COLUMN ONE : Cars? No, Japan Buys Our Gurus : As Japanese search for meaning in their lives, Americans are happy to sell it to them. New Age psychics, channelers and healers are doing a bang-up business there.

In a packed room in this city’s fashionable Aoyama district, the blond took a deep breath, removed his tortoise-shell glasses and seemed to enter a trance. Moments later, his face reddened. His body convulsed.

Voila!

Richard Lavin, a chirpy Hawaiian, was now an ageless entity named Ecton who spoke in a British-sounding accent and reeled off otherworldly advice. To one forlorn woman who asked whether she should quit a boring job, he counseled: “Don’t float away, but float away if you want. You’re a goddess. You can do whatever you want.” The woman wiped away tears, moved by the message.

For such pearls of wisdom, she and 200 other Japanese paid $65 each. And that’s a steal, compared with the going rate of $400 an hour or more being charged for private readings by a parade of American psychics, channelers and healers who are exporting to Japan an unlikely product: the New Age movement.

It is making its mark here as the Japanese begin to grope for meaning in their lives, something beyond the materialism of Gucci bags and Tiffany pendants. Japan has risen to become one of the richest, most technologically advanced nations in the world. Yet, commentators here say, rapid postwar changes in the traditional family and society have created a spiritual emptiness, prompting many Japanese to turn to the new gods of the metaphysical movement.

Into this void, in the last few years, has emerged a bazaar of New Age merchants, launching self-development magazines such as You Can, Fila and Nao. They are sponsoring seminars on everything from healing with crystals to swimming with dolphins. They are also bringing over a steady stream of speakers, including actress Shirley MacLaine’s channeler, Kevin Ryerson.

Academicians are studying the New Age movement, television shows are covering it, magazines are writing about it. Last year, in a year-end survey of Japanese news outlets, “channeling”--or chaneringu , as the Japanese call it-- was chosen as one of the “key words of 1991.”

And book firms can’t keep up with the demand. Ten years ago, for instance, the religious book publisher Shunjusha Publishing Co. published only titles on traditional Japanese religions, such as Shintoism and Buddhism.

But in a reflection of the shift in reader interest, 70% of the firm’s titles today are related to New Age--most translated books from the West, senior editor Moriya Okano said. Okano, who first introduced to Japanese audiences Ken Wilbur, an American guru of the transpersonal psychology movement, also publishes books on everything from new physics to holistic healing.

Japanese devouring New Age material seem willing to pay mind-boggling prices for it. Lavin, the Hawaiian channeler, charges $460 for a one-hour private session, more than three times the going price in the United States. Ryerson offered a three-day seminar here recently for $3,800--10 times what a similar seminar might cost in America (though the price included breakfast, hotel and a private session).

Maria Papapetros of Beverly Hills, the “psychic to the stars” who has consulted for “Ghost” and other films and taught the likes of Demi Moore how to meditate, flies to Tokyo every few months for private readings. She is also trying to pin down a contract to supply meditation tapes for this stressed-out society.

Papapetros charges her Japanese clients twice her $150 American rate. But her agent claims the fee is necessary to keep up with the psychic competition here. “Some of the Japanese psychics here charge $800 an hour,” said Naoko Iwai, Papapetros’ agent in Tokyo. Others noted that foreign channelers must include the cost of translators, plane fare, hotel and the organizer’s fee.

In any case, no one here seems to be complaining. In fact, Elizabeth Nickerson’s clients are so grateful that they push presents and extra money on her, said the New York-born channeler, perhaps the only foreigner in Japan who channels in Japanese. She is constantly receiving gifts, ranging from fruit to pyramid statues to rings and necklaces.

“They look on a channeler here as someone who will fix their lives in an hour, and they literally are willing to pay anything, no matter how much it is,” said Nickerson, who came to Japan eight years ago to teach English but began full-time channeling 18 months ago.

