世論 What Japan Thinks

I just spotted an interesting survey from Japundit on who the Japanese think do the nation proud internationally. The original from Oricon can be found here, where it says that the fieldwork was conducted between the 16th and 20th of August 2007 by means of an internet-based questionnaire posed to 2,000 members of its online monitor panel. The group was split 50:50 male and female, and there were 200 of each sex in five demographic groups; high school students, college and university students, people in their twenties not in education, in their thirties, and in their forties. I believe that they were only allowed to chose people from the entertainment and sporting worlds.

It’s an interesting list; see Japundit for the full details, but Ichiro top for men seems odd from my point of view, but perhaps not odd if I think from a Japanese perspective. Ken Watanabe and Beat Takeshi are good choices for two and three, but then there’s Kimu-taku (Takuya Kimura), one of the pretty boys from SMAP, a long-running boy band. Similarly Kazunari Ninomiya of Arashi, despite having appeared in “Letters from Iwo Jima”, is another odd choice, as just being a singer does not really contribute that much to the world at large. However, as a Scot, I’m glad to see Shunsuke Nakamura in at number six as he struts his stuff at Glasgow Celtic Football Club as proves that number 7, Hideki Nakata, was not just a one-off.

For the women, I find it a bit harder to comment, and if you asked the average person in the street in Europe or the USA, I suspect the only Japanese female people could name would be Yoko Ono (who is, I believe, actually a naturalised American these days). About the only other I am really familiar with is Tetsuko Kuroyanagi, who does a lot of good charity work for UNICEF.