow practitioners) had ailed to subdue.

Such arguments place Japanese spiritual therapists in an interesting position.While they can be said to be contributing to the scapegoating o s throughtheir critique o organized religion, they have inherited the s countercul-tural elements in terms o healing methods and criticism o mainstream society.

Such a paradoxical position underlies, as I argue below, the lack o effects inthe practice o spiritual therapy.

Te continuity with Japanese s does not stop at the countercultural level.Te appeal o spiritual therapies itsel is undoubtedly due to their strong simi-larities with the healing practices popularized by s during the last century.According to Helen Hardacre, these modern healing rites share elements romthe Japanese shamanistic tradition (H , ). Te variants o a key

shamanistic rite calledyorigithas ormed the basis o many modern healingrituals, and its original orm was described in Carmen Blackers seminal accounto Japanese shamanistic olklore as ollows:

In the rituals known asyorigitthe task o making contact with the world ospirits is accomplished by the combined efforts o the mikoand the ascetic.Te mikono longer by her dancing and music summons the spiritual beings toapproach and take possession o her. She is now a mere passive vessel throughwhom the spirit speaks. Te active task o invoking the spirit, interrogatingit, and finally sending it back to its own world is now accomplished by theascetic. (B , )

Te Japanese that eventually developed the most influential modernorm oyorigitis surely Oomoto (ounded in ) with its technique o chinkonkishin. S (, ) calls chinkon kishina mediated spirit possessionand explains that the ritual consists o one person who induces spirit possessionin another, then conducts a dialogue with the spirit beore sending it back to theother world. Te legacy o the earlier shamanistic ritual is obvious here and thelink to earlier orms o healing is identified as one o the reasons why, according

to Nancy K. S (, ), chinkon kishinbecame the engine o suc-cess o Oomotos growth in the first decades o the twentieth century. Besides theastute use o the mass media to popularize this practice, Stalker considers as the


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second actor behind the popularity o Oomotos version o the old yorigit, thepublics passionate interest in spiritualism. Tis argument is particularly rele-

vant or tracing the origins o the recent Japanese ad with spiritual therapies.As Stalker describes, modern spiritualism (namely, the belie in and practice o

communication with spirits) had appeared in in the Unites States and, by the

s, had become a fixture o the American and European popular cultural land-

scapes. It inspired novels,14gave rise to both secularist and religious organizations

(the most amous is probably Te Teosophical Society), and reached the Eastern

colonies, where it blended with local practices to produce combinatory new reli-

gions with strong spiritualist tenets (S , ). Oomoto can be seen

as one o these movements, and by adopting the theosophical ideology described

below, the coounder Deguchi Onisabur expressed the need or the verificationo his teachings through progressive Occidental knowledge (G ,

), much in the same way that contemporary spiritual therapists do today.

Nicholas G-C (, , ) argues that Helena PetrovnaBlavatskys Teosophy,15by adapting contemporary scientific ideas o evolution,restored dignity and purpose to humankinds earthly lie within a cosmic con-

textone in which consciousness worked as a orce o spiritual evolution through

countless worlds and eras. Teosophy, indeed, went urther than the simplicity o

spiritualisms suggestion that there is lie afer death, and that we could experience

this through various types o sances. Blavatsky popularized ideas o reincarna-tion and karma, Secret Masters and ibet, and built a coherent doctrine blending

Buddhist and Hindu concepts, which to the ears o Onisabur probably sounded

at the same time amiliar and new in the way they were being used.

Chinkon(the purification o ones spirit) and kishin(the possession by a spirit)

were originally two central pillars o Ancient Shinto (Koshint), a nineteenth-

century school o thought inspired by Hirata Atsutanes school o Nativism and

Restoration Shinto (S , ). Onisabur, however, reinterpreted these

practices into a combination o spiritualist belies with theosophical ideologies

about spiritual evolution, leading to the two basic elements o the s healing

rites: magic and sel-cultivation (B , and ). As noted earlier, a

practical interpretation o Neo-Conucian sel-cultivation (S , ) was

emphasized among the first wave o Japanese s. Tis came to be seen, afer the

advent o spiritualism, as inseparable rom the magical element expressed in the

. For a ascinating study o the influence o occult thought and spiritualism on the Westernliterary world, see L .

. Te Teosophical Society was ounded in New York, in , by Helena Petrovna Blavatskyand Henry Steel Olcott. As an association o like-minded individuals, inspired by the nineteenthcenturys popularization o Spiritualism, the Teosophical Society became the most influentialplayer o the modern occult revival in the West. For its influence in Japan, see K ().


