80% of Japanese Youths Find It Hard to Understand Preamble to the Constitution: The Nippon Foundation Poll (1)

There are stronger calls than before in Japan for debating whether to revise the country’s postwar constitution. One reason is the novel coronavirus pandemic, which has prompted more people to advocate adding an emergency clause to the charter that would grant the government expanded powers when necessary.

In contrast with some European and other countries that have constitutional or legislative grounds to impose binding restrictions on the activities of individual citizens and businesses, Japan has seen COVID-19 expose the limits on the government's ability to respond to an emergency.

To examine how Japanese youths look at the issue, The Nippon Foundation conducted a nationwide online survey on the “Preamble to the Constitution” for five days from April 15, covering 1,000 people aged between 17 and 19.　The preamble sets forth the underlying principles of the constitution, notably pacifism, popular sovereignty, the guarantee of fundamental human rights, representative democracy and internationalism.

Asked whether they have read the preamble, respondents were equally divided at 40.1% between those who have either read it or have a recollection of having read it and those who have not. The remaining 19.8% said they do not remember. Of those who have, more than half (55.9%) did so when they were in junior high school, followed by high school (28.9%) and elementary school (13.2%).

In response to a question as to whether the preamble was easy to understand, less than 20% (17.0%) said it was, while more than 80% (83.0%) said that it was either difficult to understand (48.6%) or there were points that they could not understand (34.4%).

The curriculum guidelines set by the Japanese Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology call for sixth graders and students of junior and senior high schools to take up the constitution in social studies classes.

This means the respondents of the survey studied the constitution not so long ago. I felt the survey showed young people in Japan are not familiar with the details of the constitution, raising anew the question of how the supreme law should be taught at Japanese schools.

(To be continued)