世論 What Japan Thinks

I do like some of the subjects that iShare come up with, and this survey is one of these times, where they look at manga newspapers, newspapers in comic form.

Demographics

Between the 17th and 20th of November 2009 510 members of the CLUB BBQ free email forwarding service completed a private internet-based questionnaire. 56.7% of the sample were male, 32.4% in their twenties, 32.2% in their thirties, and 35.5% in their forties.

On first reading this story, I naturally typed “manga newspaper” into Google and ended up on this site. It’s a rather interesting place (assuming a degree of Japanese knowledge), if only just to see how they render figures like Prime Minister Hatoyama, President Obama, Tatsuya Ichihashi, recently-arrested for the murder of Lindsay Ann Hawker, and Osama Bin Laden.
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mixi is Japan’s answer to MySpace or Facebook, owning a huge percentage of the Japanese SNS market. This recent survey from goo Ranking looked at what both women and men found great about the service.

Demographics

Between the 23rd and 26th of October 2009 1,162 members of the goo Research monitor group completed a private internet-based questionnaire. 62.9% of the sample were female, 10.5% in their teens, 20.7% in their twenties, 30.8% in their thirties, 21.9% in their forties, 9.0% in their fifties, and 7.0% aged sixty or older.

I’m not a member of mixi, and not really active in any other social media, so I cannot talk about the charms myself.
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iBridge Research Plus recently did one of their demographically narrow surveys, this time looking at Gmail. The survey was reported on as usual by japan.internet.com.

Demographics

On the 24th of November 2009 300 young women members of the iBridge research monitor group completed a private internet-based questionnaire. All of the sample were women, 22.3% of them in their twenties, 42.0% in their thirties, and 35.7% in their forties.

In October of this year, a survey of web mail usage amongst the same demographic found Yahoo! mail first, Hotmail second, local providers goo and infoseek third and fourth, then Gmail fifth.

The text suggests that the reason prize draws and online shopping are popular is the strength of Gmail’s spam filters, although I’ve never tried them out with Japanese spam myself.

I use Gmail for none of the below reasons – one is to manage blog email, the second is for a travel address, and the third is that it became necessary to register one in order to access other Google services.
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The following survey from Macromill was very superficially summarised in the press, focusing on just a single question when a lot more interesting data was available regarding mobile phone use of mothers bringing up children.

Demographics

Over the 5th and 6th of November 2009 500 married mothers from the Macromill monitor group completed a private mobile phone-based questionnaire. All the sample was female, of course, and 25.0% were between 20 and 24, 25.0% between 25 and 29, 25.0% between 30 and 34, and 25.0% between 35 and 39 years old.

Some of the figures are very surprising to me (mainly because I’m not a young mother) such as just over half the youngest age group writing a Mommy blog and over a quarter shopping or bidding in auctions at least once a week, although I did expect the number of emails exchanged to be higher!
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goo Research recently reported into elementary school children’s internet use, the seventh time they have reported on this. I’m sure I translated an earlier survey, but I can’t find it now!

Demographics

Between the 17th and 29th of September 2009 7,657 parents or guardians of elementary school children or younger completed a public internet-based questionnaire available through the kids goo portal. 54.2% of the sample were female, 1.2% in their twenties, 42.2% in their thirties, 52.4% in their forties, and 4.2% aged fifty or older.

It’s not clear from the sample as to whether mobile internet is included within this sample.

It’s a bit worrying that over a quarter of those who participate in chat (or over a quarter of those whose parents are aware of them participating and who they are talking to) don’t seem to know or have been taught the basic rules about not talking to strangers over the internet.
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I’m sure I’m not the only one who gets email newsletters from various places that I just can’t unsubscribe from, and in Japan there seems to be no law or industry best practice to have a simple unsubscribe link even from reputable businesses, so this recent survey from iShare into unwanted email newsletters revealed how the average person copes with this situation.

