I think the laws are different in Japan, in the United Kingdom at least, it's entirely legal to sell chicken which contains Escherichia coli, which causes food poisoning, where as meat such as Beef is not allowed to be sold with the bacterium.

That certainly has an effect on my thinking, it's not that I don't like a more rare presented chicken, it's that we're conditioned to think of it causing illness because of the laws around it's distribution.