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ollowing waves o s who placed importance on the spirit worlds ability to

impact on individual health and cause personal misortune.16Nagai Mikikos anal-

ysis o Shinnyo-ens sesshinclearly shows the significance o that combination and

also the emphasis on the magical element that is ofen applied by s in Japan.

In sesshinthe sel-disciplinary actions o reflection and reorm are supported by

the magical activity o accepting guidance rom the spiritual world through the

intermediary o a spiritual medium. Te teachings emphasize sel-cultivation,

but the authority o the teachings is based on an acceptance o the magical unc-

tion o the ounders amily. (N , )

Here it would not be an exaggeration to argue that the influence o Western

spiritualism and the visits to Japan o inluential personalities such as the co-

ounder o the Teosophical Society, Colonel Henry S. Olcott,17have inspired

the continuing changes undergone by religious healing rites to this day. Indeed,

the last wave o new religions demonstrated renewed interest in spiritualistic and

occult phenomena to such an extent that this characteristic is considered as defin-

ing or the s that appeared in the late s/beginning o the s in Japan.

In this respect, Helen Hardacre has made the ollowing observations aboutthe ourth wave o Japanese s:

Besides techniques such as divination and geomancy, both ounders and con-

gregants emphasize the development o spiritual aculties [reikan, rein, and other terms]. echniques or identiying and communicating withindividual protective spirits [and other terms] provide a central ocusor group activity and individual devotion. Believers apparently hope thatdirect insight into the spirit world, sometimes aided by helping spirits, can,like astrology and so on, provide a hedge against uncertainty.

(H , )

Sources or such ideologies ofen come rom translations o oreign books writ-

ten by representatives o Western occultism. Book afer book by Edgar Cayce,Rudol Steiner, Krishnamurti, Gurdjieff, and various Western gurus line the shelves

in Japanese translation, noted M (, ). And F () photo

book includes, among reports on s such as Aum Shinriky, testimonies rom a

Japanese housewie who could channel Bashar,18and rom a man who was believed

. Te emergence o the magical element has been described as a shif o emphasis romkokoroto rei( et al. , ; S , ).

. Olcott is said to have visited Japan twice, in and in , and to have met the primeminister (W , ).

. Bashar is a multi-dimensional entity popularized by sel-proclaimed American chan-neler Daryl Anka. See www.bashar.org (accessed July ). Daryl Anka is said to have arrivedin Japan or the first time in May when he spoke in ront o a thousand ans.


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to be using hand-healing powers given to him by extraterrestrial beings that he had

met on a (F , and ). More recently Ugo Dessi drew atten-

tion to the nativistic interpretations o Rosicrucian and Teosophist theories o

lost continents and Great Masters in Kuku no Kagakus doctrines (D ).

hese observations indicate that occultural globalization among spiritualtherapists is ar rom being a new phenomenon. Tese practitioners, indeed, canbe said to correspond to the latest variations o healers who share commonalitiesacross Japanese sand across time since the beginning o the twentieth cen-tury and the rise o Japanese spiritualism. For example, theta healing could verywell be seen as a genre o chinkon kishinand reconnection as a type o tekazashi(, laying on o hands or raising the hand) practiced by members o a

belonging to the Oomoto lineage, Mahikari (D ; B ).he link between the New Age Movement and the spiritual boom can beobserved in the katakana term supirichuariti(, spirituality)thatcame to define a field o studies related to the spiritual boom in Japan, andwas first introduced and used through the Japanese translations o works belong-

ing to the Human Potential Movement and its psychological theoretical wing o

ranspersonal Psychology (H , ). Abraham Maslow, who is said

to have coined the term human potential, or Ken Wilber (who has since disso-

ciated himsel rom the discipline), had been proponents since the s o ideas

that became central pillars o the New Age Movement. Tey essentially suggestedthe existence o a therapeutic value in the experience o transcendental (trans-

personal) realms through altered states o consciousness (H ,

). Such renewed emphasis on personal experience contributed significantly to

the continuous importance o sel-cultivation in Japanese spiritual therapies, and

also perhaps to its changing meaning, as I discuss later in this article.

In recent times, the explicitly market-based ormat o spiritual therapies hasattracted much attention and criticism (S ). Yet this eature is also

not new among these practices, but has rather become more prominent. In urban

centers the shamanistic tradition has clearly broken out o the old structures

o sectarian ordination or ascetic validation and taking a more entrepreneurial

approach, ofen identiying a target market narrowly and then marketing the

religious services most directly relevant to the social and economic circumstances

o that market (H , ). In this respect, too, spiritual therapies can

be thought o as just one aspect o the yet more intense entrepreneurial develop-

ment resulting rom the urbanization o healing rites observed by Hardacre.In a previous article (G ) I showed that processes o proes-

sionalization and standardization are central to the practice o spiritual therapy.


