One of the most memorable scenes in the Ring is the grainy, black-and-white flashback of Yamamura Shizuko's psychic demonstration being held in Tokyo. In the demonstration, Shizuko (played by Masako, at left) is branded a fraud, after which she falls into despondency and commits suicide a year later. What you probably don't know is that this event, and the character of Yamamura Shizuko herself, is based on a real person.

Mifune Chizuko was born in 1886 in Kumamoto Prefecture. By 1909, rumors of her powers of foresight, which developed one day while practicing a kind of meditation involving deep breathing, had begun to spread throughout Kumamoto and beyond. These rumors eventually reached the ear of one Fukurai Tomokichi, Assistant Professor of Psychology at the prestigious Tokyo University. Fukurai had a deep interest in the supernatural, and used Chizuko as one of his test subjects in proving the validity of extra-sensory perception-- the culmination of which was the infamous public demonstration held 15 September, 1910.

While the actual demonstration was free of the fatality portrayed in the movie, Chizuko-- like Shizuko-- was accused of being a charlatan, a blow from which she never recovered. Whereas Shizuko committed suicide by throwing herself into an active volcano, Mifune Chizuko ended her life in 1911 by ingesting poison. She was 25.

Shizuko's choice to end her life as she did may also have been inspired by true events. In 1933, a young girl named Matsumoto Kiyoko commited suicide by throwing herself into Mt. Mihara. In the months following this act, some three hundred persons would go on to kill themselves in the same manner.

Incidentally, just one year before Chizuko's death, another young psychic was born that would later rise to prominence for her gift of nensha, the focusing of will to produce an image on film or some other medium. Her name-- Takahashi Sadako.