The Wonder Belly Button (Fushigi no Heso) is a hypnosis café & bar in Shinjuku, named so because “the belly button is where we were once connected to our mothers via the umbilical cord. It’s a symbol of the center of the body, its core,” explained the bar’s proprietor and hypnotist Mr. Endo. “It’s also great for Googling. You look up Fushigi no Heso and my bar will be the first thing that comes up,” he adds with a laugh.
A Bit of Hypnotism to Go Along with Your Drink
For ¥1,000 per person, people between ages 20 and 40 can let Mr. Endo put them under hypnosis, and since I’d soon be ineligible for the experience, I decided now was the time to give it a go. After some tests and prep, we started with me closing my eyes and Mr. Endo putting my hands together as if in prayer, then squeezing my arms in a few places and telling me that, from now on, I wasn’t able to pull my hands apart. It didn’t work.
I was adamant about not “playing along” and determining if I really could be hypnotized so, since I could move my hands, I did. Mr. Endo didn’t seem to mind and tried something new, moving his fingers in front of my lips as if closing a zipper, and telling me I could no longer speak. I told him “Sorry.”
Unfazed, he closed my eyes and announced I could no longer open them. I was ready to look at him apologetically. The problem was that I couldn’t open my eyes. I was fully conscious but the “open eyes” signal my brain normally sent to the muscles in my face wasn’t getting through.
This only lasted a few seconds and I was ultimately able to open my eyes but it was a bit of a struggle at the end. I don’t know if it was something in his voice but, for a brief time, I did not have full control of my body. That seems to have broken the seal.
During the next exercise, Mr. Endo pushed down on my drink and said that it now weighed hundreds of kilos, and, same as before, for the first few seconds, part of my body was a stranger to me. My hand was convinced that the glass did indeed weigh a ton before finally my conscious mind broke through and I was able to lift it.
How Mr. Endo’s Hypnotism Works
“Being under hypnosis is like a different state of consciousness,” Mr. Endo explains before we began. “It’s like runner’s high. When your mind starts working differently and your body is able to do things out of the ordinary. It’s a little like that.”
A phrase that he kept using was “the zone,” where people can perform great feats without thinking about them. It’s common with sportspeople or actors who can empty their minds of all unnecessary thoughts and sink a flawless 3-point basket or cry on demand.
According to Mr. Endo, they’re the easiest kind of people to hypnotize since they are used to “entering a different zone of consciousness,” which is apparently the essence of hypnosis.
Writing this now, I’m wondering if Mr. Endo didn’t tailor his explanation to me. I’m a skeptic by nature, and though I came to the bar with an open mind and the full intention of giving the experience a fair shake, part of me had doubts.
Maybe Mr. Endo was able to sense that. In a profession such as his, reading people is a crucial skill, so perhaps something told him that I needed to hear a practical explanation based on reality. I know about “the zone” from my years of endurance swimming. I know it’s real. So maybe hypnosis is as well? Perhaps this was the primer that made the entire experience possible.
We stopped after the glass lifting exercise. Mr. Endo was sad to announce that this was as far as I was able to go.
“Hypnosis is a very individual experience. It works for some, but not always to the same degree,” he says. “With Americans only about 10-15% of the people can get hypnotized. For Europeans, it’s about 20-25%. But with Japanese people and the rest of Asia, it’s probably 70-80%. It’s all cultural. Westerners are very decisive. They think in black and white. Yes and No. This or That. But we Japanese people, we think in shades of gray. We’re open to changing our minds.”
This is also why Mr. Endo prefers not to work with people over 40. By the time you hit that age, a lot of your personality becomes set in stone and it becomes harder to enter the zone. Apparently, though, if I were still in my 20s, I could have gone below the first level.
“The first layer is about controlling a person’s movement,” he claims. “When you’re there, you can tell someone to not move or that they can’t lift a small object. Go deeper and you get to the second layer. There, you can control what a person feels.
“You can make them not feel the coldness of a chilled glass or things like that,” he continues. “The third, deepest layer is the memory. When you’re down at the memory level, you can basically do anything. I have to be very careful when I’m on the memory level. I can make you forget your father’s name.”
I’m still not sure that I believe that. But after my own experience with hypnosis, I probably disbelieve it less than before my visit to the Wonder Belly Button. Unfortunately, you need to know Japanese to see how deep into the zone you can get because the experience does not work through an interpreter. We checked.
As Mr. Endo says, “Hypnosis is language.” If you do speak Japanese and decide to give it a go but it doesn’t work out, the Wonder Belly Button also has a drink and food menu as well as electric hookahs. It additionally offers Tarot readings and sells power stones so, one way or another, maybe you will find a little bit of magic there.