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. Divination booths in a shopping center (photo taken by the author).

. Menu o a spiritual salon taken rom an inormants website:http://www.soultree-sn.com//_pricelist.html (accessed October ).


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Te diplomas offered by schools such as the Rocky Mountain Mystery Schoolor Teta Healing Japan have become a must-have or a practitioner who wishesto open a credible and competitive business. Tis matter was clearly stated bythe two students o Teta Healing at Enoshima. Tey had both been thinking oturning their interest in spiritual therapies into a ull-time job but they neededcredentials to practice. According to Teta Healing Japans official webpagethereare currently five hundred and seventy-five officially recognized theta healersaround the country.19

Such proessionalization and commercialization does not however consist oa characteristic unique to the spiritual therapies. Despite the statements o spiri-tual therapists expressing a general dismissal o ortune-tellers as simple statisti-

cians, or several decades divination in Japan has been a very profitable business.Te first department store20specializing in all types o ortune-telling services

opened its doors in (S , ) and since then

divination booths can be ound almost everywhere in Japans big cities.

Consider the photo o a divination booth in a shopping mall in Shibuya (- ). Te names o sessions and prices are fixed and extra costs due to over-time or special requests are clearly indicated. Similar observations have beenmade by Laura Miller in her recent study o tarot in Japan:

Divination booths are ound in shopping malls in major urban centers. Most

o the booths are operated by corporations who employ a stable o divinationexperts who rotate between them on different days o the week. Clients con-sult schedules to determine what day and time they can visit a selected site ora preerred divination service. Each booth seats one to three diviners, andthere is a standardized price structure based on time; this practice has helpedexpand their business because it alleviates customer anxiety about being over-charged or cheated. (M , )

And a recent article in the heJapan imesreported that Zappalas Inc.,which operates Japans largest network o ortune-telling websites and mobilecontent, said membership on its ortune-telling sites has been steadily increas-ing over the years, reaching . million as o January, with the mobile ortune-telling market having increased rom . billion in to . billion in (M ). A look at the internet pages advertising the services o spiritualtherapists reveals no difference with ortune-telling price lists ( ).

Aside rom the higher prices (compared to ortune-telling sessions), many

therapists have managed to standardize their practices to a level at which they

. See http://thetajapan.com/new/home/thetajapan_inst_list?r=kana (accessed July). Te total number increased rom two hundred and fify in July to five hundred andseventy-five as o October .

. See http://www. jemkiss.com (accessed July ).


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can compete with other proessionals who specialize in solving problems o the

heart (kokoro no mondai). And as M (, ) observes, the clients o divi-

nation booths may approach the activity as a type o light entertainment or as a

serious attempt to seek advicea behavior that also applies to spiritual therapies

because individuals who regularly seek these specialists o the heart seldom make

a difference (other than the cost) between the type o practitioner they seek advice

rom. Nearly every one o the therapists interviewed reported that their most regu-

lar clients tend to use all types o spiritual businesses without discrimination.

Despite spiritual therapies fitting perectly, cosmologically, and practicallywithin the development o aith-based healing techniques ound in the Japaneses and in the growing entrepreneurial endeavors that have characterized

such practices in recent decades, Japanese spiritual therapists insist that theyare different rom the rest o the magico-religious practitioners. Tis is in acta universally-observed phenomenon, best summarized by cultural psychiatristLaurence J. Kirmayer as ollows:

When healing practices are divorced rom the local communities or culturalsystems in which they developed, the communal methods o regulating theauthority and practice o the healer are replaced by the dynamics o the mar-ketplace or by struggles or power among proessional guilds.

(K , )

In the next section I look closer into the discourse o the difference and supe-riority o spiritual therapists stemming rom this increased entrepreneurship otheir practices.

Te Spiritual Terapists Discourse o Superiority

Te competitiveness in the spiritual market as described above is bound to leadto discourse showing the spiritual therapists exalted position within an imag-ined scale o magico-religious practitioners, and within a hierarchy o human

beings who are ofen categorized according to their ethnicity. Below, I providerepresentative testimonials rom my interviews with spiritual therapists in whichthis spirit o competition, produced by the commodification and commercial-ization o these practices, is amply expressed and finds itsel combined with thepreviously-mentioned eature o cultural criticism.

