ABSTRACT
A social environment in which religion plays a role may be conducive to the children developing an awareness of spiritual concepts from an early age but the child also has a choice whether or not to believe. Children constitute a substantial proportion of any population but still relatively little is known about childhood religious experiences. Consultation of Kokkuri-san is the Japanese equivalent to Ouija boards. The main difference is that the Japanese use either a tripod of chopsticks or else a coin, within a circle consisting of the fifty-two 'letters' in the Japanese hiragana syllabic 'alphabet'. This chapter explains three main reasons why people consulted Kokkuri-san and why they had done. It explores the common kind of divination in Japan is known as mikuji: in 2001, 57.3 per cent of pre-teens, 48.9 per cent of teenagers and 57.4 per cent of adults said that they regularly consulted mikuji oracles.
