A preliminary research for a new survey on the Japanese national character

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The study of the Japanese national character by the Research Committee of The Institute of Statistical Mathematics originated with the first nationwide survey in 1953. Since then, a similar statistical survey has been conducted every five years, for a total of nine surveys. The latest ninth nationwide survey was carried out in October 1993.From the analysis of responses to questions repeatedly asked over this period, the following fact findings were obtained.(1) There have been great shifts in attitudes toward political problems, daily life, Japanese feelings and ideas and so on for the past forty years. In contrast, attitudes toward personal relations have changed very little over this period.(2) The modernization in the attitude trend has been slightly reversed or delayd in the early 1970's.(3) After the 1970's, there has been a steady increase in the number of people who think their private life most important.However, in order to cralify details of recent and future opinion trends, we must develop new questionnaires. For this purpose, we investigated the following matters in this research project.(1) We carried out a pretest for the tenth nationwide survey using new questionnaire items, and analyzed the results.(2) We revised the data file of the nine surveys of the Japanese national character. Furthermore, we made a new data file for open-ended questions of those surveys.