Between stars and side streets: meet five fortune tellers in Tokyo

On Instagram, Gaku’s ‘Kaiunscope’ looks like an astrology column styled by a Harajuku fashion editor: star signs paired with graveur-style portraits of women shot in collaboration with Hysteric Glamour, captions that feel less like warnings and more like moodboards for the week ahead. Off-screen, he’s mostly a writer – a professional horoscope guy who treats birth charts like layered outfits.

When he meets someone, he doesn’t just see a Leo or a Virgo; he clocks how their voice moves, how they react, which parts of them feel Aries-fast or Cancer-soft, then later matches it with the chart. Some people are a clean cluster of planets in one sign, easy to recognise even before he checks the data. Others are all over the zodiac, harder to pin until he’s been talking to them for a while.

Being based in Tokyo means Gaku is basically sitting on the frontline of trends, which he cross-references with planetary shifts when he writes. These days he only does in-person readings at events or at Harajuku café Baggage around New Year, where regulars come for his oversized ‘first half of the year’ horoscopes and a coffee among people who take star talk as seriously as streetwear drops.

Madame Aires’ shop in Ikebukuro feels like you’ve stepped into a small, self-contained universe that smells faintly of incense and candle wax. She stacks the room with oils, charms and other small occult objects you can actually take away with you along with a reading in whatever divination you decide. Her story starts in a classic way: a mother who was already a respected fortune-teller, clients lined up on Tuesdays and Fridays, and a kid watching from the sidelines promising herself she’d end up doing the same – and one day be on TV.

Decades later, she’s exactly that: a spiritual worker with 27 years of experience, TV credits, and a practice she describes as ‘spiritual guidance plus intuitive art’. The tools are tarot, numerology, palmistry, energy reading and her own 22-card system, but the vibe is more therapist-meets-oracle. Clients range from public figures, salarymen and OLs to tourists who stumbled in off a Fuji Television recommendation, all asking the same core questions: love, work, and ‘what am I supposed to be doing with my life.’

She’s very clear that what she does isn’t just entertainment; for a lot of her regulars, this is part of their mental-health routine; another way to process whatever Tokyo is throwing at them that week.

If Senrigan is one of Japan’s most accessible fortune-telling chains, Kazua is the medium you book when you’re ready to jump straight into the deep end. Trained in the US and UK, she works with what she calls ‘full-sensory’ abilities: clairvoyance, clairaudience, trance mediumship, and the whole toolkit you normally hear about in documentaries rather than in a booth above a shopping street.

Her sessions are less about ‘Will I get a promotion?’ and more about talking to your spirit guides, ancestors or whatever non-human entities have decided to loiter around your life. She reads auras, touches objects to pick up leftover energy, and tunes into what she calls ‘the view from above’ – bigger-picture advice on why you’re stuck and what needs to move. Her look is disarmingly stylish, more cool aunt from Kumamoto than stereotypical mystic, but she’s blunt when she needs to be. She’s also pretty relaxed about labels: to her, fortune-telling is just one language among many. The important part is whether the message lands; if it doesn’t sit right with you, she thinks you should feel free to throw it out and keep walking.

Amaryu starts her sessions by quietly adjusting your energy. You sit down, close your eyes, and she literally ‘burns off’ sadness, worry and fear before you even get to the first question. She grew up seeing the dead as clearly as the living and only realised that wasn’t normal around sixth grade, when a casual ghost story sent her classmates screaming. Her family line is packed with healers and people who ‘saved lives’ in more practical ways, so ending up as a spiritual counsellor, medium and exorcist feels like a continuation of that work.

Before this, she was a nursery teacher and early-years educator, listening to crying parents in staff rooms and helping them leave with their shoulders a little lighter. Now her clients are everyone from teenagers to retirees whose lives have gone full soap-opera: affairs, divorces, toxic work, illnesses nobody can diagnose. She talks to their ancestors and guides, lets them bawl through the ugliest parts, then slowly steers them back into a version of themselves that feels like an ‘inner princess’ instead of a background extra. In her eyes, the biggest misunderstanding about fortune-tellers is that they’re there to scare you or dictate your fate; she sees herself more as a mechanic clearing out emotional gunk so people can remember they were born to be happy in the first place.

At first glance, Yume Uzuki looks like the classic ‘all-rounder’ you see on big uranai sites: she works with tarot, numerology, Western astrology, feng shui, various oracle decks, crystal scrying, aura reading, hypnosis-based therapies and more, all under the Heartful chain that runs reading spaces in Tokyo’s downtown.

Her connection to this world started early, when she was the kid in class pulling tarot cards during recess. Later, while working in sales, she turned into the unofficial counsellor of her office – the person coworkers visited when they needed direction, encouragement, or a read on whatever felt ‘off’.

Yume’s style is steady and intuitive, with a slightly eccentric charm. She focuses a lot on ‘reading the space around someone’ – the timing, mood, and subtle signals people give off when they’re unsure – and pairs it with practical advice you can actually use. Her sessions feel calm, structured and unexpectedly grounding. She’s the reader you visit when you want someone who has seen every kind of situation, listens closely, and gives you something clear to walk away with.