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The results are in: Poll asks if Japanese people would want to be reborn in Japan

KK Miller Nov 3, 2014
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Have you ever thought about where you’d like to be born if you were reincarnated? It may be an odd question, but in Japan this has been asked every five years to citizens around the country since Showa 28 (1953). It seems like a pretty unassuming survey, but it appears to be a cleverly phrased poll that is able to determine how the citizens really feel about their home country.

What better way to find out if Japan is doing right by their youth, by asking them if they’d be willing to do it all over again! Find out what they learned after the jump.

This is the 13th time the survey has been taken, which is conducted by the Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports Science and Technology (MEXT), with thousands of men and women of all ages polled. With the results released on October 30, many news outlets are focusing in on one aspect of the poll, “If you were to be reborn, would you want to be reborn in Japan or a foreign country?” This poll was last conducted in 2009, so remember that the world was a pretty different place back then.

▼This graph represents the number of people who would want to be reborn in Japan.
“M” is for “men” and “W” is for “women”

Pretty much across the board, Japan numbers are up for both women and men of all ages. The only demographic that seems to have dropped are males in their 70s, but even then, the numbers are still holding strong in the 80s. The news is all good since across the entire poll, the percentage of people who want to be reborn in Japan is up six percentage points from 77 to 83. Many people are spotlighting the 20-percentage point jump for males in their 20s. In fact, both males and females in their 20s showed a higher desire to be reborn in their home country.

According to researchers, the numbers have likely risen due to the Great East Japan Earthquake. Many Japanese were influenced by the praise their country received from other nations about how orderly Japan was after a major disaster. The survey also asked those polled to choose the strong attributes of Japanese people and perhaps because of this new insight on themselves, they overwhelming picked “polite” and “kind,” with both setting record high results (77% versus 60% for polite, 71% versus 52% for kind).

It appears that Japanese people are seeing themselves in a better light post-March 2011. Another theory states that with the increasing instability in the world and the world economy experiencing some serious growth issues, more Japanese people are looking to “return” to Japan.

It is a very interesting question, though. If you were to die and be reborn, would you want to be reborn in your own country? How about giving Japan a try? Let us know in the comments!

Source: Yahoo! Japan
Images: Google Earth, RocketNews24, Flickr (Scott Smith)