Katsugoro: And Other Reincarnation Cases in Japan

English-speaking readers familiar with the body of literature on reincarnation research are of course aware of the Western cultural framing of reincarnation, and will have some familiarity also with how reincarnation is viewed in India, Myanmar, Sri Lanka, the Druze sect of Islam, certain Pacific Northwest Native American cultures and the Igbo tribal culture of Africa, plus some others.These cultures were the main foci of the work of the tireless Ian Stevenson, whose writings continue to dominate, in terms of sheer volume, the field; he investigated only one published Japanese case ( Stevenson, 1997, p. 519).By the release of Katsugoro, another nation and culture is firmly placed on the reincarnation research map, and a door into a new world of reincarnation experiences and attitudes generously opened: that of Japan.Despite the title, the first English-language reincarnation book by Ohkado Masayuki, following four in Japanese (Ohkado, 2010(Ohkado, , 2011(Ohkado, , 2015a;;Ohkado & Ikegawa, 2015), not only reports the cases of Katsugoro and others, but places them within the context of reincarnation-related aspects of Japanese culture and cultural history, and the history of Japanese reincarnation research, and makes some theoretical points as well.Katsugoro also offers the third distinct culturally-mediated authorial approach to reincarnation I have seen.What I mean by this: In a review I wrote of now-retired Indian reincarnation researcher Satwant Pasricha's first book (Pasricha, 1990(Pasricha, , 2019)), I noted subtle differences in tone and sometimes content between the writing of a scientist raised in a culture that matter-of-factly considers reincarnation real, and that of Stevenson and other Western scientists, who were raised in a culture that rejects reincarnation as a non-scientific belief that originated in Asia.In short, the two opposed views underlie the texts as defaults which the authors argue should be, respectively, enshrined in science as well as religion through scientific testing or challenged and possibly refuted through scientific testing (Wehrstein, 2019).Ohkado's third tonal approach might be seen as somewhere in between, reflecting Japan's national ambivalence about reincarnation that he also reports.(In a 2018 survey he cites, 63.7% of Japanese reported no religion while 32.1% reported they were Buddhist.)One does not see a reincarnationist subtext as strong as Pasricha's, but, as if expecting greater acceptance by the reader of his reincarnationist bent, Ohkado is unafraid to include personal content, explaining in the preface how he entered the field, and in the afterword sharing personal experiences with past-life memory, both his own and those of his daughter-something most Western academic reincarnation researchers wouldn't dream of doing, lest they be tarred as unobjective.