世論 What Japan Thinks

MyVoice recently published the results of its 6th annual mobile phone service provider image survey. Note that I have previously translated the 5th annual survey.

Demographics

Between the 1st and 5th of February they interviewed 13,352 people from their onlione monitor community: 54% of the respondents were female, 2% in their teens, 19% in their twenties, 41% in their thirties, 25% in their forties, and 13% in their fifties.

The results here are pretty much in line with what even just the casual observer would conclude about the Japanese mobile phone market, although I would have thought that perhaps as Hollywood stars Brad and Cameron would have had a positive impact on SoftBank’s image, but their television commercials promote talking on the phone, ignoring the fact that most people email, and perhaps news of the rumoured three million dollars salary Cameron Diaz received for one six-hour shoot has soured the general public towards Masayoshi Son’s company.
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japan.internet.com recently reported on a survey conducted by JR Tokai Express Research into the subject of job opening for mid-career job-seekers. At the start of February they interviewed 330 people between the ages of 30 and 69 employed in the private sector in some sort of personnel-related capacity. 69.4% of the sample was male, 41.5% in their thirties, 38.5% in their forties, 17.9% in their fifties, and 2.1% in their sixties.

As you have no doubt heard, Japanese firms tend to employ people under the assumption by both the employer and employee that it will be a job for life, although recently this trend has been changing, due to both firms wishing to reduce headcount and to people wanting to change. I think it wasn’t until about five years ago that my employer (one of the largest in Japan) first asked people if they wished to take early retirement or redundancy. The founder is regarded as a god of management who I suspect might be turning in his grave (or whatever the equivalent cliché is for the cremated) if he knew that one of the newest factories is mainly employing casual contract labour. I better shut up now before I get sacked…

UPDATE: Thanks to fukumimi for clearing up a rather fundamental mistake in my initial translation!
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Recently, Macromill Inc. published the results of a survey into Saint Valentine’s Day. They interviewed 515 female company employees aged between 20 and 39 from their internet monitor group over two days towards the end of January this year. In the sample 57 women or 11.1% were aged between 20 and 24, 169 or 32.8% between 25 and 30, 182 or 35.3% between 30 and 34, and 107 or 20.8% between 35 and 39.

In Japan, Saint Valentine’s Day actually incorporates two different celebrations. Before I mention them, note that this day is just for women to give stuff to men; we get our chance next month, on White Day, the 14th of March. One celebration is, of course, the one we all know in the west, giving a present to your object of affection. The second is “male appreciation day”, where 義理チョコ, giri chocolates, are given to men, usually work colleagues, in theory given freely as an expression of thanks, but the word “giri” can be translated as “obligatory”, indicating that most female employees have to pay for chocolates for all the men in the office. Mari Kanazawa covers this issue today in her own inimitable style, as does Shari at My So-Called Japanese Life.

At work there’s quite a fair haul of goodies – there is the standard chocolates (Royce, from our company shop), then some Zunda beans Pretz (I think they are a Valentine gift anyway!), and a huge selection of hand-made cakes by one of my colleague’s wife, whose hobby is making cakes for us. I had a lovely cherry sponge, done to the quality (including the obligatory double-wrapping) of commercial cakes.
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Over two days back in October last year, goo Research interviewed 2,215 members of its business monitor community regarding office design issues. The particular aspect of office design that they were interested in is what might be called “functional design”, namely design with the aim of improving employee motivation or communication, or other such positive effects. The sample consisted of 14.5% in their twenties, 40.5% in their thirties, 32.5% in their forties, 10.7% in their fifties, 1.6% in their sixties, and 0.1% aged seventy or older.

Regarding employment status, 8.9% were at board level, 77.3% were regular full-time employees, 2.3% contract full-time employees, 1.5% were short-term contractors, and 10.0% had other status. 8.2% were in real estate, 23.9% in manufacture, 4.7% in finance and insurance, 6.1% in distribution, 1.3% in utilities, 5.3% in import/export, 22.8% in the service sector, 8.6% in the public sector, and 19.0% in other industries. 18.6% worked in companies or between 1 and 9 employees, 13.5% in those between 10 and 49 employees, 8.1% with 50 to 99 employees, 19.4% with 100 to 499 employees, 8.0% with 500 to 999 employees, and 32.4% in companies with 1,000 or more employees. The sex breakdown is not given, however.

My office is a pretty typical Japanese office; open plan with token partitions that barely hide you from other members, although looking around other parts of the building we have it lucky in having even just these token walls. I find that the offices are exceptionally noisy, as people just shout across the place, and sadly I dislike headphones of ear buds, so cannot get much respite from the din.
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japan.internet.com recently reported on the results of a survey conducted by JR Tokai Express Search into company intranet accounts and security. They interviewed 330 people from their monitor group on the 24th of January employed in the public or private sector. 94.8% were male (very high for them – it’s usually 80% or so, so I wonder if this is a misprint?), 17.9% in their twenties, 41.5% in their thirties, 32.4% in their forties, 7.3% in their fifties, and 0.9% aged sixty or older.

