Born in Yokohama, Japan, Emoto graduated from Yokohama Municipal University with courses in International Relations. "In 1986, he established the I.H.M. Corporation in Tokyo and is currently the head of the I.H.M. General Research Institute, Inc., the President of I.H.M., Inc., and the chief representative of I.H.M.'s HADO Fellowship". In 1992 he received certification as a Doctor of Alternative Medicine from the Open International University for Alternative Medicine in India, an unaccredited institute with minimal academic requirements. "Subsequently, he was introduced to the concept of micro-cluster water and Magnetic Resonance Analysis technology in the United States, which began his quest to discover the mystery of water".

Emoto is President Emeritus of the International Water For Life Foundation, a 501 non-profit organization based in Oklahoma City, founded in 2005. He has three children with his wife Kazuko,.

Emoto's water crystal experiments consist of exposing water in glasses to different words, pictures, or music, and then freezing and examining the aesthetics of the resulting crystals with microscopic photography. Emoto claims that there are "many differences in the crystalline structure of the water" depending on the type of water source, which were taken from all over the world. For example, a water sample from a "pristine mountain" stream would purportedly show a "geometric" design that is "beautifully" shaped when frozen. On the other hand, "polluted water" sources will supposedly show a "definite distortion" and will be "randomly formed".

Commentators have criticized Emoto for insufficient experimental controls, and for not sharing enough details of his approach with the scientific community. In addition, Emoto has been criticized for designing his experiments in ways that leave them open to human error influencing his findings.

In the day-to-day work of his group, the creativity of the photographers rather than the rigor of the experiment is an explicit policy of Emoto. Emoto freely acknowledges that he is not a scientist, and that photographers are instructed to select the most pleasing photographs.

In 2003, James Randi publicly offered Emoto one million dollars if his results can be reproduced in a double-blind study.

In 2005, Kristopher Setchfield from the Natural Science Department at Vermont published a paper that analyzed deeper motives regarding Emoto's study. In his paper, Kristopher writes,

Unfortunately for his credibility with the scientific community, Dr. Emoto sells products based on his claims. For example, the products page of Emoto's Hado website is currently offering "geometrically perfect" "Indigo water" that is "highly charged hexagonally structured concentrate," and supposedly creates "structured water" that is "more easily assimilated at the cellular level" for $35 for an eight-ounce bottle. Without providing scientific research references for the allegedly amazing qualities of his Indigo Water, Emoto's commercial venture calls to mind ethical concerns regarding his intent and motivation...questions that would not be present if any scientist had published research supporting his claims.

In 2006, Emoto published a paper together with Dean Radin and others in the peer reviewed Explore: The Journal of Science and Healing. They describe that in a double blind test approximately 2000 people in Tokyo could increase the aesthetic appeal of water stored in a room in California, compared to water in another room, solely through their positive intentions.

Triple-blind study

A better-controlled "triple-blind" follow-up study published in the Journal of Scientific Exploration did not yield positive results. More than 1,900 of Mr. Emoto's followers focused gratitude on water bottles in a vault over a period of three days. The water was then frozen and compared to two different sets of controls in a very elaborate protocol. The crystals, both "treated" and not, on average, were not considered to be particularly beautiful (scoring 1.7 on a scale of 0 to 6, where 6 was very beautiful). The treated crystals were also rated slightly less beautiful than a set of controls. An objective comparison of contrast did not reveal any significant differences among the samples.

There were, however, potential problems with the "triple-blind" follow up. As the study explains:

"In any experiment involving intention, the intentions of the "investigators" cannot be cleanly isolated from those of the nominal participants and this in turn constrains how one should properly interpret the results. In addition, there were many uncontrolled degrees of freedom in this experiment which may have allowed ‘‘unintended intentional’’ effects to creep in. They all involve human decisions, e.g. selecting six specific bottles of water from a huge population of available bottles, randomly assigning those bottles to three conditions, selecting and preparing the water drops, placing the water drop samples inside the freezer, searching for and photographing ice crystals on the frozen water drops at different magnification levels, choosing one of a largepossible set of image processing algorithms to provide an objective measure of image contrast, and so on." (Journal of Scientific Exploration Vol. 22, No. 4, pp. 481—493, 2008).

Emoto claims to have sold 2 million copies of his books.

• Messages from Water, Vol. 1 (June 1999), Hado Publishing, ISBN 4-939098-00-1
• Messages from Water, Vol. 2 (November 2001), Sunmark Pub. ISBN 0-7881-2927-9
• The Hidden Messages in Water (April 2004 Eng., 2001 Jap.), Beyond Words Publishing ISBN 1-58270-162-8
• The Message from Water III: Love Thyself (January 2006), published by Hay House ISBN 1-4019-0899-3
• Water Crystal Healing: Music & Images to Restore Your Well Being (17 October 2006), published by Atria Books ISBN 1-58270-156-3
• The Shape of Love: Discovering Who We Are, Where We Came From, and Where We are Going, Doubleday, 2007. ISBN 978-0-385-51837-6