世論 What Japan Thinks

goo Research recently published a massive survey of 35,925 internet users by means of a public internet-based questionnaire on the use of railway IC cards. They collected replies during a week at the end of June and the start of July. 53.3% of the respondents were female, 2.3% in their teens, 22.3% in their twenties, 39.6% in their thirties, 24.0% in their forties, 8.7% in their fifties, 2.3% in their sixties, 0.6% in their seventies, and the remaining 0.2% chose not to reveal their age. Also, 30.6% of the sample lived in the Tokyo area, 7.4% in the Nagoya area, and 16.6% in Kansai – Tokyo and Kansai have railway smart card services (namely JR’s SUICA in Tokyo and JR’s ICOCA and the private railways’ PiTaPa in Kansai) and major train concentrations, but I don’t believe Nagoya has, although it is the third major centre of population in Japan. According to the survey, though, there is plans to launch a JR TOICA card for the Nagoya area.

For those of you not familiar with their operation, here is a quick history of the cards in the Kansai area. First, JR launched the ICOCA card with two key features; one, a pre-paid season ticket and two, electronic cash, whereby money could be added manually then used either for shopping around the station or to use instead of train tickets for travel outside the season ticket’s area. A couple of years later the private railways launched the PiTaPa system, which had a quite different payment model. First, there was no season ticket, but instead between two nominated stations you got a 5% discount for each journey in your first month, rising to 15% for the third, if I remember correctly. These fares were post-pay; at the end of each month all your travel was added up and automatically withdrawn from a nominated account. For purchases other than train fares, there was also a standard electronic wallet system as for ICOCA. In addition, if you chose a credit card version of your PiTaPa card, when your available cash fell below a certain point, the card could be set to automatically recharge itself as you passed through the ticket gates. Note that although there are about seven or eight transport companies that support PiTaPa, when using another company’s transport your fares come from the electronic cash portion, and no discounts are available. This makes it a major pain for people like me who use two private railways and JR to get to work, as I would need to carry three separate cards, probably in three separate wallets to avoid interference, to get full benefit from the discounts.

In the meantime, JR announced their Smart ICOCA, which was an ICOCA card and credit card combined, with the similar auto top-up feature. In addition, ICOCA and PiTaPa got together and now allow the electronic cash to be used at each other’s ticket gates. Finally, Hankyu have just started a pre-pay system for season tickets (just like the original ICOCA), so holders of their Hana Plus PiTaPa-compatible credit cards can add a season ticket to their card, for people who’d rather manage their commuting fares that way round.

I almost forgot – the latest DoCoMo FOMA mobile phones also support some aspects of railway IC cards’ electronic cash system, but I’m not really sure of the exact capabilities.

Note also that the Tokyo JR SUICA cards can be used in the Kansai ICOCA area and vice versa. I’m not sure whether or not SUICA and PiTaPa interact, though.
Read the rest of this entry »

Just over a month ago japan.internet.com reported on a survey by JR Tokai Express Research into online payments. Towards the end of June they got responses from 330 internet users; 64.8% were male, 14.2% in their twenties, 29.1% in their thirties, 34.8% in their forties, 17.9% in their fifties, and 3.9% in their sixties.

I’m not really sure why people feel such reluctance to using their credit card online, and the column makes no mention of the reasons either. Perhaps it is an issue of trust, or perhaps it is just a general sense of the internet being dangerous. I reacon that the net, SLL in particular, is safer than the average shop, and the danger of hacking web sites can result in data leaking from offline as well as online purchases.
Read the rest of this entry »

NTT DoCoMo recently published an interesting survey they performed to find out what people thought about mobile phone credit cards. They interviewed 1,800 people from all over Japan in February by means of a web-based questionnaire. The sample was exactly 50:50 male and female, and 150 people of each sex from each decade of life, from the teens to the sixties, responded. Note that the teens consisted only of 18 and 19 year olds, though.

First, mobile phone credit cards are just what the term implies – they are mobile phones with a credit card’s contactless RFID chip embedded within them, so instead of your traditional bit of plastic, your mobile phone now becomes the device with which you Chip and Pin.

Note that currently credit cards are not as widely used in Japan as they might be in Europe and the USA. In addition, most shops and restaurants that are part of a chain will accept credit cards (although one of my local supermarkets doesn’t), but independent shops on the whole do not accept them. Note the answers to Q5, where over four in five use their credit card once a week or less, and the perhaps slightly loaded answers in Q7 (there is no indication if the question allowed a free answer or just a selection from a list, with perhaps lower-scoring answers omitted from the results) suggesting that plastic is preferred for luxuries or large purchases.

