Research for development of and education for legal mind

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We organized a series of experimental education in cooperation with the teachers in Chiba Minami High School, and Junior High and Elementary Schools both attached to Chiba University. Our purpose was to give an opportunity for pupils in primary and secondary education to have some basic experience of performing judiciary and justice. This was the third phase of our research which had started in 2001. We chose as our material the Kaiware Case in which the state of Japan was sued for negligence in releasing the information concerning the cause of mass-infection. The plaintiffs were the farmers of Kaiware radish from all over Japan who suffered from the announcement by the Ministry of Health that Kaiware radish served in elementary school lunch in the city of Sakai was the suspect for the mass infection of O-157 colitis which caused the death of 3 children and diarrhea of thousands.We spent the year of 2003 preparing materials ; editing the court-decisions, interviewing attorneys of both … More parties etc. In 2004 we run the classes in the schools mentioned above. After given basic facts, pupils were divided into the groups of 6 each and discussed for the right decision.We find the result rather satisfactory. The pupils of every school became fascinated in discussing in search of justice. We asked them to apply their own sense of justice first and see if the results were the same among the members of the group. Then they were expected to try to reach some consensus by either persuading or being persuaded by others.Our final goal is to see if Japanese society can be rearranged so that people's sense of justice plays a greater roll than present. That goal is ambitious and a bit remote. But for the time being our experiment, we believe, was a success. In the publication of the result of our research we included the materials we had used, which teachers in different levels of school can use for the purpose of instructing people, adult and junior, for the new Japanese mixed-jury system which will start in 2008. Less