世論 What Japan Thinks

Recently japan.internet.com reported on a survey conducted by goo Research into shareholder meetings.

Demographics

Between the 19th and 20th of April 2007, goo Research got 1,083 successfully completed replies to their private internet-based questionnaire. 52.5% were male, 24.8% in their twenties, 22.5% in their thirties, 21.8% in their forties, 20.7% in their fifties, and 10.2% in their sixties.

Share trading is something I have yet to do in Japan, despite having a company savings scheme, so I cannot really comment much on the results of this survey. Of course one cannot mention shareholder meetings in Japan without mentioning the 総会屋, soukaiya, yakusa-connected extortionists who seek payment in return for not disrupting the company’s AGM. Many companies hold their AGM on the same day to hopefully reduce the chance of being targeted by the mob.

I was surprised by almost one in five shareholders having attended an AGM or the like. Perhaps the more detailed survey results indicates why many people choose to attend. Do companies give away gifts or have food laid on for attendees?
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infoPLANT recently published a survey that looked into the usage of fee-charging mobile phone sites. The fieldwork for the self-selecting survey was conducted over a week from the 3rd to 10th of April 2007.

Demographics

5,207 people chose to fill out a public questionnaire available through the NTT DoCoMo iMode menuing system. 39.4% of the sample was male, 3.2% in their teens, 31.0% in their twenties, 43.4% in their thirties, 19.0% in their forties, and 3.4% aged fifty or older.

This survey is notable for one figure I’d been hoping to find in regards to infoPLANT, namely how many of their respondents are on fixed-price data programs, or パケ放題, pakehoudai, plans as they are known in Japanese. This survey had five in six of the respondents on these deals. This higher than I expected figure should always be borne in mind when reading future or past infoPLANT self-selecting iMode surveys, as this class of user does not need to worry about, for instance, the rather horrendously large bill that can be run up downloading an audio track; nearly 9,000 yen on a standard plan for a 5 megabyte audio file, and still around 450 yen on DoCoMo’s best discounted packet deals. Investigating further, the percentage of customers who have unlimited packet plans was around 27% as of September 2006 (see page 27) and about 30% at the end of 3Q 2006 (31st December 2006) (see page 2), so one can see the bias inherent in this kind of open survey conducted by infoPLANT.

Also note, even if you are on an unlimited packet program, if you use your mobile phone as a modem, these data packets are not free; stories have been recently circulating about people not reading the fine print correctly and running up over a million yen in data transmission charges!
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japan.internet.com recently reported on a survey conducted by JR Tokai Express Research into the matter of the use of open source software in the public sector.

Demographics

On the 9th of April 2007, 332 members of JR Tokai Express Research’s online monitor panel successfully completed a private internet-based questionnaire. All of the respondents worked in the public sector. 82.5% were male, 7.5% in their twenties, 38.3% in their thirties, 42.2% in their forties, 9.6% in their fifties, and 2.4% in their sixties.

A number of years ago an initiative to promot the use of Linux within local goverment and other public sector locations was started, with many local authorities and the IPA, Information-technology Promotion Agency, carrying out open source software trials, but this survey suggests that the penetration at the client side has been minimal.

Note that a previous survey covering both the private and public sectors also found there was an overwhelming majority of Windows users.
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With the Japanese version of the SOX, or Sarbanes-Oxley Act, which provides a framework for corporate governance, due to be introduced on the first of April 2008, japan.internet.com, in conjuction with JR Tokai Express Research, looked at J-SOX and compliance issues surrounding the law. Their full report, which may be purchased through this link (Japanese only), goes into much more detail on the subject. This article just touches awareness issues.

Demographics

On the 10th of April 2007 330 people from JR Tokai Express Research’s monitor panel and employed in public listed companies completed a private online questionnaire. 80.0% of the sample was male, 13.3% in their twenties, 52.4% in their thirties, 27.9% in their forties, 5.2% in their fifties, and 1.2% in their sixties.

I have only heard about J-SOX compliance from work in respect to password policy for our intranet, and perhaps interestingly enough, searching my employer’s Japanese web site turns up about 26 hits for SOX (once I eliminate pages on NOx and SOx pollutants), but our US web site has just seven hits.

The Japanese term is SOX 法, SOX hou, merely SOX law in English. However, a frequently-heard complaint from the poll-takers was that SOX law or J-SOX does not really mean anything (confusion with Dice-K at the Boston Red Sox, perhaps!) so they wish there was a more Japanese name for it.
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japan.internet.com recently published the results of a survey conducted by goo Research into studying English conversation. The column they published, however, concentrates on the computer-related aspects of learning.

