世論 What Japan Thinks

Last August, Central Research Services, Inc performed a survey regarding the introduction of lay judges to the Japanese judicial system by questioning 1,384 adults from an initial pool of 2,000 by means of face-to-face interviews. This is the third time they have carried out this survey, once in 2003 and once in 2004, so the main text will compare this time’s results with previous results. The results were presented mainly as a textual report rather than raw data, so that is the way I too will present this translation.

The system of lay judges was passed into law in 2004 and is due to be introduced in 2009. One thing I always regretted when I lived back in the UK was never being asked to serve on a jury, as being a very civic-minded sort of person, seeing first-hand and participating in the legal process would be quite an honour to me. A friend of mine once sat on a jury for someone charged with nicking car radios. After the first and only day at trial, my friend went back to his car and found, rather ironically, that his radio had also been pinched.

The support for this new law, however, has grown weaker, shrinking from about half the population being behind it two years ago to now just over a third. In addition, as can be seen from the pie chart on the right, just one in twenty has the confidence in their own abilities to perform as a law judge.

Note that Japan has not had a trial by jury system since 1943.
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Central Research Services, Inc published a report two months ago regarding leisure activities. The format of their report differs from the usual survey results that I translate as first, they scale the figures up to reflect the whole population (the current population of Japan is somewhere around 127 million), and second, they present the data within a coherent narrative rather than just the usual data dump, so the amount of data available is rather limited. It does say, however, that they interviewed 3,000 people aged 15 and over at some point to get their data. The main data worth presenting is the ranking of participation in various activities, based on how many people from the survey group performed each activity at least once in 2004, so although the lottery, for instance, is high on the list, each participant only spends a couple of minutes per week (or even per year, as the end of year big draw is very, very popular), so if the table was sorted by the actual hours spent, it would look very, very different.

Eating out	72,400,000
Travel within Japan	60,800,000
Driving (or being driven)	55,100,000
Karaoke	49,200,000
Watching videos	48,700,000
Doing the lottery	45,900,000
Personal computing (games, etc)	44,300,000
Cinema	43,900,000
Listening to music	42,400,000
Visiting gardens, museums, zoos	40,600,000
Gardening	37,500,000
Bars, pubs, and other drinking establishments	37,300,000
Bowling	32,000,000
Amusement parks	31,900,000
Physical exercise	30,700,000
Picnic, hiking, hill walking	30,600,000
Board or card games	30,300,000
Console games	30,100,000
Jogging, marathon	26,200,000
Concerts, live music	25,600,000