Nickerson, whose business card describes her as a “universal counselor,” is booked as much as three months in advance. She earns more than $7,700 a month--”more than a doctor”--working 22 hours a week, seeing as many as five or six people a day, four days a week. She claims to channel more than 100 entities, including Jesus Christ and an entity named Ashtar who speaks from his spaceship in another dimension.

Wiwoho, an Indonesian channeler, was fully booked for his weeklong visits to Japan in June and July; Wiwoho has begun “channeling by mail” to soak up the extra demand. And Frank Alper, a channeler from Phoenix, is booked for his next two weeklong visits to Japan, seeing five to six clients a day. He won’t be available until next spring.

In a sense, there is nothing new about New Age for the Japanese, who have a long religious tradition of seers and shamans, communicating with the dead, reincarnation and karma.

“These are things we Japanese have had from time immemorial. It’s like we’re just reverting back to our Shinto roots,” said Kikuko Nakagawa, editor of the magazine You Can.

But Naoyuki Sekino, a New Age pioneer here, said the Japanese are particularly drawn to the American movement because it is more light and bright than Japan’s gloomy mysticism.

Buddhist monks, for example, may foretell disaster for a family if they don’t follow certain rituals, or they may rap disciples with a stick across their backs if they flag in their Zen meditation poses. But American New Age disciples spread a positive message of planetary love, unlimited potential and “freeing yourself to be creative individuals,” said Sekino, whose wife, Ayako, is one of the most popular Japanese channelers.

Another pioneer, Jun Hoshikawa, for instance, traveled to Kyoto to study esoteric Buddhism but found that traditional teachings “suppressed your natural tendencies” in the struggle for enlightenment. In 1973, after hanging out for three months in New Age centers around the United States, including in California and New Mexico, he discovered the more liberating approach of “go with the flow” after meeting a disciple of the late Indian guru the Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh.

From then, Hoshikawa became one of Japan’s first and most eminent translators of foreign New Age material. He has translated more than 50 titles, ranging from Rajneesh to Ken Wilbur; he has written two books and publishes an ecology magazine from his idyllic mountain retreat in the southern island of Yakushima.

“Japanese culture is very strong in struggling and suppressing,” Hoshikawa said. “The shift in message, from struggle to surrender, was very shocking, fresh and new.”

The main message of Bashar, an entity enormously popular in Japan who is said to be channeled by Darryl Anka of Los Angeles, is: “Do something that excites you most.” For Japanese trapped in the complicated web of social duty and obligation, that message is highly seductive.

“All my life, I was raised with the idea that I should take care of my parents, get married to a good salary man (businessman), have two children,” said Yuko Hayashi, 24, an office worker who attended the recent Ecton channeling session. “But Ecton and others say I should honor myself and follow my own dreams.”

Indeed, during Ecton’s question-and-answer session, an office worker said she wanted to live alone and begin an independent life but felt trapped by obligations to her elderly mother.

Ecton responded: “My friend, whom are you responsible to? Taking responsibility for others isn’t bad, but it’s to forget who you are responsible for and that’s you.” This seemed to touch a chord in the crowd of mostly women; several pulled out hankies and dabbed at red-rimmed eyes.

For Yoko Yoshikawa, 37, the advent of New Age in Japan provided welcome confirmation of her own thinking, as well as a plethora of like-minded companions. Drawn by the metaphysical world as early as age 4, when she would pore over picture books of Buddha, Yoshikawa, a management consultant, firmly believed in the idea that “you have the power to realize yourself whatever you desire.”

But that message, along with an emphasis on individual character and originality, marked her as an oddball in the group society, she said. Indeed, in high school, one friend ended their friendship because she did not want to be tainted by the radical thinking. Now Yoshikawa finds that her thinking is in vogue.

In that sense, the New Age thinking being brought to these shores is radically different from traditional Japanese spiritual concepts. Rather than relying solely on the authority of an external God or Buddha figure, New Age adherents are urging the Japanese to follow their own voice within.

