世論 What Japan Thinks

According to this survey by MyVoice, performed at the start of August of this year amongst 12,317 registered members of the MyVoice Community, the following views on electronic money are as follows. 7,002 women and 5,295 men took part in the survey, with almost 40% being aged 30-39.

Q: Select all the electronic money brands you know.

Suica (JR East)	71.3%
Edy (Bitwallet (ANA et al))	63.2%
WebMoney	35.7%
ICOCA (JR West)	34.9%
ChoCOM (NTT)	20.8%
BitCash	14.7%
Others	3.3%
Don’t know about electronic money	11.5%
No answer	0.2%

Q: Have you used electronic money?

Yes	37.2%
No	62.8%

Q: For those who have used electronic money, what brands have you used? (Sample size=4,582 I think)

Suica (JR East)	54.8%
Edy (Bitwallet (ANA et al))	34.7%
WebMoney	23.2%
ICOCA (JR West)	11.0%
ChoCOM (NTT)	5.7%
BitCash	3.9%
Others	4.4%
No answer	0.4%

Note that Suica and ICOCA are regional brands focused around the two conurbations of Tokyo and Osaka, so the overlap between the two brands might be pretty small, although in the Osaka area there has been adverts describing how the ICOCA can be used in the Suica area. I would also suspect that a lot of the Suica and ICOCA users are not using the wallet features of the card - the main use is perhaps just as an electronic season ticket. Personally speaking I didn’t use the electronic wallet portion until over a year after getting the card.

Q: For those who have used electronic money, what have you used it for? (Sample size=4,582 I think)

Travel tickets	55.6%
Convenience store	42.4%
Net shopping	23.2%
Kiosk (usually on station platform)	15.3%
Vending machine	5.0%
Theatre/event ticket booth	3.5%
Supermarket	3.3%
Pharmacy	2.7%
Department store	1.6%
Discount store	1.2%
Others	14.5%
No answer	0.4%

Q: From now on, do you think you want to use electronic money? (Sample size unclear. All participants perhaps?)

I want to use	19.3%
I might want to use	26.8%
I may or may not want to use	31.7%
I don’t really want to use	13.5%
I don’t want to use	8.1%
No answer	0.7%

Sample reasons for answers:

I want to use	34yo male	Cashlessness seems convenient
	20yo female	I want to get Miles
	33yo male	Points and other privileges
I might want to use	42yo female	I’ve got a Suica pass in mind
	25yo male	Handy in emergencies
	32yo female	It seems to be becoming necessary these days
I may or may not want to use	49yo male	Too many types, and the number of cards needed is inconvenient
	27yo female	Refilling the card is a pain. Still just a few places to use the cards.
	44yo male	If I had one I might use it (eh?)
I don’t really want to use	43yo female	I don’t feel I can trust the security aspect
	23yo male	I’m a cash man myself
	39yo female	I can’t yet really understand the whole idea
I don’t want to use	26yo male	I’m concerned that personal information will be disclosed
	30yo female	I’d probably lose all my money sense
	64yo male	It’s unnecessary

I can’t say I’ve seen any cards used outside of station ticket gates myself, but I wonder if people were including their standard credit cards in the list of places they had used these cards? Most Japanese credit cards come with an IC Card component, and most supermarkets have signature-less and PIN-less transactions that are just as good as electronic money. I’d be in the “probably don’t want to use” camp myself, even though I have an ICOCA. The private rail equivalent, PiTaPa, is post-pay, which I am still not 100% sure about myself, especially since even the season ticket component is not paid in advance.

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Well, it’s now been just about a month since I started this blog, so I think a short retrospective is in order. First, the good stuff:

• Registered with most of the main directories and search engines
• Even getting some hits from above
• Done a lot of interesting (to me anyway) research and translations
• Managed to average just about one post a day
• Got a reasonably slick authoring environment with HTML-Kit
• AdSense monetisation set up

Now the bad stuff:

• Lack of punters
• Lack of comments - one real one, one spam so far
• Google ranking pretty poor - even seron what japan thinks hits blog directories first
• One solitary AdSense click
• Blog Explosion has been a waste of time

To explore the bad stuff further, first let us consider Blog Explosion. On paper it sounds great, for every two blogs you surf, you get credit for one hit in return, basically. However, the hits are extremely poor quality, as everyone, me included, is just clicking through to get credits. Admittedly, I’ve found two blogs that are interesting, the first being Blurred Line Blog, and especially his ongoing experiment with buying credits for Blog Explosion and tracking the hits. It’s also refreshing to find a blog written by someone who understands the English language correctly. The second is Tom’s Astronomy Blog. I’m not much of a fan of the science, per se, but he has a great set of pictures from his telescope and elsewhere and writes up descriptions for them that very clearly express his love of the stars. Both would be feeds for my RSS Reader, if I had one!