For example, Ms. Chikamatsu and Ms. Momoyama believe that traditional

magico-religious practitioners such as the blind mediums known as itako (;they have become amous through their presence at the summer estival in Mt.

Osore [F ]), occupy a lower level on the hierarchy and use the two

simple techniques o exorcism and communication with the spirits o the dead.Te sisters placed Ehara Hiroyuki, the amous spiritual counselor, at the middle

level. According to the sisters, he demonstrated a spiritual awakening on the indi-


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vidual level that allowed him to see peoples auras, in addition to practicing tra-

ditional shamanistic techniques. Finally, having awakened to a spiritual world

(supirichuaru sekai), the two sisters argued that they had

joined the top o the hierarchy o spiritual therapists who were gifed with a com-

pletely different vision o the cosmos and were in possession o the power to heal.

Ms. Fujimura, another o my inormants, provided a similar image o thishierarchy, this time placing Ehara at the top o a smaller scale encompassingall reinsha. Tis scale ranged rom the regular olk, who are unable to see orhear the dead, to the shamanistic practitioners who can communicate with thespirits, and then to Ehara Hiroyuki, who as a spiritual counselor is able to guidehis clients using the same spiritual powers. Ms. Fujimura claimed that she was

a spiritual teacher, someone who acts above the level o the reinsha, and who,like the sisters previously mentioned, has gained ull knowledge o the work-ings o the universe and o the methods to fix every one o her clients issues. Itbecame clear rom these accounts that the term reinshanot only reers to thepopular category o old (itako) and new (spiritual counselor) versions o prac-titioners who specialize in some type o communication with the dead, but alsothat it has become obsolete, a remnant o the past, and such practitioners arenow seen as having had limited awareness and thus limited powers. Te criti-cism o reinshadid not end with an evaluation o their alleged abilitiesit also

included strictures upon the way reinshaconduct their sessions.Ms. Sakura, or example, claimed in an interview that she was descendedrom a amily o reinsha, but only decided to ollow her ancestors path aferrealizing that the proession does not have to be about scaring people by tell-ing them that misortune will beall them i they do not listen to what the spir-its o the dead or gods have to say. In these criticisms, the example o HosokiKazukoinamous or her harsh comments to celebrity guests on her televisionshowwas ofen brought up as a bad example and to be contrasted to EharaHiroyukis more gentle approach to therapy. Ehara himsel has undoubtedly

ueled such comparisons by widening the gap between himsel and his predeces-sors, whom he accuses o seeking materialistic wealth by scaring their clientswith religious doctrines and making them dependent on their sessions by onlyproviding temporary solutions (E , ).

he spiritual therapists also had something to say about ortune-tellers:

because they rely on a series o ofen numerical constants, ortune-tellersrom

hand-readers tofeng shuimasterswere classified by spiritual therapists in the

category o regular human beings, and reerred to as practitioners o statisti-

cal studies (tkei gaku). For Ms. Suzuki, or example, the ortune-tellers

ability merely consists o helping people to eel part o a group that is believedto share the same set o lie patterns. And eeling the need to be part o a group

was seen as negative, a deect o contemporary Japanese culture. Indeed, as the


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ollowing testimonies show, a lack o sel-confidence, a lack o communication

with amily and relatives, repetition o the same mistakes and, above all, a sel-

imposed repression were ofen linked to being Japanese.

Te spiritual advisor Mr. Suzuki, or example, summarized this reasoningduring our second encounter as ollows: Everyone wants to have an averagelie (heikinteki na jinsei) according to Japanese standards. You know how manywomen come complaining that they are not married and saying Im already! (m da shi!)? An aura therapist, Ms. Fukuda, expressed similar ideas:Japanese do not show their true sel; they repress it, repress it until it becomesunbearable (nihonjin wa hont no jibun o dasanaide, osaete, osaete, tsuraku nattekita[sic]made). Te sisters Ms. Chikamatsu and Ms. Momoyama also repeated

the same idea by characterizing Japan as a nation ogaman (endurance). It (lie)was not meant to be like that! (sonna hazu ja nakatta!) are the words metaphys-iotherapist Ms. Kimura ofen hears rom her typically Japanese clients.

Te existence o this sel-criticism, which identifies nationality as the cause o

distress or the majority o clients, is undoubtedly a result o the strong influx o

Western (mainly American) ideas originating rom the translations o New Age

books and talks by oreign spiritual teachers, as noted above. And, as or fiction

and nonfiction literature in general, Japan has been a country o excessive impor-

tation, not excessive exportation ( , ). Indeed, it is mainly oreign

authors who are read and rememberedsuch as W (); M(); R (); W (); W()by the spiritual therapists,

and even though Ehara Hiroyukis publications are extremely popular, they are

never valued as highly as the spiritualist theories o the West. In act, Ehara him-

sel reinorces this Western superiority by saying that his spiritualism is based

on the code o the Spiritualist Association o Great Britain which he had to make

simpler i he wanted Japanese people to understand it (E a, ).

