世論 What Japan Thinks

Central Research Services Inc recently reported on a survey into media consumption in 2005. The survey itself was conducted back in October 2005, and although detailed demographics are not available, the sample was randomly selected from residents up and down the country aged between 15 and 69, and conducted by means of face-to-face interviews. The response rate was 57.4%, giving a raw sample size of 3,443 people.

I don’t think this survey teaches us much that intuition suggests to be true, but it’s always interesting to get these hunches backed up by raw data. However, although almost three-quarters read a paper every day, how much they actually read versus just headline skimming is another question that hasn’t been asked here.

Q3 is a rather weird question – perhaps it’s to see if people start with the news or the sports. The tabloids have sports on the back page, but the broadsheets usually have the television listings, then the sports from the second-last page, so I don’t know how that affected the answers.
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With MNP, Mobile Number Portability, having just started in Japan, japan.internet.com reported that JR Tokai Express Research performed a survey into people’s views on MNP. They interviewed just 330 people from their internet monitor group by means of a private internet-based questionnaire. 66.3% of the sample was male, 33.3% female, so where that places the remaining one person, I don’t know! 17.3% were in their twenties, 41.8% in their thirties, 27.3% in their forties, 11.8% in their fifties, and 1.8% in their sixties.

The sample size for Q1SQ is very small, so it is difficult to extrapolate these figures, but it does seem that DoCoMo is the biggest loser and au the biggest winner. This backs up unofficial figures I heard of about 400,000 net loss to DoCoMo, 600,000 gain for au, and 200,000 less customers at Softbank, despite their suicidal price slashing. UPDATE: I was out by a factor of ten or so! This morning’s TV (recalling from memory, so the figures might not be 100% accurate!) said that au gained a net 103,000 customers, DoCoMo lost 75,000, and Softbank 23,000 over the last week. The figures don’t add up because there are also brand new customers included in the overall totals, I believe, and each company perhaps uses different counting methods.

For me, I had enough problem working out how to use my new phone from the same maker and service provider, so I’d be put off taking advantage of MNP and having to learn a whole new service model too!
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[part 1] [part 2]

goo Research recently published the results of a survey they conducted into internal electronic communications within businesses. Over three days at the start of August they interviewed 2,133 people in employment (full-time only, I believe) from their internet monitor group. The sex breakdown is not listed, but judging by other surveys’ demographics, a figure of over 80% male would not be unexpected at all.

Jumping on the recent mixi float bandwagon, this half of the survey looks in a bit more detail at the subject of Social Networking Services, or SNS. Whereas I can get behind the idea of corporate blogging, I don’t think that SNSs would work too well. Perhaps I am of the generation (or personality) that never really got into the whole Instant Messenging boom, of which I see SNSs being an offspring of. A mailing list where answers can be considered and replied to at leisure, or a blog with decent RSS support (or even wikis) would seem more productive than a more free-form free-for-all SNS.
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[part 1] [part 2]

goo Research recently published the results of a survey they conducted into internal electronic communications within businesses. Over three days at the start of August they interviewed 2,133 people in employment (full-time only, I believe) from their internet monitor group. The sex breakdown is not listed, but judging by other surveys’ demographics, a figure of over 80% male would not be unexpected at all.

This is a subject I’d love to talk about, but company confidentiality issues prevents me from feeling free to let rip. In addition, I still don’t fully understand Japanese working culture, so the exact reasons for some of the issues I experienced still escape me, although management control is one important factor.

One thing, though, that I thought would be good for many large companies would be something like the halfbakery, only with more serious ideas. I had an interesting idea last night regarding mobile phones but, as Q1SQ indicates, communication with other teams with more direct responsibility for phones is problematic, so the idea will just die.
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Today, japan.internet.com published the results of a survey conducted by JR Tokai Express Research into browsers installed on corporate computers. 330 people from their monitor pool employed in private or public enterprises successfully completed a private internet-based questionnaire. 80.0% of the sample was male, 12.4% in their twenties, 42.1% in their thirties, 30.9% in their forties, 13.0% in their fifties, and 1.5% in their sixties.

