世論 What Japan Thinks

I do like some of the subjects that iShare come up with, and this survey is one of these times, where they look at manga newspapers, newspapers in comic form.

Demographics

Between the 17th and 20th of November 2009 510 members of the CLUB BBQ free email forwarding service completed a private internet-based questionnaire. 56.7% of the sample were male, 32.4% in their twenties, 32.2% in their thirties, and 35.5% in their forties.

On first reading this story, I naturally typed “manga newspaper” into Google and ended up on this site. It’s a rather interesting place (assuming a degree of Japanese knowledge), if only just to see how they render figures like Prime Minister Hatoyama, President Obama, Tatsuya Ichihashi, recently-arrested for the murder of Lindsay Ann Hawker, and Osama Bin Laden.

Research results

Q1: Do you usually read manga? (Sample size=510)

	All	Male N=289	Female N=221
Frequently	24.9%	25.6%	24.0%
Sometimes	46.3%	42.6%	51.1%
Never	28.8%	31.8%	24.9%

Q2: Do you usually view news web sites? (Sample size=510)

	All	Male N=289	Female N=221
Frequently	55.3%	59.5%	49.8%
Sometimes	38.4%	33.9%	44.3%
Never	6.3%	6.6%	5.9%

Q3: Do you usually read newspapers? (Sample size=510)

	All	Male N=289	Female N=221
Frequently	34.9%	34.6%	35.3%
Sometimes	36.9%	36.3%	37.6%
Never	25.5%	25.3%	25.8%
Never even read a newspaper once	2.7%	3.8%	1.4%

Q3SQ: Do you feel newspaper columns are difficult to understand? (Sample size=496)

	All	Male N=278	Female N=218
Often feel so	5.0%	3.6%	6.9%
Sometimes feel so	46.6%	44.2%	49.5%
Never felt so	48.4%	52.2%	43.6%

Q4: Recently a number of web sites featuring news explained through manga have appeared. Did you know about such manga newspaper sites? (Sample size=510)

	All	Male N=289	Female N=221
Knew and have read them	5.9%	6.9%	4.5%
Knew but haven’t read them	14.9%	14.5%	15.4%
Didn’t know about them	79.2%	78.5%	80.1%

Q5: What do you think about such manga newspaper sites? (Sample size=510)

	All	Male N=289	Female N=221
Completely support them	14.7%	16.3%	12.7%
Perhaps support	55.3%	51.2%	60.6%
Perhaps oppose them	23.7%	25.6%	21.3%
Completely oppose them	6.3%	6.9%	5.4%