Next, the lack of punters and comments. Well, I suppose it’s early days, so I can’t expect a healthy readership instantly, and I’ve not tried networking much at all. This problem ties in with the Blog Explosion experience above, I feel, as with Blog Explosion you need to spend thirty seconds surfing to get one viewer (assuming you assign all your credits to buying hits), who is probably only going to spend the minimal time on your page just so they can get their credit to spend on another pair of useless eyeballs. To get 30 visitors (my current daily average) I need to spend probably 20 minutes (allowing for overhead) surfing. But, if in that 20 minutes I instead search for a blog with a recent posting on a similar topic matter to mine - Google Blogs and Technorati are good places to look for candidates - and write a comment that either just has my top-level URL in the header or specifically links to one of my relevant stories, I should in theory get targeted traffic. I’ve only done this twice or thrice, mind you, and have had merely one or two hits in return, but if I can do twenty posts and once catch the blog owner’s eye, the chance of getting a trackback or even a blogroll entry increases, and a permanent link is worth it for getting that essential boost in the search engines.

I suppose all the other negative things are caused by the lack of punters, so I’ll just have to keep plugging away and see what happens. I genuinely believe that this blog will provide a useful database for someone, whether it just be settling Internet arguments about Japan, such as when discussing Japanese religiosity or lack thereof; or whether it be for more serious business reasons, such as trying to get a feel for Japanese public opinion on topics that perhaps rarely get translated. I really do feel I have some unique (within the context of the English language world) content here!

To conclude, one of my Technorati blog tags is public opinion. I am the solitary blog so tagged, and looking at the individual post tags, public opinion shows my own blog with five out of the latest ten entries (it would be more but Technorati is slow to update my blog, and I didn’t start tagging until recently), which must demonstrate something, probably about how ego-centric the average blogger is!

ARTICLE DELETED. Now rewritten at this page.

According to this survey published by infoPlant, QR codes are very well-known and widely used. One word of caution, however, is that this survey, carried out at the end of August, had the respondents self-selected from a link in the DoCoMo iMode menu system. 7,660 people completed the survey, 5,023 of them women, so naturally one would expect a strong bias in favour of the question.

Note that the QR Code at the head of the story was made for free at the web site here.

Q: Do you know about QR codes (2D barcodes)? (Sample size=7,660)

I’ve used them	73.3%
I know about them, and have a reader feature in my phone, but I haven’t used them	7.6%
I know about them, but don’t have a reader feature in my phone, so I haven’t used them	15.6%
I don’t know about them	3.5%

Looking at the age breakdown, for both males and females almost 90% of the under 20’s use them, but the rate steadily drops down to end up at just about half of all the over 50s.

Q: For those who answered that they used them, in what printed materials have you used QR Codes? (Sample size=5,513)

Business card	5.7%
Newspaper	31.9%
Magazine	84.2%
Advertising flyer	51.1%
Poster	14.2%
Direct mail	25.0%
Mail-order catalog	24.8%
PC web site	20.7%
Other	13.1%

There was no significant differences between the sexes, except for almost two and a half times more women used mail-order catalog QR Codes.

Q: Which of the following QR Code-based services do you want to use? (Sample size=7,660)

Easy phone book registration from a business card, etc	36.8%
Read a URL and access a site	74.3%
Replacement for company identification badge	29.0%
Cashless shopping at vending machines, etc	28.3%
Buying goods written about in magazines	27.7%
Replacement for tickets (concerts, travel passes, etc)	32.5%
Others	5.5%
Don’t want to use	7.4%

Strangely enough, I thought, those who answered in the first question that they didn’t know what QR Codes were didn’t want to use any services at all, on the whole. Almost two-thirds of that group answered “Don’t want to use” to the above question.

We had a visit today from the census representitive for next month’s census. The questions are mostly very simple - age, place of work, size of house (Japan has a target to within 20 years get the average family living space up from the current about 50 square metres to 100 square metres. Hoever, there are very few flats available over 100 square metres, at least not without getting into funny money, and even many houses barely top that in living area), hours worked per month, etc. The one problematic one I saw was there is a nationality box, Japanese or other, with a write-in area. All children from an international marriage are dual nationality until aged 20, so what do they tick? I saw on The Community mailing list the prevailing opinion was to tick both boxes and let them sort it out. One person did phone city hall, and their advice was to select Japanese for the kids, but that just hides the issue. Many international children may have special schooling requirements, especially if they have moved back from overseas.

On a lighter note, there is no box for religion, so we cannot repeat the efforts in New Zealand and the UK where people selected Jedi-ism as they religion. Perhaps instead for country of origin we can write in Endor (but that’s the Ewok land, isn’t it? Ohh ‘eck, I’m no Staar Wars geek!)

Recently (how recently is not stated!) goo Research published this survey on blog awareness and usage in Japan, their 19th survey in their series on blogging. 1,042 Internet users aged from teens to their 50s were surveyed, with 58.83% (uggh, what’s with the two decimal places? I’ll round to one for the rest of this story) of the sample women. The following results were obtained:

Q: Within the last month, have you looked at someone else’s blog?