Demographics

1,079 members of goo Research’s online monitor group completed a private internet-based questionnaire. 24.1% were in their twenties, 22.7% in their thirties, 21.8% in their forties, 20.8% in their fifties, and 10.6% in their sixties. 51.8% of the sample was male.

Last month I presented another survey concerning Second Life (hey, that headline’s wrong – a majority don’t want to try!) that showed that almost half the sample wanted to try out Second Life; add the results here to the previous survey and we see that over three in five potential Second Lifers may be on the lookout for English lessons!

The article also mentions cafetalk.jp offering Second Life English lessons, so if you fancy getting involved as a tutor through Skype on your PC, feel free to have a look at what they offer, as there does seem to be a significant number of Japanese looking for on-line English.
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With the annual new recruit intake for Japanese businesses about to start on April 1st (or April 2nd this year), goo Ranking published a timely survey on what sort of behaviour people would like to warn new recruits about. As usual, the only information regarding the carrying out of the survey is that the fieldwork was done between the 22nd and 24th of February. The scores reported are the relative votes for each option, with the top vote getter at 100 points.

As for me, I think I manage about sixteen or seventeen! How do you do?

Regarding our team’s newest recruit from last year, the only thing personally I’d like to warn him about (apart from to stop constantly sniffing every hour of every day of every week!) is that although our office is casual dress, his trousers are just a bit too saggy and his shirt-tail hangs out around his bum.
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Just recently japan.internet.com published the result of a survey conducted by JR Tokai Express Research into foreign-affiliated companies. As finance is one field I know little about, please let me know if I get some of the terminology wrong!

Demographics

On the 14th of March 331 people from JR Tokai Express Research’s monitor group employed in private industry successfully completed a private internet-based questionnaire. 77.9% of the sample was male, 16.6% in their twenties, 43.8% in their thirties, 31.1% in their forties, 7.3% in their fifties, and 1.2% in their sixties.

This topic has, I think, been in the news recently, but I can’t find anything about it. The nearest bit of English news I’ve discovered is this piece from Japan Economy News on a foreign-led shareholder revolt.
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japan.internet.com recently reported on a survey conducted by JR Tokai Express Research into server operating systems in small and medium-sized businesses. On the 10th of March 330 people employed in companies with less than 100 people, working in management, board-level, sales, technical or other specialist positions completed the survey. It may be worth comparing the results here with a previous survey on desktop operating systems.

Demographics

86.4% of the sample was male, 5.2% in their twenties, 39.1% in their thirties, 41.8% in their forties, 8.8% in their fifties, and 5.2% in their sixties.

Being in a large company, I don’t count for this survey, although our intranet seems to be powered by some sort of Linux-based system, I suspect. Within each team, however, file servers tend to be Windows; no-one is terribly interested in setting up anything more advanced, and in fact… ahh, perhaps I might get into company confidential information, so I’d better stop now.
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Following up on two days ago’s translated survey that showed surprisingly high penetration of Internet Explorer 7, japan.internet.com published the results of a survey conducted by JR Tokai Express Research into Windows Vista. The survey was conducted on the 28th of February, barely a month after Vista’s release in Japan, which seems not to have been much of a success. Note also the results of a previous survey conducted last year into interest in Microsoft Vista recorded one in five planning to upgrade.

Demographics

330 people from their monitor group employed in public or private enterprises replied to the private internet-based survey. 74.8% of the sample was male, 16.4% in their twenties, 43.9% in their thirties, 28.8% in their forties, 8.2% in their fifties, and 2.7% in their sixties.

I’m holding off from Vista for the moment myself; I don’t see any need to upgrade from XP, and indeed I also see many reasons not to upgrade, having used it for a time at work last Autumn when testing out the beta versions. Despite most people having Vista-ready notebook computers, I don’t know of anyone at our workplace who has tried upgrading their main PCs.
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japan.internet.com recently reported on a survey conducted by JR Tokai Express Research into how people rate the company they work for. The fieldwork was conducted on the 14th of February, with 330 people from their online monitor group successfully completing a private internet-based questionnaire. It’s probably useful to cross-reference this with my recent translation of a survey on middle-age job opportunities.

Demographics

The 330 people were all employed in private industry, with an overwhelming 95.5% male. All of the sample was aged 30 or older, with 35.8% in their thirties, 52.7% in their forties, 10.6% in their fifties, and 0.9% in their sixties.

My degree of satisfaction (or otherwise, as the case may be) with my employer is documented to some extent in my weekly newsletter, available by either entering your email address in the box below, or by visiting the newsletter archives on Google. Only recently have I started to put some effort into resolving matters, but I am seeing possible signs that something positive may happen.

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