Many o the spiritual therapists I interviewed embodied this criticism o their

liestyles. Most claim to maintain a strong relationship with their Western tutors

through a continuous involvement in the events organized by their spiritual acad-emies. Te two aspiring theta healers in Enoshima were planning to continue their

course in the United States afer completing what the Japanese branch had to offer.

Others rushed to demonstrate their nonconormity to Japanese values by talking

about their own decisions to seek their spiritual reedom. For example, afer con-

tact with spiritual therapies, Ms. Kayama divorced; Ms. Hirayama lef her parents

home and her job as a civil servant; Ms. Mitani lef her job and spends six months a

year on the small island o Miyako, , km away rom her husband (who lives in

Sapporo); Mr. akahashi lef his job and has never gone back to see his parents.

Some spiritual therapists, like Ms. Saeda, however, seemed to simultaneouslynotice what they considered to be the detrimental effects o such a blind ocuson the individual sel.


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Foreign teachers say remove your ego, concentrate on the heart, not thehead, but Japanese should do exactly the opposite. Tey need to think aboutthemselves, and they need also to stop respecting those teachers without ques-

tioning them. Te problem with the Japanese is their extreme dependencewhich pushes them to do exactly what they are told to do in the spiritualistbooks and seminars.

In these cases, Japanese people and spiritual therapists were seen as special

because they were Japanese. Ms. Ueda claimed that Japan is a undamentally spiri-

tual culture because the essence o the Shinto religion is a blend o polytheism and

animism. Te same type o argument can be also ound in the writings o popular

authors. Ehara Hiroyuki argues that Japan is a country that ranks high on a spiri-

tual level because the belie in an invisible world is part o the Japanese nationalcharacter (kokuminsei). Ehara continues by saying that the Japanese people

used to value the power o nature and the supernatural, but that the consumer-

ism introduced in the postwar period made them reject their roots (E b,

). Kond Kazuo, one o the most prolific translators o English spiritualist

and New Age books,21places the particularity o the Japanese people in their phys-

iology and especially their brain, which, he argues, does not distinguish between

reason and natural instincts, as does the Western brain (K , ).

Unsurprisingly, such connections made between the superiority o Japanese

spiritual therapists and the Japanese race are not uncommon among Japanesespiritualists. Ancient Shinto, to which I traced the origin o chinkon kishinear-lier in this article, proessed many theories about the uniqueness, homogene-ity, and superiority o the Japanese.22Some o these claims are that the Japanesegods created the entire human race, that the geography o Japan and the nomen-clature o its regions mirror the map o the world, and that a decoding o theKojikiwill reveal the secrets o humanity ( , ). Such theo-ries were eventually inserted into the nationalistic and imperialistic ideology owarring Japan, beore joining the nihonjinronliterature popularized in the post-war period.23Nihonjinronwritings share a singular objective: to demonstrate

. Kond has translated at least fify publications, including the twelve volumes o the texts thatwere dictated to Maurice Barbanell, amous spiritualist and ounding editor o the weekly British

newspaper Psychic News, by his Indian spirit guide, the three-thousand-year-old Silver Birch.

. Michael C notes that chinkon(spirit-quieting) rites, which most probably wereimported rom the Korean peninsula, were already serving in the seventh century both to guar-antee the political authority o rulers and to paciy the spirits o the numerous submitting lin-eages (, ). By the early Heian period, such rites came to be understood as a reenactmento the Heavenly Grotto myth (C , ), one o the most amous mythological accountsplaced at the origin o the Japanese nation and identity.

. Hotaka () has demonstrated that similar nationalistic statements also con-tributed to the rise o neo-new religions (the last wave o new religions) in Japan in the s.


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unique qualities o Japanese culture, Japanese society, and the Japanese people(B , ). Te author argues that the postwar appeal o such theories hasmoved in to occupy the identity space vacated by tainted symbols o dubious cred-

ibility (B , ), by which he reers to the controversy-struck symbols o

the emperor, the national flag, and Yasukuni shrine. As Ian Reader has noted in

a review o Beus work, in addition to the act that other countries ace the same

problem o contested symbols, in Japan, even i nihonjinronfills a symbolic vac-

uum, it does so with a mode o discourse that is itsel innately unsettling and sym-

bolic o unease and contention (R , ).