Overall, I think that this survey suggests that people will see mobile credit cards as an extension of the current mobile wallets, so they will treat them as something to use everyday for even the smallest transactions. From the provider’s point of view, small transactions still have a fixed basic fee associated with them, so charging a bottle of cold tea to your phone’s credit card could cost the retailer up half the retail price in transaction fees. How shop owners can cope with this new threat to their profit margins remains to be seen, and would in fact make a good theme for a future survey.
Read the rest of this entry »

iSHARE recently surveyed the memberrs of CLUB BBQ to see what their opinions on various issues surrounding mobile phones were, but the only results they posted in this news release were regarding electronic money and phone features. 718 people, 72% male replied to the private internet questionnaire carried out, according to the article, over two days at the end of February this year, but I presume this is a typo for January.

Note that CLUB BBQ is a free mail service that in return for free usage the members must regularly fill out surveys. It’s interesting that for this survey, and many others that iSHARE have performed, the men outnumber women two to one, whereas most other internet monitor-based surveys are around 60% female, perhaps indicating the CLUB BBQ is a more male-oriented site; judging by the various anime characters around the iSHARE web site I would say that this would seem to be true. This might suggest that the average CLUB BBQ user may very well be a heavier user of technology.
Read the rest of this entry »

Toppan, a large Japanese corporation, published a press release relating to a survey they performed regarding views on financial institution security and Smart Card-based services. They questioned just 416 adults from Tokyo and surrounding area by means of a private internet-based survey over a couple of days in mid-November. The detailed survey results were not published, but instead the data was presented as a report, so will be translated in that form.

Note that an IC Cash Card is the Japanese term for a SmartCard-based ATM card. This definition excludes, I believe, credit cards with Chip and Pin functionality, and is sometimes associated with extra biometrics information – a good number of the ATMs in Japan are fitted out with fingerprint or vein scanners.

The bank I am with has recently changed their rules so that when using ATMs with a standard magnetic strip-based card, only (only?) 2,000,000 yen (£10,000 or US$20,000) can be transferred to another account per day, down from 5,000,000 yen per day; the same two million yen can also be withdrawn as cash. If using a Smart Card, the amount that can be transferred or withdrawn has been raised to TEN MILLION YEN, fifty thousand pounds or one hundred thousand dollars!
Read the rest of this entry »

[part 1] [part 2]

DIMSDRIVE carried out a survey at the start of December to find people’s views regarding electronic money. They interviewed by means of an internet-based questionnaire 6,430 people from all over Japan, 2,736 (42.6%) male, all members of their monitor group.

In the second half of this survey, most of the users seem to be doing small transactions, and are attracted mainly to the speed, and as noted previously, convenience stores and railway kiosks are the most popular locations, so that suggests the main users are perhaps commuters are the regular users, darting in and out for a newspaper and an energy drink on the way to work. For those who haave not used electronic money, the main issue (other than the inability to perform transactions due to not having had the opportunity nor the hardware) seems to be education of the consumer.
Read the rest of this entry »

[part 1] [part 2]

DIMSDRIVE carried out a survey at the start of December to find people’s views regarding electronic money. They interviewed by means of an internet-based questionnaire 6,430 people from all over Japan, 2,736 (42.6%) male, all members of their monitor group.

The Suica system comes out tops for name recognition, but that may be because it is promoted as not just electronic money, but more importantly as a rail pass. Suica is the preferred system for issuing railway season tickets, so it gets heavily promoted in that respect, and is also often featured on in-train advertising, therefore it has very high name recognition, as can be seen here.

However, Edy scores higher as the first thing that springs to mind regarding electronic money, perhaps because the advertising for Suica is weighted towards the season ticket features, not shopping.
Read the rest of this entry »

[part 1] [part 2]

goo Research recently carried out a massive opinion poll to investigate how people in Japan use internet banking.In cooperation with NTT Resonance and Mitsubishi Research Institute they surveyed 43,074 members of the goo Research internet monitor group and ordinary goo users. This public poll was conducted for two weeks in the middle of October, with 56.0% of the respondents female. 2.2% were in their teens, 23.3% in their twenties, 40.4% in their thirties, 23.8% in their forties, 7.8% in their fifties, 2.1% in their sixties, and just 0.4% over seventy.

It seems that both conventional banks’ net services and net-only banks do not give any significant discounts on transaction fees – Japan still has lots of fees for doing almost anything outside working hours or more complicated than withdrawning money – but even with that worries about security, which is probably as much due to perceptions as actual danger, need to be addressed to give potential customers the assurance that the services are safe.
Read the rest of this entry »

[part 1] [part 2]

goo Research recently carried out a massive opinion poll to investigate how people in Japan use internet banking.In cooperation with NTT Resonance and Mitsubishi Research Institute they surveyed 43,074 members of the goo Research internet monitor group and ordinary goo users. This public poll was conducted for two weeks in the middle of October, with 56.0% of the respondents female. 2.2% were in their teens, 23.3% in their twenties, 40.4% in their thirties, 23.8% in their forties, 7.8% in their fifties, 2.1% in their sixties, and just 0.4% over seventy.

