Human Engineering reading lists include material on suggestion, automatic writing, tulpas and the real-world Philip experiment, in which participants attempted to generate apparent responses from a fictional personality through collective belief.

The sensational theory is that Kokushi attempted to create “worker personalities” psychologically before reproducing them physically.

A less supernatural explanation may be more plausible: false-memory research, fabricated coworkers, group conditioning and experiments testing how readily staff accept a personnel identity they are told already exists.