This survey from MyVoice, their second look at department stores, had a surprising to me set of results, with Japanese much less frequent users of these stores than I might have imagined.
Demographics
Over the first five days of March 2009 15,606 members of the MyVoice internet community successfully completed a private online questionnaire. 54% of the sample were female, 2% in their teens, 14% in their twenties, 36% in their thirties, 29% in their forties, and 19% aged fifty or older.
I recommend to every visitor to Japan that they go to department stores to at least just look; the basement floor is usually full of lots of speciality food stores that will be more than happy to hand out free samples at off-peak times. The best one I know for this is Hanshin Umeda – there’s always lots of free mouthfuls of wine, sake, fruit vinegar and tea to be had.
I quite often use these food areas, in particular RF1, which although a little on the expensive side has a wonderful range of salads. My favourites are their baked veggies – lots of potato, asparagus and carrot – and their Hokkaido Danshaku potato croquette, which are wonderfully soft and creamy. Read the rest of this entry »
A new gadget that is generating quite a bit of buzz around the Japanese English-language blogs is the Poken, with various events having giveaways of the wee beasties, with now JapanSoc also getting in on the act.
What is a Poken? Perhaps this video explains:
It’s basically a portable cache of your social network accounts (actually, pointers to an online cache) so when two pokens meet, they exchange identifiers so back at home you can quickly find out where you can meet all your real-life contacts. Quicker and more accurate than scribbling a phone number or email address on a bit of paper, and for anti-social gits such as myself it saves the business of asking, just a quick high-four and Bob’s your uncle.
The Poken shop shows a few designs, but printing your own would be a fabulous extra feature…
This was quite a surprising result for me, to see how newcomers into the digital camera market, Panasonic and Sony, were becoming forces to be reckoned with, according to the results of this survey from goo Research and reported on by japan.internet.com.
Demographics
Between the 3rd and 7th of April 2009 1,085 members of the goo Research online monitor group completed a private internet-based questionnaire. 52.6% of the sample were male, 15.6% in their teens, 18.2% in their twenties, 21.5% in their thirties, 16.4% in their forties, 15.8% in their fifties, and 12.6% aged sixty or older.
There’s a lot of good photography in Japan blogs appearing now – two of my favourites are Tokyo Times and i, cjw.
This look with MyVoice at DVD (and other media) recorder usage, their fifth survey on the topic, revealed a few interesting statistics such as the one in the headline and that the now defunct-for-over-a-year HD DVD format still outranks Blu-Ray recorders, although as noted last time I reported such a number, one wonders if there is a degree of misidentification by users. I wonder if HD DVD suggested Hard Disk plus DVD to some respondents?
Demographics
Over the first five days or March 2009 15,482 members of the MyVoice internet community completed a private online questionnaire. 54% of the sample were female, 1% in their teens, 14% in their twenties, 37% in their thirties, 29% in their forties, and 19% aged fifty or older.
I got hit by a rather irritating feature between my cable box and my DVD recorder. Despite both being made by the same company, you cannot get a digital out into the DVD recorder that will allow me to record two channels at once. The support line said the only option was to rent their high-end set-top box that has a built-in hard disk recorder, but that seemed rather unsatisfactory, especially as we only took their cheapest package of converting our existing analog service to digital but no high vision, so we’ve ended up paying them an extra 300 yen plus we get a thinner paper program guide for the privilege. Read the rest of this entry »
Continuing the ecology theme, let’s look at how well the corporate eco slogans are getting through to the public in Japan. This was the topic of a recent ranking survey from goo Ranking.
Demographics
Between the 18th and 2nd of February 2009 1,076 members of the goo Research monitor group completed a private online questionnaire. 51.1% of the sample were male, 7.2% in their teens, 15.8% in their twenties, 29.4% in their thirties, 25.2% in their forties, 11.1% in their fifties, and 11.3% aged sixty or older. Note that the score in the results refers to the relative number of votes for each option, not a percentage of the total sample.
If I can’t find an official translation of the slogan I will translate it as best I can. These unofficial English versions are indicated by italicised text and probably sound really rather awful, but often even the official translations suffer from that kind of problem.