Unease and contention have been on the rise since the mid-s, and the

same is mentioned by Reader, noting that Beu had ignored the impact o the

Great Hanshin Earthquake and o the Aum aair on todays Japanese society.Looking at the nihonjinron-type reactions praising, or example, the groupism

o the Japanese people who survived the earthquake that hit Kobe in January

(MC ) or the post-March media criticism o the alienated

Japanese youth who joined Aum Shinriky, we find that the seemingly paradoxi-

cal discourse o the Japanese spiritual therapistsholding both positive and nega-

tive views about their ellow citizensis neither new to explanatory models used

in healing practices nor unique to this specific community. It is not even para-

doxical, considering that Japanese are seen as superior and unique, only in the

past, beore the modernization o the country (see Eharas comments on page o this article).

Furthermore, nationalistic ideologies are not characteristic o Japanese spiri-

tual therapists alone. In addition to being a undamental eature o New Age prac-

tices in South Korea (see W ), these ideologies also seem to occupy the

minds o the oreign spiritual teachers who work in Japan. Lack o hard data

prevents me rom making too general a statement, but it is worth mentioning that

Ms. Smith, channeler and resident o Japan since the mid-s, noted that despite

the hundreds o Japanese students she had trained, no Japanese will ever be able to

reach the level o American channelers, even theyuta(shamanistic practitionersin Okinawa) whose ability she had allegedly once sought to test.

In summary, the individuals who compose my sample have so far been

considered kinds of Japanese magico-religious practitioners who offer mostly

Western-imported therapies that seem to have been consumed on the same

grounds as other types of faith-based activities. Te highly commercialized

aspect of this profession is worthy of note for the competitiveness that it engen-

ders (with the ensuing discourse on hierarchy among magico-religious practitio-

ners), but ultimately the situation does not differ rom what has been happening

in other sectors o the Japanese economy, where the objective is to provide a com-bination o entertainment and temporary eelings o hope and relie. Yet spiritual

therapists, expressing their countercultural ideals, still claim to be not only better


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than all other types o traditional practitioners such as the reinsha, ortune-tellers,

and so on, but also better at knowing what is best or the Japanese people, who are

either criticized or beingJapanese or blamed or having orgotten their true Japa-

neseness. Again, such cultural criticism, although typical o occult thought and

practices, is neither new in the history o magico-religious practitioners in Japan,

nor novel in its appeal to the symbolic vacuum which seems to ail post-Aum Japan.

In act, I finish my discussion on spiritual therapies in Japan by arguing that the

simplification by spiritual therapists o the sel-cultivation actor, which has been

so important in both countercultural arguments and aith-based healing in Japan,

exacerbates this symbolic vacuum by providing no other ideal model than the sel.

Changing Concepts o Sel-Cultivation in Spiritual Terapies et al (, ) consider sel-cultivation to have ormed the ideological

basis o all alternative healing movements that arose in modern Japan. Beore

the Meiji period, sel-cultivation constituted an essential element o Neo-Conu-

cianism, a school o thought that has significantly influenced Japanese culture and

society since its prolieration in the discourse o the okugawa periods military

government, which was concerned with the achievement and maintenance o a

stable and harmonious society (N , ). Mary Evelyn ucker has shown

how major thinkers o that period such as Yamazaki Ansai and Kaibara Ekken

managed to reach a syncretism between Conucianism and Shinto and Buddhist

ideas through the use o the dialectic o cosmology and cultivation: sel-cultiva-

tion was a means to harmonize the sel with the changes o the universe (

, ). Eventually this syncretism led to the transormation o early ascetic,

miko, and divination magical rites into acts o sel-cultivation (H ,

; H ) and ultimately inspired the nineteenth centurys new social

movements, some o which came to be known as new religions (S ).What about sel-cultivation in spiritual therapies? Some studies have argued

that Eharas spiritual counseling borrows elements rom psychotherapy. AsKoike explains, the ormat o Eharas most popular show, he Fountain oAura, always ollowed the same pattern: the celebrity guests lie-course is inter-preted by Ehara using three techniques. Reading the color o the aura24o theguest to find out about their personality (a red aura, or example, means a stress-ul yet passionate person), seeing the guests past lie to explain their currentlie (skillul singers, or example, tend to have been musicians in their previousexistences), and finally listening to or seeing the messages o the spirits among

. Walter J. Kilner () is usually associated with discovering and analyzing thestructure o the human atmosphere (see the homonym title o his study) or aura, the energyfield that he believed surrounds every human being and yet is individually distinct. Tis part oEharas televised session was discontinued rom .


