世論 What Japan Thinks

Continuing their recent series of interesting habits that people have around technology, japan.internet.com, in conjunction with Cross Marketing Inc, carried out an internet-based survey to see what email habits people had. They interviewed 300 people from up and down Japan, exactly fifty-fifty male and female, with 16.6% of the sample aged either 18 or 19, and a similar 16.6% aged in each of decades of life from the twenties to the sixties.

Just about all Japanese mobile phones come with graphic smilies (Vodafone even has animated ones, I believe), pre-registered set phrases that include smilies, and smilies in their input conversion dictionaries. For instance, if you type in かお, kao, face, then select the covert to kanji option, as well as the expected kanji 顔, most mobile phones will also present a list of smilies to choose from. Note that this option is also available in Windows - if you have the Japanese IME, select the properties page for the Japanese input method, go to the “Dictionary” tab, and activate the “Microsoft IME Spoken Language/Emoticon Dictionary”.

I do use smilies, or 顔文字, kaomoji, literally “face characters”, a lot in mail, although I usually use the built-in graphics rather than choosing ASCII (and non-ASCII, as is often the case) art. However, as a signature I occasionally do use the Greek characters κεπ.
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Following on from a recent survey regarding phone email handedness and voice earedness, japan.internet.com in conjunction with JR Tokai Express Research carried out a survey on which hand people usually use with their mouse. They surveyed 330 working people by means of an internet questionnaire. 76.7% of the sample was male, with 15.8% in their twenties, 45.8% in their thirties, 30.3% in their forties, 7.6% in their fifties, and just 0.6% (two people) over the age of sixty.

In the first question you may notice a rather high percentage of lefties who got converted to right-handedness. This treatment of sinister characters is not unique to Japan, but it does perhaps appear to be rather strong within schools, looking at the figures here. Also, since most of the survey here is in their thirties, we are only seeing a snapshot of schooling 20 years ago or so; searching the web reveals that there is an oft-quoted survey that says only 0.7% of Japanese schoolchildren are left-handed, but I could not discover details of what the original survey was or when it was conducted.

Q1: Are you left-handed or right-handed? (Sample size=330)

Originally left-handed, but school or parents “corrected” me	4.8%
Ambidextrous (to Q2)	2.1%
Always right-handed	87.0%
Always left-handed	6.1%

Q2: Currently, with which hand do you use your mouse? (Sample size=43, ambidextrous users)

Left hand	7%
Right hand	84%
Both hands (to Q3)	9%
Use other pointing device	0%

Q3: Do you know that by using the control panel or other software you can change a mouse to left-handed use? (Sample size=36, ambidextrous right-hand mousers)

Yes	39%
No	61%