A Study on Education in Japanese Legal Expression: Through a Survey of Japanese University Students

Abstract

The text on Japanese law is known for being difficult for Japanese people. The law is a part of the liberal arts curriculum at high school and university. The courses are focused on understanding the content of the law; however, the difficulty also lies in law-specific Japanese expression.This research aims to clarify whether the degree of comprehension of legal expression is high even in those who do not receive special education in law if their understanding of different registers of Japanese is high.The methodology included a survey on the degree of comprehension of legal expression that was conducted for students of the Faculty of Letters who were interested in the usage of the words.Honorific expressions known as esoteric Japanese usages were adopted as a comparative subject of legal expression, and the degrees of comprehension of both were investigated simultaneously and then compared.The results demonstrate that very few students exhibited a proper understanding of legal expression. In addition, students with a high degree of understanding of honorific expressions also had a somewhat higher understanding of legal expression; and only very weak correlation was found.It is clear from the foregoing discussion that even people who are good at understanding general Japanese expressions find it difficult to understand legal expression.In the future, in situations where it is necessary to understand legal expression, it seems necessary to nurture a system of education in which people acquire better comprehension of Japanese legal expression.



Author Information
Yuko Kurata, Kansai Gaidai University, Japan
Noriko Kurata, Tokyo University of Science, Suwa, Japan

Paper Information
Conference: IICEHawaii2018
Stream: Interdisciplinary, Multidisciplinary & Transdisciplinary Education

This paper is part of the IICEHawaii2018 Conference Proceedings (View)
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Posted by James Alexander Gordon