Introduction

Anyone who watches the cursed video tape will die a week later.

In the horror novel series Ring by Suzuki Koji, which was made into a movie and became a worldwide hit, the grudge of Yamamura Sadako, a psychic who died with a grudge against the world, is psychically projected onto a video tape which curses to death those who see it. In the story, Sadako's mother, Shizuko, is portrayed as a psychic with the abilities of clairvoyance and thoughtography, while her father, Iguma Hirahachiro, is portrayed as a scholar who was fired from a university after scandals about his research into Shizuko's abilities. The model of Sadako's parents is said to be Dr. Fukurai Tomokichi, an assistant professor at Tokyo Imperial University, who worked on the research of psychic powers called senrigan (clairvoyance) that caused a stir in academic circles and the mass media at the end of the Meiji era.

This exhibition traces the course of the affair from the experimental records of the time, and introduces the views of scientists of the time and the reaction of society.

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  Chapter 1
  Reading about the Senrigan Experiment

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  Chapter 2
  Reading about controversy among scholars

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  Chapter 3
  Reading about the senrigan craze

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  The scholars’ views

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  References

• These high-definition images are available in the National Diet Library Digital Collections. Those that are labelled NDL Digital Collections can be viewed via the Internet on any computer. Those labelled Restricted access means that the image can only be viewed on computer terminals at the NDL or an affiliated library. For more information, please refer to the Digitized Contents Transmission Service for Libraries webpage
• A string in square brackets is a NDL Call Number.
• The original Japanese-language article first appeared in August 2015 as part of Small Electronic Exhibitions Kaleidoscope of Books, No. 13. Please note that the descriptions herein are based on information that was current at that time.

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Chapeter 1