“Many channelers come to Japan and say, ‘Trust yourself, ask yourself,’ ” Sekino said. “We’re not used to that. It was always, ‘Ask your seniors, your scientists, your politicians, your parents.’ ”

As a result, in this group-think, authority-centered society, the New Age message amounts to revolution.

“New Age thinking has tremendous transformative power for Japanese society,” said Takaki Takatori, a Shunjusha editor, who added, “If this spiritual movement really spreads, the basic structure of our society could collapse and be organized in a different way.”

That is unlikely to occur soon. For one thing, the numbers of the New Age faithful are still relatively small. Tokyo University religion professor Susumu Shimazono estimates that the believers number in the “hundreds of thousands” in a nation of 125 million; that compares, for example, with the several million followers of the Soka Gakkai religion.

Still, Shimazono guesses that the percentage of New Age believers is higher in Japan than in the United States and may well spread more rapidly. The reason: There is no organized force against New Age in Japan, such as the array of established religions in the United States that see channelers and their ilk as messengers of Satan.

The task of loyal opposition here still falls largely to the foreign missionaries, such as evangelical Christian preacher Kenny Joseph. Joseph, who has been in Japan for 41 years, says the Japanese are simply getting ripped off by the American psychics--not to mention being misled by the devil.

“Everybody’s got the idea that Japan is rich, so they figure why should they waste time on poor Americans? It’s like, ‘Why should I flip hamburgers when I can make $20 an hour teaching English here?’ That mentality has gotten to the New Agers,” Joseph said.

Another reason that the New Age movement is not likely to transform society anytime soon is because it is still in its infant stages, more than a decade behind the United States. As a result, many Japanese are still looking for a guru-like figure to tell them what to do, rather than truly developing their own sense of self.

“Japanese don’t have an inner voice. New Age movement followers are seeking channelers as a new authority figure,” Kurimoto said.

Japanese folklorist Takahiro Otsuki, a lecturer at Tokyo Gaigo University, added that most of his students lack a sense of self and are attracted not so much to the New Age message as to having a group to belong to.

For many Japanese, the New Age message is not an easy fit.

“Japan has a strict or solid social order, so it’s hard for them to accept the looseness that characterizes the New Age movement,” Okano said. “And New Age therapy encourages the release of emotions, which Japanese don’t do in daily life.”

So far, Nickerson said, the majority of her clients are seeking not grand personal transformations nor answers to the riddles of the universe, but pretty mundane information.

“They want to know whether they should quit their job. Why are they having problems with their mother-in-law? ‘Why hasn’t my husband had sex with me for six months?’ I do a lot of sexual counseling,” said Nickerson.

The New Age movement began to take off in Japan about five years ago. The reasons can be explained in two words: MacLaine and Bashar. Shirley MacLaine’s book “Out on a Limb” sold more than 200,000 copies, taking the publishing world by surprise. Soon after, Masumi Hori began a company called Voice and began translating the works of Bashar, the entity channeled by Anka. The three-volume set sold 300,000 copies.

And the movement is beginning to spread outside Tokyo. In Osaka, a new group called One was launched in December by Danny Manheim, an Israeli doctor of Chinese medicine, and Nobuhiko Sato, a Japanese real-estate baron. They are offering similar workshops and speakers from around the world, including “crystal healer” Dale Walker and “Ixaca,” an entity channeled by Verlaine Crawford of Los Angeles.

The Osaka group also plans to build a series of New Age resorts combining vacationlike leisure with studies in nutrition and meditation, healing and channeling. Next year, they hope to open what Manheim called an “Esalen of Japan,” referring to the metaphysical study center in Big Sur.

For spiritual healers like Nickerson, there is much work to do and not a moment to waste.

“There is a lot of pain here,” she said. “Americans use their emotions, but the Japanese can’t express them. People are unhappy. They can’t escape.”

Chiaki Kitada, a researcher in The Times’ Tokyo bureau, contributed to this report.