世論 What Japan Thinks

Mixi is one of the most popular invite only Social Networking Service (SNS) in Japan, apparently, like Friendster et al. in the USA. They are not my cup of tea (just like I’m not really into all this blogrolling and incestuous linking here), but obviously other people like them. There was a report from a workshop at the Social Infomatics Fair 2005 at Kyoto University containing some interesting statistics on the social webs that had built up.

In February of this year, the number of users stood at around 360,000. Note it seems to be over a million now. The purpose of the research was to try to identify what sort of network of relationships had built up between users.

“My Mix” (in Japanese it’s pronounced closer to “My Mick”) is the slang term used to indicate the number of direct friends someone has registered; this would be roughly analogous to one’s blogroll in the blogging world.

According to a researcher named Kikuo YUTA from the Network Informatics Laboratories, 50.8% of the users have four or less people in their My Mix; 23.6% have but a solitary soul (perhaps just the person that invited them?) as a friend. On the other hand, the average length of a My Mix is just under 21.

For people with five or more names in their My Mix, the numbers stack up as follows:

5 to 11 friends	17.1%
12 to 25 friends	24.3%
26 to 40 friends	15.4%
41 to 87 friends	20.6%
88 to 197 friends	10.1%
198 to 1301 friends	2.9%

This adds up to 90.4% - what happened to the other 9.6%, you may very well ask. Well, here the story write-up is very vague (or I don’t understand it, of course), but what has happened is that the above table represents the share of the total number of links for each of the population sizes. This is explained further in the next paragraph.

A large minority of the My Mixers were very tightly intertwined, making them hubs for all the human relationships. Those with over 41 people in their My Mix list made up only 4.8% of the population, but accounted for 33.6% of the links. On the other hand, those with less than five in their My Mix (50.9%) had just 9.5% of the links.

Hmm, isn’t this just data simply derived from the population distribution, or is there a deeper meaning I am missing?

Kikuo YUTA also said that the high density of links in mixi was very rare - usually structure develops over time, but here it came into being almost right from the beginning. “It is the first time in the world such a unique structure has been found”, he said.

Maybe I’m missing something, but I would think that anything invitation-based would tend to have the sort of tight structure that they are describing? Being in Japanese limits the scope for spreading into disparate groups, I would think. Japanese just love being unique, however. Reading ahead I see more explanation… The rest of the article talked about other human aspects of the network, and whilst very interesting, is getting away from the main purpose of this blog, polls and surveys, so I’ll not translate. Also, the Japanese was getting rather hard!

– now in Google, but still no links to me to be found — got a strange hit from Yahoo! mail — need a better counter than SiteMeter — worked out how to write a macro in HTML-Kit, so can do tables faster — all other Blog Explosion users just perform click throughs, never read, just like me too — Google Blog Search returns rather poor results for the keyword “Japan” — translating is fun! — lots and lots of stats to translate, historical comparisons might be fun — trying HaloScan, but might bin their comments and stick with Blogger — goodnight all –

With the XBox 360 release date now announced, and the new Revolution controller previewed (and I must say it looks interesting!) more research shows the PS3 still the top must buy for people. It will be interesting to see if the Revolution moves up on the back of its showing at the Tokyo Game Show.
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This week’s silly survey, once again from Trivia no Izumi, took 100 mongrels and 100 owners, and when they went out for a walk, the owner fell over ill and hoped Lassie would come home and drag someone out to rescue their dying master. Of course, most people brimmed with confidence regarding their dog’s intelligence, but quite unsurprisingly to me, all failed miserably. A few dogs did demostrate concern, I thought, but then again others just took the chance to have a free run-around.

I saw a link to quite a surprising survey (not really a poll, but it’s an interesting statistic nonetheless) about the state of Japanese teeth, in particular children’s teeth.

According to a survey by a Nagoya dentist, in 1997 about 4.9% of children were missing adult teeth completely. However, last year the figure had ballooned to 11.6%, and on average each child was missing one or two adult teeth (excluding any wisdom teeth), with the worst case being missing six, over 20% of them!

The story provides no explanation that I can see for why, but it does seem a worrying statistic!

There’s been a survey of opinions on “Warm Biz“, the new initiative after Cool Biz this summer. Cool Biz was to set air conditioners to 28°C and wear short sleeves and no tie, an initiative supported and strongly promoted by Prime Minister Jun-chan. Warm Biz is basically the opposite, to wear thermal undies and set office thermostats to 20°C for the winter. The company I work for supports Cool Biz in theory, but our air conditioners are not very subtle at all, so if they are on they are using blowing out 24°C or 25°C air, which is rather cold on my bare arms. If they are off, like right now, there is no moving air in the office at all so it gets hopelessly stuffy. Note that with Warm Biz they hope to save almost 2.5 times as much energy as with Cool Biz. However, I discovered that Cool Biz saved just a few percentage points of the forecast amount.

The survey took place on the home page for Club BBQ for 24 hours over the 25th and 26th of August, where there were 2,321 self-selecting respondents, 70.8% male, 29.2% female. The sex balance may seem off, but Warm Biz is mainly aimed at businessmen, I feel, so it is not too much of a problem, at least not compared with it being a self-selecting survey.

