世論 What Japan Thinks

…of in the summer, just to finish off the dangling headline. I’m back from my holidays, and back to stupidly hot temperatures around double of what I left back in the UK and Germany, so to tie in with the hot and humid weather right now (and it’s going to get a lot hotter and more humid before it’s done) let’s look with goo Ranking at what summer smells people hate. As usual for these ranking surveys, demographic information is not available, just that on the 22nd and 23rd of May a number of members of the goo Research monitor group completed an online survey on this topic.

One may notice that the top pong, body odour, relates to one of these things that foreigners hear (perhaps only from other foreigners?) about how the Japanese don’t sweat.

Finally, the kanji used in the headline, 悪臭, akushuu, consists of two kanji for bad and smell, and means exactly that.

Ranking results

Q: What stench of summer do you most dislike?

Rank	Stench	Score
1	Stench of other people’s body odour	100
2	Stench of rotting food	95.4
3	Stench of sweaty shoes and socks	79.7
4	Stench of sewers	62.4
5	Stench of other people’s poo	46.7
6	Stench of clothes dried in the sun	45.3
7	Stench of cigarettes	42.5
8	Stench of perfume	34.2
9	Stench in trains (closely-packed sweaty bodies, beer and food smells from clothes, etc)	29.6
10	Stench of female cosmetics	28.8
11	Stench of male cosmetics	25.9
12	Stench of pets	23.6
13	Stench in cars (plastic baking in the sun, etc)	22.3
14	Stench of insecticide	15.3
15	Stench of food	14.9
16	Stench of refrigerators	12.6
17	Stench of swimming pools (chlorine, etc)	12.5
18	Stench of insect repellant	10.8
19	Stench of sun cream	10.8
20	Stench of mosquito coils	10.2