I’d have to answer “don’t know” to Q2 and Q3 too. Rather timely considering this survey, we’ve just had email from the IS team to say that the minimum password length for the intranet is being increased, plus it must contain at least one alphabetic and one numeric or symbol character, and from next month the password must be changed once every 30 days. As a bonus, we can also put a space character into it.

We have now at least four or five passwords between the user and the corporate network: desktops have BIOS password, Windows log in password, router password, and intranet password. For notebook computers it’s BIOS password, disk encryptor password, Windows log in password, wireless LAN smart card password, and intranet password. All these passwords are on different lifetime schedules, and of course most of them cannot be automated. All I can forsee is that the number of PostIt Notes around monitors will increase!
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japan.internet.com recently reported on the results of a survey conducted by JR Tokai Express Research into what bosses thought about their subordinates blogging (and other unreported topics related to business blogs). They interviewed 330 people managers in public and private companies; a mere 5.2% were female (see other surveys on this subject), 0.9% in their twenties, 20.0% in their thirties, 53.9% in their forties, 21.2% in their fifties, and 3.3% in their sixties. Just these demographics alone are fascinating!

My direct boss has read this blog on occassion, but I always have the concern that perhaps someone in the personel department may be monitoring it for any statement that I may make which are against some company policy or other. Therefore I try to avoid telling about how really horrid wonderful my job is. Here’s one bit of hopefully non-confidential information: I am from 5pm today the longest-serving foreigner in our division, as the guy ahead of me just quit. I don’t know whether to to be proud or depressed.

Have any of my readers in Japan got into trouble for blogging? Hopefully nothing as serious as an American resident in Korea who got sacked for blogging about how Korea’s view on one aspect of history may not be correct.
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DIMSDRIVE Research recently looked at a hot topic in Japan, the recent drastic reduction in tuna quotas. Between the 13th and 18th of December they interviewed 7,149 people from their monitor group by means of an internet-based private survey. 43.5% of the sample was male, 1.0% in their teens, 15.8% in their twenties, 35.3% in their thirties, 27.9% in their forties, 14.4% in their fifties, and 5.6% aged sixty or older.

When I translated an earlier opinion poll by DIMSDRIVE Research on tofu, I postulated that that was the nation’s favourite food, and this survey doesn’t disprove my guess.

Perhaps connected with this survey is my recent examination of a press release by the Institute Of Cetacean Research on whaling. It might be interesting to perform a survey see if people would switch from tuna to whale if the quotas for the former were cut and the latter increased.
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Last month japan.internet.com reported on an opinion poll conducted by goo Research into mobile phones and promotional sites. 1,049 members of goo Research’s monitor pool responded to a private internet-based questionnaire. 58.5% of the sample was female, 1.7% in their teens, 24.4% in their twenties, 41.0% in their thirties, 25.0% in their forties, and 7.9% in their fifties.
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japan.internet.com recently published the results of an opinion poll conducted by goo Research towards the end of November into sponsored blogging. 1,093 people from their internet monitor group successfully completed a private internet-based poll. 57.0% of the sample was female, 2.1% in their teens, 20.4% in their twenties, 42.4% in their thirties, 24.9% in their forties, and 10.2% in their fifties.

This practice is often disparagingly called “astroturfing”, meaning faking grass roots support. When it is disguised support, I hate it too, but when made clear I don’t really mind it; to illustrate using my current AdWords advertisers, the subtle and distrusted astroturfing would be something like:

By the way, recently I’ve been dabbling in hedge funds, and found the info at HedgeSynergy invaluable…

The obvious format, which Japundit do really well (now, did they pay me to say that?), is:

You may wish to visit my sponsor at Hayden-Harnett, which seems to be selling rather nice accessories and the like.

My personal least favourite is the habit of using (disclosure: I have a relationship with the company) which to me always reads as (disclosure: they pay me to say this).

There’s also a company PayPerPost which, as the name perhaps suggests, pays you to post about a product or service; actually, they are more of an introduction service, introducing advertisers with advertisees. I’ve not used them though, and I don’t think that sort of blogging would fit in well with this web site.
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japan.internet.com recently published the results of an opinion poll conducted by JR Tokai Express Research into the subject of online stocks and shares trading. They interviewed 330 people employed in public or private enterprises; 82.4% of the sample was male, 10.9% in their twenties, 49.1% in their thirties, 32.7% in their forties, 6.7% in their fifties, and 0.6% in their sixties.

I know there’s a few people in my office who do online trading, but I don’t know what sort of portfolio they have outside of the company’s own employee share system, or how active they are. I used to have a few shares from privatisations back home, and come to think of it, I might even have some hiding somewhere that I’ve lost touch with. Didn’t Standard Life go private recently and give away many free shares to the policy holders?
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