世論 What Japan Thinks

iShare recently took a look at drivers’ first road accident, and found that almost half of all license holders are still to have their first.

Demographics

Between the 24th and 28th of February 2011 641 members of the CLUB BQ free email forwarding service completed a private internet-based questionnaire. 54.9% of the sample were male, 28.4% in their twenties, 32.6% in their thirties, and 39.0% in their forties.

The figure of almost half the drivers having never had an accident may be high in part due to a lot of “paper drivers”, the name for people with driving licenses but who never actually drive. Although I got a parking ticket last year I’ve never had an accident in my time in Japan, but that’s mainly due to only driving about four or five times a year! Back in the UK my first accident was scraping the side of the car against a post as I was parking, a feat I repeated a mere month later.
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A recent survey from goo Research, reported on by japan.internet.com, into mobile phones but focusing on camera features in this report, found that cameras were now ubiquitous on mobile phones.

Demographics

Between the 14th and 18th of February 2011 1,074 members of the goo Research online monitor group completed a private internet-based questionnaire. 52.9% of the sample were male, 16.7% in their teens, 17.9% in their twenties, 21.1% in their thirties, 16.6% in their forties, 15.5% in their fifties, and 12.2% aged sixty or older.

Currently the makers are fighting a megapixel war in Japan, in both traditional feature phones and smartphones. For feature phones, Panasonic have their 13 megapixel Lumix phone, LG their ugly as sin jobby-brown 12 megapixel effort, and Sony-Ericsson the stupidly over-specced 16 megapixels; for smartphones, Toshiba’s Android-based 12 megapixel camera.
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A couple of weeks ago I published a translation of a survey into Toho Cinema’s proposed 300 yen cut to a standard admission ticket, but since then I came across a Japanese-language article telling me why it is a portent of things to come.

First, the article listed historical prices for cinema tickets, calling it cartel pricing. However, there was no adjustment for inflation, but I found a site with historical CPI data, so I’ll use January 2011 as a base.

I think that table is saying that the correction to 1,500 yen makes prices cheaper than what they were in 1970. If the price remains at 1,800 yen, the 1970 price adjusted for inflation is 576 yen, which means that current prices are within 4% of what they were in 1970 allowing for CPI; this actually destroys the author’s argument about how prices have risen drastically since 1970. However, let’s move onto the other points.

Currently, although 1,800 yen is the standard price, one day a week is Ladies’ Day, where women get in for 1,000 yen. Furthermore, over 60s get in for the same discounted price, but Toho Cinemas are talking about getting rid of Ladies’ Day and limiting the OAP discount to the over 65s. The reason for this is that at the moment over 60% of tickets sold are at 1,000 yen, just one-tenth are at the full price, and another tenth at 1,500 yen, so if this goes through it will mean eight times as many people paying more than paying less!

The final statistic provided is that in 2004 the average ticket price was around 1,200 yen, but by last year it had dropped to under 1,100 yen, according to unnamed sources in the cinema business. Although there seems to be a bit of a slippery-slope argument here, it is iinteresting food for thought!