I am unsure whether or not PayPal counts as a net-only bank, or even if it, or an equivalent system, is popular is Japan. However, it seems internet-only banks are surprisingly popular (although since this is an internet-based survey there is some built-in bias), but if bricks and mortar banks offered transaction fee discounts for online usage, perhaps they could seriously erode the net-only banks’ customer base. It’s interesting, given that one of Koizumi’s pledges has been to do away with silly rules for the sake of it, that it seems that net banks cannot be used for utilities payments or lottery ticket purchase. My bank back home, first direct, has internet-based services, but I still prefer the telephone (and with Skype it’s ridiculously cheap!) for all my business.

This is another large survey that I will publish over two days.
Read the rest of this entry »

NTT DoCoMo recently carried out a survey of users of mobile phones with electronic wallet functionality to see how, or even if, they were being used. Note when reading this survey that first NTT DoCoMo has heavily invested in the electronic money infrastructure and almost all of their new models come with this feature built-in. For their FOMA range (3G phones), it is a compulsory feature, and with sales figures showing over 80% of new and upgrading customers are choosing these models, NTT have a vested interest in the success of electronic wallets, as they no doubt get a transaction fee for every electronic money purchase. This may or may not have influenced the outcome of the survey. However, if accurate, it shows a pretty high degree of market penetration. UPDATE: If only I’d posted this right after I translated it last week, I could have beaten the BBC on this story!

Although launched only last July, in just one year and two months (September 3rd) DoCoMo reached 6 million electronic money-capabile phones sold, and by the first of October there were about 25,000 shops nationwide and 6,000 vending machines equipped with readers.

In this survey, 4,000 users of mobile phones with the DoCoMo おサイフケータイ (osaifu keitai, Mobile Wallet) service functionality built-in were interviewed, 2,200 male, 1,800 female, and their answers are as follows.

Q: Have you used the Mobile Wallet functionality of your phone?

	Using it	Used to use it, but stopped	Not used it
All	28%	3%	69%
Up to 19 years old	18%	4%	78%
20 to 29 years old	27%	4%	69%
30 to 39 years old	32%	3%	65%
40 to 49 years old	29%	3%	68%
Over 50 years old	21%	2%	77%

This 28% represents 1,108 people, and if this is scaled up to cover all people owning electronic-money ready DoCoMo phones, about 1.82 million people are using this service.

Q: How often do you use your Mobile Wallet? (Sample size=1,108)

Over thrice a day	6%
About once a day	12%
About five times a week	5%
About thrice a week	15%
About once a week	24%
About once every two weeks	11%
About once a month	17%
Hardly ever use it	10%

Compared with the same question asked in May, the percentage using the service once a day or more has increased from 13% to 18%.

Q: Where do you use your Mobile Wallet? (Sample size=1,108, multiple answer)

Convenience store	84%
Rental shop	25%
Vending machine	24%
Airport	22%
Electrical retailer	18%
Pharmacist	16%
Book or CD shop	15%
Cafe	15%
Fast food store	14%
Bar or pub	12%
Family Restaurant	11%

Note that at some places, like at airports, the Mobile Wallet is not used as money, but as a member’s card for saving points, etc. When you buy a plane ticket from ANA online, you can get an email sent to your mobile phone that allows you to access an application that records a transaction identifier in the IC card of the wallet, so ticket collection and check-in can be performed simultaneously and effortlessly.

Q: How satisfied are you with your Mobile Wallet service? (Sample size=1,108)

Extremely satisfied	13%
Satisfied	69%
Dissatisfied	19%

SQ: If extremely satisfied or satisfied, will you buy a Mobile Wallet capable phone next time you change phones? (Sample size=902)

Definitely want to buy	47%
Want to buy	52%
Don’t want to buy	1%

Q: What do you like about using your Mobile Wallet? (Sample size=1,108)

Just hold over reader to use	73%
Speedy purchasing	60%
No fiddling with a wallet	46%
Earn points	21%
Can refill via iMode	20%
Can see remaining cash on display	17%
It’s OK not to bring a wallet	14%
Can use for lots of services	14%
Less stuff in my wallet	12%

Q: What services would you like to use in the future? (Sample size=4,000)

Electronic money	58%
Point card	56%
Rail pass	35%
Cinema ticket	20%
Cash card	18%
Home key	15%
Concert ticket	8%
Theme park passport	8%