I must admit to a high degree of ignorance of the slogans; for instance, even though I get bombarded with Toyota advertisements I cannot recall seeing that particular slogan. The recognisable slogan for Mitsubishi mostly sticks in my mind for the pronunciation of Drive@earth:
A recent topic that has cropped up here and there under the heading of “eco” in Japan (“eco” these days is just no more than a catch-all for money-saving in general) has been taking your left-over food home from restaurants, a subject looked at recently by iShare.
Demographics
Between the 24th and 27th of March 2009 339 members of the CLUB BBQ free email forwarding service completed a private internet-based questionnaire. 52.5% of the sample were male, 39.2% in their twenties, 28.9% in their thirties, and 31.9% in their forties.
I’ve never taken home a doggy bag in Japan, as I’ve always finished the food put in front of me, unless it was too digusting to eat. Conversely, I dislike the way it gets forced upon you in the USA, especially as when I’m staying in a hotel there’s no way to reheat it even if I wanted to finish it off the next day. I wonder what is the proper etiquette for this?
Here’s two recent stories on doggy bags in Japan, one from the Japan Times (see the last few paragraphs) and one from Tokyofoodcast, looking at a doggy bag campaign in Meguro, Tokyo. Read the rest of this entry »
Between the 18th and 2nd of February 2009 1,076 members of the goo Research monitor group completed a private online questionnaire. 51.1% of the sample were male, 7.2% in their teens, 15.8% in their twenties, 29.4% in their thirties, 25.2% in their forties, 11.1% in their fifties, and 11.3% aged sixty or older. Note that the score in the results refers to the relative number of votes for each option, not a percentage of the total sample.
Between the 18th and 2nd of February 2009 1,076 members of the goo Research monitor group completed a private online questionnaire. 51.1% of the sample were male, 7.2% in their teens, 15.8% in their twenties, 29.4% in their thirties, 25.2% in their forties, 11.1% in their fifties, and 11.3% aged sixty or older. Note that the score in the results refers to the relative number of votes for each option, not a percentage of the total sample.
I’m sure all the guys in the audience will be wincing at number five – perhaps its high ranking is from women not empathising with us in our moment of suffering. Talking about that region, other more obvious (to us guys at least) pains have perhaps been removed for the sake of decency.
For me personally, I sometimes get a trapped muscle in my neck that hurts something awful! Read the rest of this entry »
Please indulge my off-topicness for a minute or two as I talk about the Kobe Sweets Festa 2009, an annual cake fair in Kobe.
Their Kobe Sweets blog (Japanese only) introduces many of the patisseries that will be exhibiting their wares at the Festa, to be held on the 8th and 9th floors of Daimaru Motomachi between the 1st and 6th of May 2009. Koeb has a lot of very, very good cake shops, so be sure to find some time during Golden Week to pop down for a cup of tea and cake.
Next Satuday they are having a tasting session, so they need to borrow a few bloggers’ stomachs for the task, so I’d like to put my name forward as willing to stuff my gob full of cake for the benefit of my readers. It’s just one of these hardships I have to put myself though to keep my readers entertained.
I’ve had a wee word with Shane at Nihon Sun, and she would be happy to host me as a guest blogger talking about the event, introducing Kobe Sweets Festa to the English-speaking world.
The title sounds perhaps as if Sunday has come a day early to the blog, but that was the best title I could think of for this recent survey by iBridge Research Plus and reported on by japan.internet.com into online shopping failures.
Demographics
On the 30th of March 2009 300 female members of the iBridge online monitor group completed a private internet-based questionnaire. 20.3% of the sample were in their twenties, 41.0% in their thirties, 27.7% in their forties, 9.7% in their fifties, and 1.3% in their sixties.
The find of failure this survey was interested in was goods not quite matching the description on the page or accidentally buying the wrong thing, etc, not technical failures or fraud. Don’t ask me why almost one in five of the sample aren’t sure whether or not they failed! Read the rest of this entry »
This survey from MyVoice, their second look at department stores, had a surprising to me set of results, with Japanese much less frequent users of these stores than I might have imagined.
This look with MyVoice at 
A recent topic that has cropped up here and there under the heading of “eco” in Japan (“eco” these days is just no more than a catch-all for money-saving in general) has been 
The title sounds perhaps as if Sunday has come a day early to the blog, but that was the best title I could think of for this recent survey by iBridge Research Plus and reported on by japan.internet.com into 
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