The device, which fits neatly into a pocket, promises to alert its owners to the presence of eight different types of spectre, from “lost souls” to “evil spirits”.

Using a variety of carefully calibrated sensors — one of which claims to detect human fear — the machine will then inform users whether the ghost is malevolent or benign.

The ghost radar hits Japanese stores next week and will be available in Britain from next month for about £45. The timing of its release is critical: the Japanese ghost-spotting season is fast approaching, and, says its inventor, no summer campfire gathering will be complete without the detector. It also arrives at a time when belief in the supernatural is soaring in Japan, with growing numbers of people visiting fortune-tellers and snapping up guides to the paranormal.

“Ghosts are something deeply ingrained in Japanese culture,” said Kenji Koshida, the device’s inventor. “People talk about them all the time — especially engineers and other people you’d expect to live in the world of logic. I believe in them.” The device comes with a hefty instruction book rich with gobbledegook and describing how its invention came about. It explains that while, historically, certain fortunate people have been endowed with natural ghost-detecting talents, the ghost radar is for the great majority of us who possess no such powers.

Solid Alliance, the technology company that makes the gadget, has worked closely throughout the design process with GRX, a virtual study group that investigates “paranormal symptoms”. The same group is now collating a giant online database of what the first users of the radar have found.

The Times took the radar to two of the most notoriously haunted places in Tokyo. The first, in the middle of the Otemachi financial district, was Taira no Masakado, the shrine of a decapitated descendant of Emperor Kammu whose ghostly disembodied head will reportedly slay anyone attempting to move the monument. Even the presence of this unspeakable evil did not cause the ghost radar to flicker. It did, however, register a type-6 moving spirit as it passed a drinks vending machine about 250 metres away.

The radar was equally silent outside the Sengakuji temple, where the famous 47 Samurai are buried. Their mass suicide in disgust at Lord Kira’s cowardice is the stuff of legend, but after 300 years in the afterlife their tortured souls are evidently staying quiet.

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