The 1948 law punished possession and growing but not use itself. A health ministry panel recommended making use an offence and regulating chemical compounds instead of parts of the plant. In 2020 there had been 5,034 cannabis convictions, 4,121 of them for possession. The law was changed in 2023.[1]
Listed for context. No score change is recorded for Japan here.
References
Checked. The date and the event were compared with a source that was read.