世論 What Japan Thinks

goo Ranking recently took a look at one of my most disliked things on Japanese television, fortune telling, and in particular what things make people hate a fortune teller.

Demographics

Over the 22nd and 23rd of July 2011 over 1,000 members of the goo Research online monitor group completed a private internet-based questionnaire. However, the link to the sample demographics does not work. 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 think this survey refers to when people visit fortune tellers themselves, or read books about their own star sign or whatever, rather than watching someone on television. Here’s a photo from flickr by Janne Moren of a palm reader in Osaka:

By the way, Japan does not have the typical US (and UK) big-time television cold readers fishing their audience for someone to whom the letter “T” is important. Instead we get hot readings with celebs getting their palms read and egos stroked by other celeb readers.

I did see ads for Uri Geller on my phone recently, which was not very nice in the slightest.

Ranking result

Q: What things make you feel you hate a fortune teller? (Sample size=just over 1,000)

Rank		Score
1	When they’re trying to force a sale	100
2	When they really look down on me	92.2
3	They spend almost all of the reading boasting about themselves	82.3
4	When the details of an assertion is completely wrong	75.4
5	They don’t deliver a verdict from the spirit world, just a personal opinion	75.2
6	Their fortune-telling techniques are dodgy	72.3
7	Their advice doesn’t make clear what it is best for me to do	70.5
8	They assert “I think you’re worried about X” after I tell them X is a worry	67.5
9	They lecture instead of giving advice	66.8
10	They proceed with the fortune telling after mishearing personal information	64.2
11	Discussions get derailed so the advice is barely useful	60.9
12	They get angry when not addressed as “Sensei” (Teacher)	60.3
13	Their analogies are difficult to understand	60.2
14	They cling to their past glories	56.5
15	They say “So why did you request a reading?” and otherwise reject my actions	50.1
16	“Commit your thoughts to paper” and other methods for resolutions are all out of date	32.4