世論 What Japan Thinks

Following on from the recent news about Softbank and Yahoo! buying all the outstanding shares of Vodafone Japan, itMedia published the results of a survey into mobile users’ views on Softbank entering the mobile phone market. The survey was carried out over five days at the end of March and the start of April, with 1200 people responding to a private questionnaire over the internet. The survey group consisted of 400 mobile phone users from each of the providers DoCoMo, au and Vodafone. More detailed demographic information, or where the group of users came from, is not stated.

The most interesting result is that for what people hope fill be the outcome of the deal, in particular regarding call and reception quality. It is a standing joke within the English-speaking community in Japan to call Vodafone “Borderfone” because of the perceived poor quality of reception. This survey shows that this is perhaps a valid criticism, as two in five Vodafone users are looking forward to improvements versus just a quarter of non-users.
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japan.internet.com, in conjunction with JR Tokai Express Research, carried out an internet-based survey of 330 people employed by national and local government, and by private enterprises to find out how well they knew various English computer-related buzzwords and acronyms. The sample was 72.7% male, with 23.0% in their twenties, 42.7% in their thirties, 24.8% in their forties, 9.1% in their fifties, and just 0.3% aged sixty or over. Note that those interviewed are not necessarily IT specialists, or even IT users, in their workplace.

Note that the questions are testing to see how confident the respondents are in their knowledge, not if they are correct or not. I do remember one incident at work regarding the GPL (actually, I remember lots of incidents with lots of technical terms) where one senior person was holding forth at length and with great confidence about a certain aspect of it but was, in fact, talking utter cobblers.

I’m rather surprised at FTTH scoring almost double of RSS and SNS, though. As far as I am aware, FTTH is rarely used in advertising for high-speed home internet access; it is usually just fibre-optic (光ファイバー, hikari faiba-) or NTT’s trademark B-FLET’S (B for Broadband, F for “flat rates, friendly Internet access, and a flexible environment”, and “Let’s” for “Let’s IP Service”).

How well do you do in knowing these terms?
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japan.internet.com, in conjuction with JR Tokai Express Research, conducted a survey to find out where businesspeople obtained their information from. 331 people from all over the country were questioned, with 73.4% of the sample male. 21.5% were in their twenties, 42.3% in their thirties, 27.2% in their forties and 9.1% in their fifties. The survey was most likely conducted via a private internet poll, although this is not clearly mentioned.

I’m surprised that almost nine in ten regularly visit a portal, yet not even half visit a search engine, just scarcely beating the number who visit route-finding web sites, although I suppose it means that a good number of people do their searching directly from the portal.
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goo Research recently carried out some research on the fallout from the “Livedoor Shock”, as it is being called in Japan, and Horie’s arrest. The research was carried out in conjunction with the Yomiuri Shimbun.

Just as background, when the story broke on the 16th of January, The Tokyo Stock Market Mothers Index in particular, within which many new IT firms are listed, fell around 22.4% over the following two days.

For this survey, 1,092 people (I believe they all owned shares) were questioned to see how they had felt the effects of the Livedoor Shock. Note that the survey was conducted on the 1st and 2nd of February, by which time the main TOPIX index had recovered all its losses, but as can be seen later, the personal investors were still hurting, suggesting that they were holding IT-heavy portfolios or other high-risk investments.
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[part 1] [part 2]

Over four days at the end of November and start of December last year, goo Research carried out a closed internet-based survey of 2,207 businesspeople to find out about the use of intra-company communication tools and blogs, and other related matters.

Note that this survey was carried out before probably the most famous Japanese blogging CEO became an ex-president and an ex-blogger, so I wonder how the answers to the questions in this second half would change if this survey were repeated today.

One thing I noticed from the company I worked for’s attempt to introduce a community was that a cheerleader or evangelist is needed to help get the ball rolling. Although the next survey question suggests that over half the people want to see management backing, the backing in itself is not the key, I don’t think, it is that the bosses should also be in the vanguard, otherwise there may be a tendency for the whole think to just fizzle out.
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[part 1] [part 2]

Over four days at the end of November and start of December last year, goo Research carried out a closed internet-based survey of 2,207 businesspeople to find out about the use of intra-company communication tools and blogs, and other related matters.

