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.

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.