世論 What Japan Thinks

japan.internet.com, in conjunction with Cross Marketing Inc performed a survey on next-generation game consoles. They interviewed 366 self-confessed gamers; 50.3% were male, 25.4% in their teens (18 or 19 to be exact), 24.9% in their twenties, 24.6% in their thirties, and 25.1% in their forties.

With the recent name change of the next Nintendo to Wii (I try to think of the name as referring to going “whee!”, not going wee…) the awareness of the name seems rather low; it would have been interesting to have used the previous Revolution codename instead in this survey. I will keep an eye open to see if the awareness of Wii increases in the coming months.
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infoPLANT recently released the results of a survey they conducted into game machines. They conducted their research by means of a public questionnaire available through the iMode menu system for a week at the end of April. 5,924 people completed the survey, with 62.5% female.

Note the figures suggesting that the Nintendo DS is significantly more popular with the older generation. Surely this must be related to the current boom in brain training in Japan, in particular the massively popular series for the DS, a set of titles I dearly want to buy, along with the DS itself (and also a kanji dictionary), if I ever manage to earn any money from this blog!
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In a survey performed by infoPLANT on games machine ownership (warning: Japanese PDF), and translated in detail here, the most stunning result of the questionnaire is that the sales of the Nintendo DS seems to be driven by the older generation, as can be seen from the chart on the right.

The most likely explanation for this trend, I believe, is the brain training boom in Japan, in particular the Brain Age game and other similar titles that promise to ward off senility and keep one’s mind active, even though the celebrity advertising it on the television is merely a pretty young thing.

On a slight side note, my voice was one of the voices used to tune the recognition engine for British English for the European launch of the Brain Age titles.

japan.internet.com, in conjunction with JR Tokai Express Research, looked at what people did regarding their mobile phone batteries. They interviewed 337 mobile phone users from their internet monitor group by means of a private internet survey. 79.5% of the sample was male, with 14.8% in their twenties, 35.0% in their thirties, 33.8% in their forties, 13.9% in their fifties, and 2.4% in their sixties.
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goo Research recently published the results of some detailed investigation into the use of portable music players. Over four days at the end of March they interviewd by means of a private internet questionnaire 2,183 members of their monitor group. The respondents were 48.2% male, with 19.1% in their teens, 17.5% in their twenties, 19.7% in their thirties, 21.2% in their forties, 16.6% in their fifties, 4.8% in their sixties, and 1.2% seventy years old or more.

Note that MP3 player refers to either memory based or hard-disk based players only like iPods or D-Snaps, not CD players that support MP3 file formats. I am not sure under what category phones with music playback support are recorded; perhaps they are “Other”?

I’ve recently been testing a Sony NW-A3000 but I couldn’t really recommend it to anyone. The 20 Gb hard disk is nice, of course, but the PC-based software is unwieldy to say the least, as is the player software. Pet hates include that random shuffle seems not as random as it should be, doing Pause then Play will result in a one-second or so skip, and recharging the player resets the player back to the first track. I’ve heard that the iPod balances out the volume, but the Sony doesn’t, so I have to keep fiddling with the sound levels. On the other hand, I did manage to find an almost complete archive of Just A Minute, but on the downside I perhaps scare the other train passengers as I try to stifle laughs during my commute.
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japan.internet.com, in conjuction with Cross Marketing, performed a survey regarding Operating Systems for their home PC. They surveyed 150 men and 150 women who own computers at home via an internet-based questionnaire. The age demographics were equally split with 16.6% in their teens (actually only 18 and 19 year olds), twenties, thirties, and so on up to 16.6% in their sixties. It is not stated whether each age band was split equally between male and female.

I’m surprised to see that 12.0% of users are still limping along with one of Microsoft’s 16 bit operating system. Whether the one single Linux user reflects the demographics of Cross Marketing’s monitor pool or whether that is a true reflection of Linux in the Japanese home market, I do not know.

Although my headline says few Japanese may buy an Intel Mac, the 14.3% who responded with varying degrees of positivety represents almost four times as many people as the current Mac OS user base, suggesting that the figures are much more positive than at first glance.
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japan.internet.com continued its recent series of surveys investigating people’s habits around technology, with this survey, performed in conjunction with Cross Marketing, looking at desktop setup and mass-storage devices. They interviewed by means of an internet questionnaire 300 people from all over the country. The sample was exactly 50:50 male and female, and the age grouping too was split into six equally sized samples, with the samples of teenagers (ages 18 and 19 only), twenty-somethings, thirty-somethings, and so on up to those in their sixties each containing 50 people.

One of the things I’ve noticed with my colleagues at work is that a lot of them have at least a third of their desktop covered with icons, using it as a temporary (more like semi-permanent!) holding area for mail attachments, current projects and the like, a behaviour I never really understood.

One other custom I’d like to see investigated by this series of polls is one on how people use filtering on their mailer. Again, I’ve noticed my software engineer colleagues often have a huge inbox with a massive amount of unread mail (we’re talking thousands!) then manually moving mail into target folders. Similarly, not many turn on message threading, nor do they archive their inbox, which seems to me like a massive waste of time.
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Following on from a recent survey regarding phone email handedness and voice earedness, japan.internet.com in conjunction with JR Tokai Express Research carried out a survey on which hand people usually use with their mouse. They surveyed 330 working people by means of an internet questionnaire. 76.7% of the sample was male, with 15.8% in their twenties, 45.8% in their thirties, 30.3% in their forties, 7.6% in their fifties, and just 0.6% (two people) over the age of sixty.

In the first question you may notice a rather high percentage of lefties who got converted to right-handedness. This treatment of sinister characters is not unique to Japan, but it does perhaps appear to be rather strong within schools, looking at the figures here. Also, since most of the survey here is in their thirties, we are only seeing a snapshot of schooling 20 years ago or so; searching the web reveals that there is an oft-quoted survey that says only 0.7% of Japanese schoolchildren are left-handed, but I could not discover details of what the original survey was or when it was conducted.

Q1: Are you left-handed or right-handed? (Sample size=330)

Originally left-handed, but school or parents “corrected” me	4.8%
Ambidextrous (to Q2)	2.1%
Always right-handed	87.0%
Always left-handed	6.1%

Q2: Currently, with which hand do you use your mouse? (Sample size=43, ambidextrous users)

Left hand	7%
Right hand	84%
Both hands (to Q3)	9%
Use other pointing device	0%

Q3: Do you know that by using the control panel or other software you can change a mouse to left-handed use? (Sample size=36, ambidextrous right-hand mousers)

Yes	39%
No	61%

Jan Kuczynski let me know about a survey he translated on the colour and ‘feel’ of handsets that people in Japan want. A rather interesting survey that I wish I’d found first. I can’t imagine what a plant-like feel phone would be though!

I also hope that it’s just mobiles that these three women in his logo are holding…

As a sort of follow-on from the survey on mobile phone handedness, japan.internet.com, in conjunction with Cross Marketing Inc, had a look at what sort of computer and monitor people used. They interview 379 internet users, 50.1% male, 16.3% in their teens, 16.1% in their twenties, 16.4% in their thirties, 16.4% in their forties, 17.2% in their fifties, and 17.7% sixty or over.

I believe this survey is looking at home computers rather than office machines, although this is not clearly stated within the report.

They did in fact look at a few other factors that seem more interesting the just screen resolution, but sadly they have not made these results public. However, the resolution information may prove useful to web designers, and seems to back up the statistics I see from my own blog: 1024 x 768 is the benchmark. However, whether or not people run their browsers fullscreen is a question for another survey!
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