First up, 78.0% said they supported Warm Biz. Conversely, only 56.7% said they wanted Cool Biz to continue next year.

Perhaps people find it easier to add another layer than take one off. The number of people I see wearing T-shirts under their shirts is quite amazing - I wonder if this is another example of Japanese folk wisdom?

67.3% of those surveyed had heard of Warm Biz, with this perhaps due to the aftereffects of Cool Biz permeating throughout the population.

With 78.0% saying they support Warm Biz, though, where did the extra 10% or so come from? Perhaps this survey was done after reading an article regarding Warm Biz? Over 90% had heard of Cool Biz, however.

Reasons for supporting it included people advocating it themselves (perhaps their office is usually too hot in winter?) and that it will save money on heating. On the other hand, just like for Cool Biz, the most popular dissenting opinion was it being too difficult to work under these conditions.

Regarding Warm Biz becoming established, only 31.4% agreed. 35.9% discounted Warm Biz as just a reaction from Cool Biz, and 48.7% reckoned that there wouldn’t be much difference from last year, indicating many people think it’s just a passing fad.

Back to Cool Biz, 56.7% thought it has been a success this year, although it is supposed to keep running until the end of September.

Looks like still quite a bit of work to do before the public warms to Warm Biz!

Personally, I’ve always thought it was a daft idea, and never knew why companies are pushing it so hard over here in Japan. The last thing you want from a mobile is for the battery to run out, and trying to follow the action on a tiny screen with a non-existant aerial seems like a lesson in frustration. This survey seems to back up my opinions. It was carried out at the end of July, amongst 2,156 people from a private internet survey group, 55.1% male, predominantly under 50 years old.
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Well, we’ve had the ultimate test of public opinion (more analysis of the numbers later) and Koizumi led the LDP and New Komeito alliance to win over two-thirds of the seats in the new lower house, knocking out half of the people kicked out of the party for opposing the Post Office privatisation, the very issue that brought on the election in the first place.

The Japan-based foreigner (and ex-foreigner!) communities are buzzing right now, much of it filled with humbug about how could the Japanese be so stupid as to vote for the LDP, with the implied “…but we, of course, know better”. I’m looking right now for exit polls on why people chose to vote, but the implications that people have of it being a single-issue (PO privatisation) election does not mesh with previous polls which indicated that voters were getting less interested in the PO issues.

According to the exit polls, the 20.2% who described themselves as unaffiliated voters voted by a small majority (42% versus 35% averaged over the two votes) for the main DPJ opposition party but with the high numbers of affiliated voters, this was not enough to alter the results.

Koizumi’s main slogan was “Don’t stop the reforms!” We’ll see how he sticks to these through the life of the parliament. However, he is, according to LDP rules, going to reach the end of his term as leader next year, and will not be eligible to stand again, so will his reforms live on with a new leader?

Looking at reports of the exit polls we can begin to build up a picture of what really happened at the ballot boxes. The main unknowns in the run-up to the election were the undecided and the unaffiliated voters, about 40% and 45% (although of course there would be a lot of people in both camps!) respectively going into the last week of campaigning.

Of those surveyed, 20.2% described themselves as unaffiliated voters. From that group, 32.6% voted for the LDP versus 38.2% for the DPJ in the proportional representation vote, and 37.4% versus 45.5% in the direct elections.

In the last lower house election exit poll, unaffiliates split 21.4% versus 56.5% in the PR vote, and 27.0% versus 53.0% for the direct seats, LDP versus DPJ.

Note, one reason for the votes for the main parties being higher in the direct election is that not all of the minor parties put candidates up in all constituencies. Unfortunately this report does not suggest any reasons for the change in support since the last time.

New Komeito supporters voted 72.3% for the LDP in the direct elections, showing that in seats where there is no New Komeito candidate (over 90% of them) the electoral pact is still going strong.

In the 33 seats where the Post Office privatisation rebels stood, LDP supporters preferred the official candidate, 55.1% versus 33.4% for the rebels, although the rebels still won in half the seats. Previous opinion polls had indicated the official candidates were on 41% versus 33%, indicating that the undecided had chosen to back Koizumi’s choice.

The last two articles have been praising Sony just a bit too much, so here’s a survey, well sales figures anyway, for mobile phones in Japan

For the second quarter of this year, the sales by manufacturers of mobile phones for all networks in Japan was as follows:

Panasonic	18.3%
Sharp	16.6%
NEC	14.4%
Toshiba	12.7%
Others	38.0%

The total sales for the quarter was 10,650,000 handsets, down 3.2% from the same quarter last year. 3G handsets made up 74.9% of the total, with the 3G share predicted to be around 90% by the last quarter of the year.<

Sony don’t seem able to make a good mobile. They have their own scroll wheel-like interfaace, but it doesn’t seem to be that popular, and their current flagship, the Premini-II, is absolutely tiny (and the original even tinier), but since the majority of users are heavy emailers, the virtually unusable keyboard and the screen that requires squinting doesn’t sell very well.