This is one subject I’d love to wax lyrical on, but sadly I suspect I’d probably get sacked if my boss read what I want to say! Suffice to say I am unaware of a blog by our prez; most of his communications are by PDF files. About a year ago we did try to introduce a community-based service that failed, perhaps partially due to it being seen as a gaijin thing, but more importantly … I’d better self-censor this post now.

The main problem people report is regarding information overload; either simply too much data or inability to highlight the new information. Interestingly, almost two-thirds are interested in work-related blogs, yet only just over half are interested in a community site, although the survey does not make clear what definition of “community” was used.
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Regardless of how long I live here, and how often people try to explain the Yakuza to me, I always shake my head in disbelief when I see stories like this one on the guys who put the Organised into Organised Crime.

Crime syndicates in Japan had around 86,300 members as of Dec. 31, down some 700 from a year earlier, marking the first drop in 10 years, the National Police Agency said Thursday. The Kobe-based Yamaguchi-gumi, accounted for 50.1% of all the members, passing the majority threshold for the first time.

What sort of questionnaire got these answers? Do the gangs submit annual reports? I can only imagine the text: “The chairman reports that outstanding bad debts are down 22.9% due to a 16.3% increase in the number of kneecaps broken. Workforce loyalty is also strong, as indicated by a two-thirds reduction in pinkie removals.” Three significant figures of accuracy suggests relatively detailed numbers are being obtained from somewhere, but where?

Note that the graph above may not, in fact, be truthful. In fact, I may very well have made it all up!

goo Research, in cooperation with the Nikkan Kogyo Shimbun Ltd, performed an internet-based survey in Decemeber of 2005 amongst 1,076 people regarding their views on NEETs and Freeters. At the same time, 218 companies also answered a similar set of questions, and the answers have been gathered together for presentation in this report, although the text does not make it clear whereabout the company answers have been included. Unfortunately, neither the sex nor the age breakdown of the survey is available, as that might have provided extra clues to interpreting the results.

First, I had better translate a couple of terms. NEET, or Not in Education, Employment or Training, was first coined in the UK to refer to teenagers, mainly, who left school with neither a job not ongoing education lined up. In Japan, it refers to a much wider population; there is no age limit, and as for employment, NEETs may do casual or very short-term labour (in fact, there are a number of heavily-advertised web sites that advertise these pocket-money jobs) and may very well have completed a university degree, but due to various factors have not decided to commit themselves to a job. I am not sure from where exactly they get money to support themselves, but it is most likely from their parents.

Freeters, on the other hand, is a purely Japanese word, formed by taking the English word “freelance”, or perhaps just “free”, and the German word “arbeiter”, meaning part-time, or at least not a full employee, 正社員, seishain. Many of the part-time jobs are in the service industry, so a freeter may flit from flipping burgers in McDonalds for three months, to doing the late night shift at the local convenience for another two months, to two weeks not working at anything at all.

The essential difference is perhaps that a NEET spends more time not working whereas a Freeter works just enough to fund his own time off. Along with the overall decrease in young people, with NEETs and Freeters not contributing much in the way of taxes, the ability of the government to pay pensions in the future is further threatened by the casualisation (is that a word?) of the workforce.
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In December, DIMSDRIVE Research interviewed 5,000 people, 2,457 male, from their internet monitor group about their views on the top e-business news stories of 2005. The age demographics were 1.4% in their teens, 15.6% in their twenties, 34.3% in their thirties, 28.7% in their forties, 13.3% in their fifties, and 6.7% aged sixty or over.

I find it interesting that the women rated IT firms buying baseball teams more highly than the men, as baseball does tend to have a more male image. I personally would have rated spyware and phishing more highly, but I don’t the the subject has got as much coverage in the Japanese press as it gets in the west.

I don’t think I need a crystal ball to predict what the biggest story of 2006 will be.
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