Had it not been for the death of her newborn baby, Fukumi Kushige would have shared the apathy of most Japanese toward the nation's legal system.

Koji Kato (second from left), a law professor at Kyoto University, chairs a recent meeting of the Judicial Reform Council.

In Japan, judicial affairs are exclusively left to the legal profession and lawsuits constitute relatively foreign territory for ordinary people.

Ever since Kushige's baby girl, Naho, suffocated after being laid facedown at a hospital in Yokohama in February 1993, however, this apathy has turned into distrust.

A protracted legal battle between the Kushige family and the hospital in question started the year that Naho died.

And, having sued the hospital for malpractice, Kushige and her husband have fought this battle without being able to learn virtually anything in court of what really happened to their daughter, she said.

They have also been offered little sympathy from the judges, she added.

The suit, which the Kushige family lost due to what judges described as insufficient evidence to prove the hospital's liability, is now the subject of a Supreme Court appeal launched in April.

"All we ever wanted was for the court to clarify what had really happened behind the hospital's closed doors," said Kushige, who lives in Yokohama.

At first, the hospital staffers admitted their responsibility for the death of her baby and had even apologized to the parents on their knees, Kushige said.

A failure to settle the matter out of court, however, heralded a complete U-turn in their attitude, she said.

Throughout the district court and high court trials, the hospital insisted Naho had suffered "sudden infant death syndrome."

"In our case, the judges relied heavily on precedents, and most of precedents have turned out against cases like ours," Kushige said.

Kushige questions how little the trials helped in verifying the course of events and how many judges have the heart to act on their own discretion. She added that some associate judges even dozed off on two occasions in trials -- one of which was at the crucial moment in the second trial.

"What I experienced for the 6 1/2 years I spent in court make me wonder if they can share the feelings of ordinary citizens" in judging what could happen to a newborn baby if left unattended for 2 1/2 hours, Kushige said. She accordingly called for ordinary citizens' active involvement in trials if judges cannot live up to their expectations.

This sense of frustration against the judiciary appears to be widely shared by Japanese who have been involved in court battles.

According to a survey conducted by a Cabinet-appointed panel on judicial reform last year on 1,612 plaintiffs and defendants of closed civil cases at 16 district courts, only 18.6 percent of 591 respondents expressed satisfaction with the court system.

Those who praised judges for their preparedness, common sense and knowledge of matters other than legal affairs, accounted for less than half the respondents.

Recently, reports that the deputy head of the Fukuoka District Public Prosecutor's Office allegedly leaked information to a Fukuoka High Court judge in connection with the police investigation into a case involving the judge's wife, have also served to attract a great deal of public attention.

This is at a time when the Judicial Reform Council is trying to lay out a plan to change the current trial system.

One method under scrutiny is a jury system mirroring that employed in the United States. Under this system, random members of the public give their verdicts on certain cases before judges pass sentence.

Another involves a joint council system as seen in France and Germany, which has public representatives consult with judges before handing down a verdict and passing sentence.

Last month, the judicial council basically agreed to pursue a kind of joint council, in which civil members act as "trial staff members," along with judges, to deliver verdicts and pass sentence in certain trials.

The council was launched in July 1999 to devise a plan to overhaul the nation's legal system. It was charged with devising measures such as increasing the number of legal professionals to provide better services, and allowing citizens' active involvement in the judicature -- one of a few circles left closed in contemporary Japan.

The council is scheduled to present its final report on overall judicial reform in mid-June.

The council's 13 members are yet to work out details of the new court system. These include how the proportion of professional judges and civil trial staff members involved in cases should be decided, the voting method that will be used in making judgments and interpretation of the Constitution, which guarantees the independent status of judges.

The general consensus, however, is that justice should no longer be left entirely in the hands of the professionals.

"In general, judges don't have many social contacts because of the nature of their job, and tend to be confined to their inner circle," said Takeshi Tsuchimoto, a former prosecutor of the Supreme Public Prosecutor's Office and law professor at Teikyo University. Tsuchimoto specializes in the Criminal Procedure Act.

"They tend to grow obstinate and play it safe by following precedents when making judgments," Tsuchimoto said, adding that certain judges cannot deal flexibly with complicated social and economic problems and identify with the feelings of crime victims and other members of society.

Tsuchimoto cited a recent case in which both the Tokyo District Court and the High Court gave a drunk truck driver who hit a car and killed two infant girls in a subsequent fire on the Tomei Expressway a four-year prison sentence. Prosecutors had demanded five years -- the maximum legal term for professional negligence resulting in death.

As part of efforts to enrich judges' experience outside of court and help the legal profession to become better versed with the mores of society, the judicial council is also deliberating on measures such as having assistant judges practice as lawyers and prosecutors for a certain period of time.

The council has also agreed to set up a third-party committee involving members of the public regarding the appointment of district and high court judges. These appointments are currently under the control of the Supreme Court.

While lauding the role of judges in passing verdicts from a professional point of view, Tsuchimoto says citizen participation is also needed. He said a joint council could make the best use of both sides.

Tsuchimoto warned that should criminal cases be left in the hands of a jury, not-guilty decisions would increase. He claimed that a jury could be swayed by temporary emotional factors and by outside information, such as biased press coverage.

The jury system was developed in medieval Britain as the people's countermeasure against the absolute power of the monarchy. It was subsequently introduced in colonial America, and in France and Germany.

In Japan, a jury system was adopted between 1923 and 1943, following the precedents set by these Western nations. It eventually fell into disuse, however, with people opting for trials before professional judges, Tsuchimoto said.

France and Germany's jury systems were eventually displaced by joint councils in 1923 and 1941, respectively. According to Tokio Hiraragi, a former criminal judge and a law professor specializing in the Criminal Procedure Act at Keio University, this occurred chiefly because of an increased number of not-guilty verdicts, with juries fearing that judges could impose severe sentences on convicted people.

Hiraragi also pointed out that in these countries, juries were found to be inconsistent in their judgments, problematic in their evaluation of evidence, prone to be influenced by superficial circumstances, and costly.

Britain abolished the jury system in civil cases as well as its grand jury in 1933, introducing a majority system to jury trials in 1967.

Michiatsu Kaino, a professor at Waseda University who specializes in Anglo-American law, insists that introduction of the jury system would shorten lengthy court procedures and facilitate efforts on the part of judiciary personnel to make trials clear-cut.

Public involvement in court matters would help rectify the current court system, which depends heavily on confessions forced out of suspects under investigation and functions as something of a formality, Kaino said.

In 1998, 99.9 percent of those tried in court were found guilty.

"The most important thing is that ordinary people like me would be more educated by playing an active role in trials," said Kushige.

"I had never given serious thought to the importance of legal systems in my life until I was actually forced to be involved in a legal conflict."