Yes	75.4%
No	18.9%
Don’t know what a blog is	5.7%

The viewers percentage has tripled since their first survey last April and the don’t knows have decreased from almost 41% first time out.

Q: Within the last month, have you posted a comment on someone else’s blog?

	All	Male	Female
Yes	25.4%	22.2%	27.8%
No	74.6%	77.8%	72.2%

Q:Have you made a blog yourself?

Yes	27.2%
No but I want to try sometime	33.3%
No, and don’t plan to	32.2%
Don’t know what a blog is	7.3%

The number not knowing what a blog is has increased! Perhaps people paniced at this question and realised they didn’t really understand things after all?

There now follows a large table describing what blogs people use, but rather than reproduce the whole lot, the highlights from the sample of 283 bloggers are livedoor leading at 17.7%, down from 23.4% last time (last month?); goo at 16.2% down from 17.7%; and Rakuten at 15.2% from 15.6%. Yahoo! and not listed others are the only gainers, 2% and 4% respectively.

One reason for more losers than winners is that the question allows multiple answers. The last time the average blogger used just under one and a half services; this time it is just under 1.4 services, suggesting either people are keeping less blogs or moving their blogs to a single provider.

Q: About how often do you update your blog? (Sample size=283)

Daily or so	21.9%
Twice or thrice a week	26.9%
Once a week	13.8%
Twice or thrice a month	14.1%
Once a month	5.6%
Once every two or three months	6.7%
Less than once every six months	11%

Q: Has your blog received a trackback? (Sample size=283 I think)

	All	Male	Female
Yes	68.2%	72.6%	65.5%
No	31.8%	27.4%	34.5%

On the other hand, only 33.9% have sent a trackback to another blog.

Q: Do you use an affiliate (cash-for-clicks) program? (Sample size=283)

I participate in one already	16.6%
I definitely want to join one	26.5%
I want to join one	25.1%
I don’t really want to join one	14.8%
I don’t want to join one	6.4%
Don’t know	10.6%

Finally, bloggers and those who wanted to be bloggers were asked what were the three most important factors when selecting a blog service to build a blog in. Of the 630 respondents, the top three answers were “Easy to make” at 77.5%, “Easy to understand management system” at 59.0%, and finally “Freedom of layout” at 37.1%. Strangely, I thought, magazine recommendations was right down at the bottom, less than 1% selecting it as a key factor.

Looking at this survey on Japanese and their language, performed last year in January and February, it seems that three out of four of the 3,000 Japanese surveyed would normally read my blog’s title as yoron rather than seron! Only 18.9% plumped for seron whilst 73.6% went for yoron, with the remaining 7.5% either use both readings equally or just don’t know. Further investigation indicates both readings are perfectly acceptable, so one is neither more or less correct than the other.

Doing some study at work on patents, trademarks and copyright issues in Japan in Japanese, I found out that for the results of opinion polls and the like, copyright law does not apply, except in the case where the words “Reproduction Prohibited” (Japanese: 禁転載) are present along with the data, therefore this blog does not infringe copyright on the surveys as far as I can determine. The write-up on the surveys is covered by copyright, especially when opinion or other human creativity is expressed, so I still need to find out if the concept of “Fair Use” is enshrined in Japanese law. My translations and reportage are copyright as they contain considerable creative effort (although it might not seem like it all the time) but they may be derivative works, depending on how literally I translate the stories. I should be able to get away with “Fair Use” (unlike manga and anime translator who also claim it) as I don’t use all the source material, and I believe I add value only with my comments or with the uncopyrightable raw data.

Of course, I am not a lawyer, Japanese or any other nationality, so please take my advice only with a rather generous pinch of salt, and remember how much you have paid for this advice.

According to a survey published in the Nikkei Shimbun of 865 foreigners incarcerated in various prisons around Japan, performed in September and October of last year, the vast majority would prefer to do their time back in their home country. Note the slightly onimous (but statistically perfectly accurate) opening phrase, highlighted for your benefit, translated directly from the original article.

Amongst the continually growing foreign prisoner population, 80% answered that if they could choose where to be imprisoned, they would select their home country rather than Japan. Amongst Chinese prisoners, who make up almost half the total number, well over 80% of them hoped for their home prisons. The main reasons given was distance from their families and the differences in language and culture. The Ministry of Justice Correctional Office said that there is a possibility of introducing international prisoner transfers with some of those countries that we cannot currently transfer to.

One could read some sinister undertones into this news item, as a lot of people are wont to do these days, but I shall not. One reason the foreigner prison population is growing is that the foreigner population is also. The exact statistical correlation is difficult to discern, however.

It’s the annual be nice to old folks day today, and the big statistical news is that this year over 20% of Japan’s population is over 65, passing Italy on 19.5%. The issue of the aging population and the lack of children in Japan is littered with interesting facts and figures, so I’ll have to dig out a few references to translate sometime in the near future.