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which sometimes appears the guests guardian spirit (shugorei) to trans-mit moral messages such as nothing occurs by chance, hardships become les-sons, you like your job because you were meant to, or those who protectedyou during your lie continue to look ater you beyond death (K ,). According to Horie, Eharas session ollows a psychotherapeutic ormatthat can be distinguished in our steps: building a relationship o trust using theability to see spirits (rapport), seeking reasons or present problems in the past(trauma), changing the perspective on present issues revealing thus the goodaspects o ones lie (reraming), and reassuring the client o their protection byguardian spirits and o the location o the ultimate solution within themselves(empowerment) (H , ).

I psychological theory can be used to analyze Eharas spiritual therapy, itcould also inorm our understanding o a session o Shinnyo-ens sesshin, whichis in the long line o chinkon kishin-type o rituals. In this respect, Nagai notesthat the counsel given during sesshinmay concern the ollowers spiritual affairs[in eect, inluence rom ghosts o angry relatives or riends], practice, men-tal attitude, or personality (N , ). Tis magical, ormal aspect osesshin, as Nagai identifies it, does not seem different rom Eharas attempt tobuild a relationship o trust based on his alleged spiritual powers, a belie thatis assumed among Shinnyo-ens ollowers who ask advice to the organizations

reinsha. What is interesting and could be said to have been transormed in thepassage rom s to todays boom in spiritual therapies is the sel-cultivationelement o these healing rites.

Nagai notes that Shinnyo-ens sel-cultivation and the inormal aspect o ses-shinprovides a two-layered model or ones sel-cultivation: the Buddha(s) andthe ounders amily, through the traditional Mahayana Buddhist teaching o theten good actions o mind, word, and body, augmented by the Seventeen Regu-lations or Women, which were compiled by the ounder It omoji and said tobe also used by male ollowers (N , ). Te empowerment here

is thereore expressed in the reassurance that diligent sel-reflection and sel-polishing according to those precepts and by means o the Tree Activities25will guarantee good results. On the one hand, Eharas session is also composedo a sel-cultivation actor expressed by the empowering advice that marks theend o it. Spiritual counseling may be said to include both elements o the tradi-tional Japanese magico-religious rites. On the other hand, this sel-cultivationpart o Eharas session, and particularly o the spiritual therapies, is rather sim-plified. Te hint on how this is done lies in the of-heard sentence, the solutionis in yoursel.

. Te Tree Activities are kangi(, joyul giving), otasuke (, lit. helping, actuallyproselytization), andgohshi(, service) (N , ).


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Indeed, contrary to the ounders o s, Ehara does not provide models osel-cultivation and is the first to claim, in his first best-selling book, that he isnot special; he just ound himsel with this ability to see things invisible to oth-ers (E , ). Tere is a lack o both biographical details and allusionsto specific religious doctrines in his writings; rather, he ocuses on expandingthe different ways to come in contact with ones spirit (supiritto),commonly known in New Age circles as the Higher Sel. Wouter J. Hanegraaffdeines the Higher Sel as the mediating link between man and God it ismore personal than God yet more universal than man it is our real identity.[C]onscious connection with ones Higher Sel leads to increased insight, spiri-tuality, love, balance and health (H , ). According to Ehara,

this connection can be achieved by maintaining a healthy lie and by thinking,conversing with others, and acting positively. Tere is no evil, Ehara argues, butnothing occurs by chance (E , , , ). I people are willing to lis-ten to themselves they will find the answer to their problems, because the answeris already there. Tis is, in brie, Eharas message.

Eharas comments mirror the opinions o Eric Pearl (page o this article)and Vianna Stibal (page o this article). All that Pearls reconnection wasmeant to allow is to simply be. [B]e with the person and understand thatthe uncertainty will be taken care o (P , ). Teta healing claims

similar effects. Te technique that Stibal used was something she apparently wasalready doing in her reading sessions, but which she could not understand.

Curious to understand why the technique was working, Vianna solicited thehelp o a physicist and with an electrocephalograph discovered that the simpletechnique tapped Teta waves. Over many years o practicing the technique,Vianna believes the technique utilizes a Teta wave to achieve an instant heal-ing. Trough thousands o clients she discovered not only an amazing way toconnect with the creative energy that moves in all things, but that this energycould change instantly Belies and Feelings that are linked to sickness.26

Again, what transpires rom such claims is the belie in the hidden poten-tial that humans will realize they already possess i they ree their minds romwhat are seen as superficial concerns. And i, indeed, some o these techniquesrecognize the existence o some kind o supernatural, transcendental power orbeing, such as angels, guardian spirits, or the Creator O All Tat Is (which intheta healing is believed to be the original initiator o the clients healing abili-ties), they take second stage in spiritual therapies sessions. It is the individualthat occupies center stage and that ultimately is supposed to be the instigator o

his/her own healing.

