For more than a month the tabloid press has been obsessed with comedian Tomoko Nakajima, who apparently has squandered her career and whatever money it made her on the services of a self-styled fortune teller who effectively commandeered her life. In Japan, fortune tellers, or uranai-shi, do pretty much the same thing that fortune tellers do everywhere else in the world. They use supposedly timeless, spiritual or other non-scientific techniques to predict an individual's future. Uranai-shi have more of an accepted social position Japan than they do in a lot of other developed countries. A few, in fact, are bona fide stars whose advice is sought by the rich and famous, thus making them rich and famous, too.

A recent article in Asahi Shimbun discussed people who, like Nakajima, have become "addicted" to fortune tellers. About 80 percent of the people who patronize uranai-shi are women, the majority in their 30s. One told the newspaper that she first turned to uranai-shi when she needed advice about becoming a freelance writer. A fortune teller told her to get married instead, and she did, but the marriage didn't work and she divorced.

Despite what turned out to be bad advice she continued seeking counsel from fortune tellers, obsessed with what would happen to her in the future. She paid upward of ¥20,000 per session for two years and eventually amassed a debt of more than ¥3 million. In the end, she kicked her habit by studying the psychology of addiction, and now makes a living counseling fortune telling addicts like herself. Nice work if you can get it. She points out that the act of "regurgitating" emotions to a fortune teller is what makes the process so habit-forming. It's like a "tranquilizer" to ease the fear of the unknown, but since the fear is never directly dealt with it never goes away, and so the patron has to continue seeking advice.