世論 What Japan Thinks

Trivia no Izumi has a silly wee survey they conducted with 100 kids aged around 6 or 7 I think. The idea was that their mothers gave them 10 yen to buy a sweetie from a shop, but the owner of the shop fumbled the coin dropping it into a box only to pull out a 100 yen and 500 yen coin, asking the kid to choose which one of the two he or she dropped. Apparently this is based on a famous children’s tale. Of course, all the children who lied were later being told off by their mother and went back to the shop to fix everything up.

The final result, as you can see from the graph to the right, is that 63 out of the 100 children were honest enough to admit that it was neither of these coins that they dropped; 29 said it was the 100 yen, 7 chose the 500 yen, and one kid with a promising career ahead as a yakuza (or a politician, I suppose) said both were his.

The hidden cameras captured the kids mulling over their thievery, with the most enterprising soul claiming the 100 yen first, going out to the Kinder Egg-like toy vending machine (what do you call them?) only to find it required 200 yen, so he returned inside and said it was actually the 500 yen coin he had dropped…