Japanese Research on "Pokémon Panic" Confirms Conclusion of CSICOP Researcher

AMHERST, NY July 29, 2004 -- In December 1997, thousands of Japanese children were stricken with a rash of ailments, including seizures and fits of vomiting. The incident was attributed to the wildly popular children's animated action series Pokémon. In the May/June 2001 issue of Skeptical Inquirer, managing editor Benjamin Radford discussed the incident in his article, "The Pokémon Panic of 1997." Radford's diagnosis at the time: mass hysteria. Now, a letter in last week's New England Journal of Medicine has validated his conclusions. In the letter, Dr. Akihisa Okumura reported that, in a sampling of the children affected, most have not had any more seizures unless they were epileptic.

For years the episode was shrouded in mystery: the media widely regarded the 1997 Pokémon incident as either an unexplainable episode or a rash of epileptic seizures, but they overlooked the phenomenon of mass hysteria as an explanation for the strange epidemic. But mass hysteria is a group phenomenon, so how does it explain thousands of children at home independently falling ill? "The answer," Radford explained, "is that the Pokémon seizures didn't just occur at one time." The phenomenon unfolded in stages, and understanding the chronology is key.

At 6:30 p.m., December 16, 1997, episode 38 of Pokémon—"Computer Polygon Warrior"—aired in Japan. An animated battle featured strobe-like animation that the Japanese media suggested was the ultimate cause of the outbreak. By 7:30 p.m., 618 children had been taken to the hospital complaining of a variety of symptoms: trance-like states, shortness of breath, nausea, convulsions, and vomiting. The television media covered these incidents later that same evening, and several stations replayed the flashing sequence—whereupon even more children fell ill. News accounts in the following days stated that 12,000 eventually became ill; 700 had seizures.

On December 17th, the media published front-page, headline stories about the occurrence. The number of cases skyrocketed only after the media reported the initial few hundred incidents the public, and only after the children had a chance to interact at school—a common place for outbreaks of mass hysteria—the following day. "Once the children had a chance to hear panicky accounts of what happened through the media, their friends, and their schools," writes Radford, "the number of kids reported the next day [December 18 … shot up [by a staggering 12,000 cases." There were clearly some actual episodes of seizures, but the majority of the attacks appear to be the result of mass hysteria.

A letter, "Five Years after the ‘Pocket Monster' Seizures," published in the July 22, 2004 issue of The New England Journal of Medicine, discussed the results of a follow-up study. The study followed up on ninety-one "Pokémon patients" in the five years following the incident, and found that the majority of patients had not had any more seizures. Of the patients who had experienced repeat episodes, about half had been diagnosed with epilepsy; the rest may have had an underlying predisposition to having seizures.

Skeptical Inquirer is the official journal of the Committee for the Scientific Investigation of Claims of the Paranormal (CSICOP), a nonprofit scientific and educational organization founded in 1976 by Paul Kurtz, Isaac Asimov, Carl Sagan and other prominent academics, scientists and writers. CSICOP encourages the critical investigation of paranormal and fringe-science claims from a responsible, scientific point of view.

For more information, contact John Gaeddert at (716) 636-1425 ext. 219, or Benjamin Radford at (716) 636-1425 ext. 331.





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