. http://www.thetahealing.com/about-thetahealing.html (accessed October ).


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Although or some clients, such ollow your heart/think positively-type omessages may sound like they validate their intuition regarding the best solu-tion to the problem they were acing, leading them thus to be more assertiveand confident when taking uture decisions (whether these reveal themselves asgood or bad), this type o advice does not really seem to help those who have noclue as to what they should be doing with the troubles in their lie. For this sec-ond group o clients, as or the spiritual therapists themselves, ideals o an innateJapanese spirituality coupled with the airly candidly interpreted advantageso American individualism may offer some support and (possibly) solutions ortheir issues. Yet, considering the consuming patterns o the majority o clients,who ofen seem to be no more than ans o occult theories, spiritual therapies

have yet to provide a new method or dealing with contemporary problems. Iam reminded o an acquaintances comments regarding her requent visit to or-tune-tellers, reinsha, and all types o practitioners o spiritual therapy: I dontcare or their advice. I just want to hear them interpreting my lie using spiritualtheories.

Te Fading Away o Spiritual Terapies

In this article I have ocused on the most prominent aspect o the last decadesspiritual boom phenomenon in Japan, namely spiritual therapies. Te object oinquiry was a common countercultural discourse used by spiritual therapists in

which organized religions, including s, have been demonized and the contem-

porary Japanese way o lie has been contrasted with the new and better supiri-

chuaruways. I have, however, sought to demonstrate that spiritual therapies are a

continuation o aith-based healing practices that have developed in Japan since

the nineteenth century and that this may have been the cause o their popular-

ity, even i temporary. Like their predecessors, spiritual therapies construct their

counterculturalism against modern notions o religion and scientific rationalism,

while also presenting both o the elements o magic and sel-cultivation that havecharacterized the healing rites o s. As or the proessionalization and entre-

preneurship that spiritual therapists demonstrate, these have been in development

at least since the s and are probably much better handled by the ortune-telling

business o which my inormants were so critical.I identified two aspects in the discourse o spiritual therapists that have pre-

vented their customers rom discovering the unique value o these therapiesand probably led to the end o the spiritual boom. First I argued that the thera-pists narratives o superiority that originated rom practical issues o competi-

tiveness with other magico-religious practitioners ultimately expanded to simplyinclude everyone who is not a Japanese spiritual therapist. Te paradoxical dis-course that suraced was countercultural in its eclectic criticism o Japaneseness


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and/or non-Japaneseness, but it did not differ rom mainstream, nihonjinron-type arguments that have sought to fill up a post-Aum symbolic vacuum.

Secondly, I observed that the sel-cultivation element o spiritual therapiesdiffers rom their predecessors in terms o the lack o role models and concretetechniques that clients are supposed to be inspired rom and practice in order tosolve their issues. In that sense, the symbolic vacuum is exacerbated instead obeing satiated.

In a recent exchange with Horie Norichika27about the end o the spiritualboom, Horie noted that since the beginning o , supirichuaruseems to havelost its genre-defining narrow meaning and has been ragmenting into varioussections o Japanese sub-culture. It is probably too early to reach a conclusionabout this phenomenon, but one o the reasons or the all o the supirichuarumay be ound in the argument developed in this article. Spiritual therapies mayhave seemed new because o their obvious and highly publicized borrowing oWestern ideas and practices, and they may have looked attractive due to theircultural criticism, whose expression has been adapted to suit the concerns o thecontemporary, post-Aum Japanese clientele. In essence, however, they remainedwithin the long tradition o Japanese healing rites, victims o the same marketi-zation that has led to competitiveness-based discourses o superiority, and whichhas provoked today an even more simplified, albeit lacking-in-effect approach to

therapy. Perhaps this approach, combined with competitiveness, provoked theragmentation o the genre that Horie has observed. Perhaps, also, the supirichu-arunever lef the territory o the sub-cultural. In other words, the supirichuarushould just be seen as an artificially and temporarily constructed amalgam o

various occultural phenomenaone that attracted media interest as a conse-quence o the spotlight thrown upon noninstitutional, popular religion in theimmediate afermath o the Aum affair.

. An e-mail to the author dated July .


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Documents

Spiritual Therapies in Japan