Objective : The author investigated interpretation of various spontaneous cases of precognition which were widespread among people. Method : Using an original questionnaire about 30 factious precognitive stories which were similar to actual samples, female students of a college, junior college and vocational college (18-22 years old, N=345) responded interpretation (scoring of four typical categories, i.e. fiction, psychiatric symptom, accidental coincidence and paranormal phenomena, in condition that sum of them are 100) and/or popularity of the stories. Results : These stories were interpreted differently according to the precognitive style and the background condition. Frequency of the precognition correlated positively to the interpretation of accidental coincidence, and so negatively to the explanation of fiction and psychiatric symptom. Popularity of the stories contributed to the paranormal scores. Conclusions : Various types of precognitive stories had specific profiles of interpretation.

There are few English reports dealing with contemporary Japanese research groups for anomalous phenomena. In this paper, the author describes the modern Japanese scene focusing on activities of academic or scientific groups. The most active researchers have experienced a number of social upheavals in their lives. Therefore, the author has taken the historical term "since World War II" and divided it into three parts as marked by two major impacts : the First Impact by Uri Geller and the Second Impact by modern Chinese research. Before these two impacts, psychologists and others were re-constructing and developing Japanese academic activities toward Western parapsychology. After the First Impact, engineers started studies on anomalous phenomena, too. With the Second Impact which is continuing today, researchers from various branches of science are studying qigong, including parapsychological phenomena. In present-day Japan, three academic societies are publishing scientific journals in which peer-reviewed articles appear. These societies have stimulated and activated other groups.

Twenty subjects, individually tested, in each of two experiments tried to guess a target from four reaction words to a stimulus word, completing a run of 43 PQAs (PQA : Paired Quadruplet Associates). Each experiment had a control series in which participants had no psi task and had only to say a word as a favorite or a habitual association. In the Experiment I the subjects obtained 233.7 hits with a deviation of +18.7,but not significant (CR=1.4,P<.17). However, a subject obtained a highly significant score of 20 as opposed to MCE of 10.75 ( CR=3.25,P<.002,though not corrected for selection). In Experiment II, the deviation was +10.7,again not significant but in a positive direction. All the controls got a score close to MCE.

Before the experiment the data base of the PQA was enlarged by adding 377 samples in 1933/94 classes to the earlier. The obtained scores were corrected by a formula to adjust them for the associational loads of the words to be selected.