世論 What Japan Thinks

goo Ranking’s survey for today is a look at what images people hold of common primary (elementary) school love.

Demographics

Between the 31st of May and 3rd of June 2013 1,069 members of the goo Research online monitor group completed a private internet-based questionnaire. 50.1% of the sample were female, 24.8% in their teens, 24.9% in their twenties, 25.0% in their thirties, and 25.4% in their forties; there was no-one older than 49 in this sample. Note that the score in the results refers to the relative number of votes for each option, not a percentage of the total sample.

This is the sort of topic that I feel uncomfortable with. I don’t remember much from my primary school days, but girls never really featured as anything significant until perhaps the last year, yet watching the television in Japan they ask even kindergarten children about who they fancy in their class. Maybe I just came from a strange part of Scotland, or maybe I was as blissfully ignorant as I am today. Both these have a high probability of being true…

Ranking result

Q: What are the characteristics of primary school love? (Sample size=1,069)

Rank		Score
1	Boys that can run fast are popular with girls	100
2	Seriously carrying out love spells such as writing the name of the person you fancied on an eraser	81.4
3	Seriously praying that your seat will be moved to beside the person you fancy	79.2
4	Pretend to make fun of the person you fancy in front of them	69.1
5	Getting jeered at by classmates when they find out about who you fancy	62.4
6	Pair up the person you fancy’s name with yours to see how they fit	51.5
7	After everyone leaves the class, having a fly sit at the person you fancy’s desk	47.7
8	Making a love story set at school activities like outdoor trekking	46.5
9	Trying your hardest to get the same supervising teacher as the person you fancy	43.2
10	Wearing one’s lucky item, colour of item according to one’s horoscope	37.8
11	Thinking seriously about what would happen if you you were to mutually fall in love with your pop idol	37.2
12	Being happy that feelings are mutual, and not going out together	30.9
13	Ending up as rivals with friends when you all fancy the most popular person in class	25.7
14	Having lots of people you fancy	24.2
15	Buying similar stationery items to the person you fancy	21.0
16	Feeling that even if you are too nervous to get the words out, you can transmit your feelings to the person you fancy	20.4
17	Being unable to click with your friends because you don’t have someone you fancy, so end up choosing someone to fancy	19.4
18	Getting all nervous when the person you fancy gets put on the spot by the teacher	19.2
19	Worrying about whether to declare your love on the person you fancy’s birthday	10.5
20	Worrying about being unable to tell anyone that you fancy the strange person in the class	9.1