If supernatural beings are a form of energy strongly connected to violent death and tragic events of the past, then Japan is the perfect breeding place for such phenomena, says Lilly Fields, a "certified paranormal investigator" who has lived in Japan for more than 25 years.
"Tokyo in particular is a city with a history of catastrophe and death," says Fields. "Blood is everywhere: numerous bloody samurai uprisings, hara-kiri, fire-bombings, modern-day suicide. The capital was racked by earthquakes and terrible fires all through the Edo Period, the death toll often reaching into the tens of thousands. Dead bodies were thrown into mass graves without the proper funerary rites performed to allow the souls to move on. These makeshift graveyards are located everywhere underfoot.
"From the beginning of the 17th century, the Tokugawa shogunate employed feng shui in city planning to make the capital into a kind of a spiritual power center. That, along with certain favorable environmental conditions such as dampness and seismic activity, turned the city into a vortex of ghosts and paranormal activity."