“Where did you come from before you were born to our house?” eight-year-old Katsugoro asked his brother and sister. To his surprise, neither of them remembered a previous life as he did. In this book, the linguist and parapsychologist Ohkado Masayuki examines this and other historical Japanese cases suggestive of reincarnation, alongside his own contemporary research into the phenomenon. One of his most impressive cases involves two-year-old Takeharu, who remembered being killed on a battleship in World War II. The author’s efforts to verify the memories and to discover the identities of the past personalities are ingenious.

The majority of the cases involve Japanese children, though some remember past lives in countries they had never visited: three-year-old Tomo recalled a former life in Scotland working in his family’s restaurant. Two-year-old Akane recalled being a Hindu who died in a fire in India. Conversely, there are cases of non-Japanese children remembering past lives in Japan. Some of the children also remember the state between lives, and the transition to their present life. Their accounts bear striking similarities to near-death experiences: leaving the body, traveling to other realms, and meeting spiritual beings.

These moving accounts show that the little ones around us are conscious spiritual beings, who have had profound extraordinary experiences. The author concludes that the evidence strongly favors the reality of those experiences. In the tradition of Prof. Ian Stevenson, this book makes a valuable contribution to reincarnation research.

Ohkado Masayuki is a parapsychologist and linguistics professor in the Department of Language and Cultures at Chubu University in Japan. He has been a visiting professor at M.I.T, at the University of Amsterdam, and in the Division of Perceptual Studies, University of Virginia. Ohkado is active in Japanese parapsychological circles, and is an award-winning author of numerous articles and several books relating to reincarnation, xenoglossy, and near-death experiences. His books (all in Japanese) include We Can Be Reborn (2015), A Study of Spirituality, with Special Reference to Xenoglossy (2011), and A Scientific Approach to ‘What Happens When a Person Dies?’ (2010).  Afterworlds Press is proud to publish his first book in English, Katsugoro and Other Reincarnation Cases in Japan.