The figures for Internet Explorer are spectacularly high. Dropping those with no browser or no computer and the don’t knows, almost 98% of users may be running IE, and even including all the don’t knows still leaves at best (or is it at worst?) just under 90% definitely with Internet Explorer. One reason, of course, is that many corporate intranet applications may require a specific browser, as my employer’s does. Note that Sleipnir is just an Internet Explorer shell, although Gen Kanai’s blog informs me that it can be switched to use the Firefox/Gecko engine instead.

For the open source Mozilla project, at best there are 54 identifiable users, or 18.9% of those who know their browser, but that is assuming that the Netscape, Firefox and Mozilla user groups do not overlap, and of course that the Netscape category doesn’t include people using a pre-open source 4.x (or even earlier!) version.
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With both Amazon and Apple recently opening film and video download services, towards the end of September japan.internet.com, in conjunction with goo Research, looked at what people thought about downloading movies. 1,043 people from their internet monitor group, 55.5% female, successfully completed a private internet survey. 21.8% were in their twenties, 40.1% in their thirties, 25.9% in their forties, 9.1% in their fifties, and 3.2% in their sixties.

The results here are interesting; although there is a slight majority not interested in downloading, those who download want to watch on the television. However, with the proliferation of wide-screen televisions, high-definition broadcasts and Blue Ray disks, a standard lower-than-DVD quality download might look rather poor on a 38 inch plasma display.
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As part of DIMSDRIVE Research’s 91st Ranking Research, they published the result of a survey into which inventor to thank for the world today. They surveyed 6,008 people from their monitor pool over six days in mid-August. It might be interesting to cross-reference this post with a previous ranking survey on the top company founders or presidents.
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japan.internet.com published the results of a survey by Cross Marketing Inc into pay contents for mobile phones. At the end of July they interviewed 300 people from their internet monitor group. As usual for Cross Marketing, the sample was evenly split, 50:50 male and female, and a fifth aged 18 or 19, a fifth in their twenties, and so on up to a fifth of the sample aged between 50 and 59.

The authors suggest that a key reason for people not paying very much, if at all, for mobile contents is due to the ability now to be able to surf the internet and discover lots of free content. However, to me this ignores certain obstacles like the quality of browsers and the lack of sites designed for mobiles. In addition, the most popular option, downloading ring tones, has recently become much cheaper, with lots of 100 yen (plus 5 yen tax) per month all-you-can-download sites getting heavy television promotion.
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japan.internet.com recently published the results of a survey conducted by JR Tokai Express Research on commercial email magazines. They interviewed by means of a private internet-based questionnaire 331 people working in private industry. 76.1% of the sample was male, 14.5% in their twenties, 45.9% in their thirties, 32.9% in their forties, 6.3% in their fifties, and just 0.3% (one person) in their sixties.

Many major companies with online presences produce these email magazines, although one drawback I find is that whilst subscribing is easy, unsubscribing can be a pain, as there is rarely a one-click solution; often one needs to log into an account, find the settings, then turn them off. I have had to redirect a few of them straight to the spam bin as I’ve been unable to find out how to turn them off!
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Last month japan.internet.com reported the results of a survey conducted by JR Tokai Express Research regarding the use of support call centres. They interviewed 330 people employed in both the public and private sectors; 83.0% were male, 10.0% in their twenties, 41.8% in their thirties, 32.7% in their forties, 14.5% in their fifties, and 0.9% in their sixties.

I’ve once phoned a support line in Japanese for a problem with my ISP’s free router and the ADSL performance. The ISP was another division of the company I work for, and the notebook PC I was trying to connect with was a company-issue machine with the standard company installed software, but still they started the script from “Are you sure you’re plugged in?” The problem was something to do with performance being dreadful – I’d changed providers but the throughtput dropped from a few megs a second to barely dial-up speeds, and uploading even the shortest mail would time out. I finally convinced them it was their fault, not mine, that the line was slow, but it still took them another week or so to do whatever they needed to do at their end to restore the speed.
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