mshilarious, I'm not making an ad hominem comparison; I'm comparing the degree of substance behind the two alleged controversies, and saying that in the audio engineering community this isn't generally considered to be one at all. Rather, the limits of the human auditory range are generally considered to be elementary, well proven and well settled--even the Oohashi study that you refer to cites sources to that effect across a range of 55 years in its first sentence.
It's just as in biology, where evolution isn't generally considered controversial. Creationists are a tiny minority among scientists, but almost any creationist will sincerely believe that a much larger number of scientists agrees with him.
That is a very understandable human attitude, I find. Few of us can say "I believe in something which the vast majority of knowledgeable people utterly reject on the basis of overwhelming evidence," without varnishing it with such additional layers of goop as, "Genius is always belittled, and truth must struggle to come to light in a sea of darkness ..."
I'm fond of people who have unusual and non-conforming ideas, yet in my circle of audio engineering acquaintances I can think of only one person who definitely believes in the audibility of sound above 20 kHz, and he was the director of sales and marketing at Earthworks (Eric Blackmer). At least his commercial activity was consistent with his ideals!
I've got the published report of the Oohashi study right here; I anted up and paid the download fee to the American Physiological Society five years ago and read the whole thing. It does NOT claim that people can hear above the 22 or 26 kHz cutoffs that were used in the experiments; in fact the authors continually use the word "inaudible" to describe such energy. They ran EEGs and PET scans which did seem to show significant neurological responses, but not auditory ones, and the authors were at a complete loss to explain the effect. No one has come up with any explanation since then, either. (Nor to my knowledge have any results such as this been duplicated by any other experimenters.)
What is most notable to me is what was not said, however. In published studies that are much more straightforward than this one, whenever you filter out the high frequencies from a recording using all-pass filters so as to control the phase below the cutoff point and keep it comparable for A versus B, you get a rapidly diminishing ability for listeners to determine whether the highs have been cut off or not as you get to about 12 kHz. By the time you raise the cutoff to 16 kHz there are very few people--including trained engineers and musicians--who can reliably tell you whether higher-frequency energy is present or not.
In this study, the participants listened to music that was filtered at 22 or 26 kHz--yet they readily assigned adjectives describing different sound quality to the "full-range sound" versus the "high-cut sound." This strongly suggests that the sound in the audible range wasn't the same, but I see no sign in the published report that the experimenters did anything to verify this one way or the other. And it's not that hard to do.
Enough is enough about this. I didn't volunteer to take on all comers; I'm just trying to say that if and when sampling rates above 44.1 kHz have any audible advantage, it's not because higher audio frequencies are being conveyed. There aren't any higher audio frequencies--because higher frequencies are not audio frequencies.
--best regards