Demographics

Between the 18th and 28th of September 2009 513 members of the CLUB BBQ free email forwarding service completed a private internet-based questionnaire. 54.8% of the sample were male, 30.4% in their twenties, 33.3% in their thirties, and 36.3% in their forties.

My wife gets a shed-load of spam every day, especially from Rakuten (Japan’s largest online mall), who will sell on your address to their shops at the drop of a hat, so even if you unclick all the mail delivery boxes, you come back a day or two later and find that new boxes have appeared. I suspect in the small print when you buy something from one of their shops is some text saying that you agree to get email from other businesses from the same genre. She has mostly given up on unsubscribing, so she now has hundreds of addresses blocked in her mail client!
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A recent survey from iBridge Research Plus and reported on by japan.internet.com into the topic of web-based email amongst a young female demographic found almost a majority had a Yahoo! email account.

Demographics

On the 28th of September 2009 300 female members of the iBridge Research Plus monitor group completed a private internet-based questionnaire. 24.3% of the sample were in their twenties, 46.3% in their thirties, and 29.3% in their forties,

I did once try to recommend Gmail to my wife by sending her an invitation, but she never took me up, despite telling her about its excellent support for emoji!
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It’s been a while since I’ve seen a survey on RSS feed reading habits, but looking at the data in this survey by iBridge Research Plus and reported on by japan.internet.net perhaps the reason is a lack of interest.

Demographics

On the 17th of August 2009 300 members of the iBridge Research Plus monitor group completed a private internet-based questionnaire. 50.7% of the sample were male, 17.7% in their twenties, 31.7% in their thirties, 30.7% in their forties, 15.7% in their fifties, and 4.3% in their sixties.

I’d be lost without my reader, Google Reader. I actually get just about the same number of feed readers as web site visitors per day, and if I exclude feed readers who click through, my RSS feed is most probably the more popular way of reading What Japan Thinks. If you’re not already subscribed, check out the links on the top left to see what I’m on about!

For the benefit of my Mum, using an RSS reader means you don’t need to set mine or my brother’s site as your home page!
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Recently japan.internet.com published the results of a survey conducted by RealWorld RealResearch into Q&A site usage, a field which has seen two moderate-sized players, one of them being Microsoft, shut down their services this year.

Demographics

Over the 1st and 2nd of September 2009 1,013 members of the RealWorld RealResearch monitor group completed a private internet-based questionnaire. 61.2% of the sample were male, 8.1% in their teens, 8.6% in their twenties, 11.1% in their thirties, 41.1% in their forties, 19.1% in their fifties, and 12.1% aged sixty or older.

I’ve used an English-language Q&A site, and although I did find that the majority of answers were reasonably correct, with the public voting it was a bit too easy for wrong but playing to the crowd answers to do better than an unpopular but more correct opinion. I’ve since stopped visiting after realising how much time I was wasting, as they are quite addictive places!

The article also mentions that on the 9th of September 2009 Yahoo! Chiebukuro had surpassed 30 million questions and 80 million answers!
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With Twitter showing little sign of adoption in Japan, and TwitterPoli, a site tracking Japanese politicians’ Tweets, having just 10 local officals and 6 national politicians being tracked, this recent survey from MyVoice looking at local government Tweeting (and other related topics) seems a bit pointless, quite frankly.

Demographics

Between the 22nd and 27th of July 2009 562 members of the CLUB BBQ free email forwarding service completed a private internet-based questionnaire. 56.0% of the sample were male, 34.5% in their twenties, 32.9% in their thirties, and 32.6% in their forties.

What Japan Thinks can be found on Twitter; most of the content is just automated Tweeting of my posts, but two or three times a week or so I post one-liner survey translations that don’t make it to the main blog.

Note that the Twitter usage rate of 6.2% in this survey versus 2.3% in the previously-mentioned survey can be ascribed to iShare having a more technically-minded audience; the simple fact that the survey respondent pool comes from people using an email forwarding service demonstrates this.

The two local authorities mentioned in Q4 can be read on Twitter; the links are Aomori Prefectural Office (ooh, nice background!) and Hokkaido Rikubetsucho.

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