世論 What Japan Thinks

Google rightfully beats Yahoo! hands down for English language search, but I never seem to have too much luck with Google and Japanese. I stay away from Yahoo! Japan as I find the design extremely ugly, but this doesn’t seem to be a factor with the natives according to a survey reported on by japan.internet.com and conducted by JR Tokai Express Research Inc into information gathering through search portal sites.

Demographics

Between the 31st of January and the 3rd of February 2008 330 members of the JR Tokai Express Research monitor group employed in either public or private industry completed an internet-based questionnaire. 80.9% were male, 10.0% in their twenties, 40.0% in their thirties, 37.3% in their forties, 11.2% in their fifties, and 1.5% in their sixties.

One thing I’m not sure if Yahoo! Japan does, but it is something that Google definitely doesn’t, is to search alternative verb forms, so that if you put in the infinitive it also searches past tense, progressive, passive, and so one. That would be nice, but top of my wish list would be alternative kanji and kana alternatives for a word; for example, skin clinic could appear as 皮膚科, 皮フ科, ひふ科 or even ヒフ科, so it would be nice if I typed in just one form and the search engine matched all the variants.
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Voice chat fills me with dread, so it’s something I’ve never felt the desire to do, even though I have been invited to some meetings and have also found others with topics that interest me. However, a recent survey reported on by japan.internet.com and conducted by Cross Marketing Inc into this very topic of voice chat produced a slightly unexpectedly high number of user.

Demographics

Over the 23rd and 24th of January 2008 300 members of the Cross Marketing online panel completed a private internet-based questionnaire. As usual for Cross Marketing, 50.0% were male and 50.0% female, 20.0% in their teens, 20.0% in their twenties, 20.0% in their thirties, 20.0% in their forties, and 20.0% in their fifties.

I went looking for some voice chat pictures to illustrate this story, but instead I found some rather dodgy sites; there’s at least one place selling chat with dodgy-looking anime characters at 1,200 yen (around US$12) per hour, and another charming place that bans foreigners.
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The Trade Union Congress in the UK recently called for workers to be allowed some MySpace time, and one gets the impression that in the USA the ability to use company resources for personal internet access and private telephone calls is a fundamental human right, but what of Japan? A recent report from japan.internet.com on a survy conducted by JR Tokai Express Research Inc into employee internet access management shone some light on this topic.

Demographics

On the 16th of January 2008 330 people from the JR Tokai Express Research monitor pool employed in private enterprises or other organisations as directors, senior management, personnel, or in other management or planning roles completed a private internet-based questionnaire. 75.8% were male, 4.5% in their twenties, 27.9% in their thirties, 44.2% in their forties, 19.1% in their fifties, and 4.2% in their sixties.

Our rules are actually set in place mostly by personnel or other management divisions in order to try to comply with J-SOX issues, with a bit extra from the MIS department. Many of our policies are on paper sensible (though over-stringent), but the justification they add is often laughable. My favourite is their restriction on writing to bulletin boards; apparently someone wrote over 20 messages one day to a train-spotter message board and the owner complained about being flooded with traffic… My pet hate is that Skype is forbidden, even though for people on business trips it can be the cheapest way to keep in touch with family (and the office), due to paranoia about file-sharing and flooding the local network if it becomes a hub, but both these options can be turned off. I did consider renaming notepad.exe to skype.exe or winny.exe just to put the wind up the MIS department, but I suspect they don’t have a sense of humour. Oh, and they also forbid Opera 9 due to the risk of the inbuilt BitTorrent client leaping into life and sharing the whole hard drive.

I in no way whatsoever work on the basis of if it isn’t blocked by the proxy, it’s fair game.
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I think all my readers know my position on the trustworthiness or otherwise of Wikipedia; what I trust as an information source is the Beeb, followed by a few UK newspapers. For information about Japan in English, quite frankly I cannot really trust any commercial source, and those with user feedback are in fact one of the reasons I started WJT. To see what the Japanese themselves trust, as part of their 132nd Ranking Research, DIMSDRIVE Research asked what sources of information people could trust.

Demographics

Between the 19th and 27th of December 2007 4,044 members of the DIMSDRIVE Research monitor panel completed a private internet-based questionnaire. 56.5% were female, 13.6% in their twenties, 31.5% in their thirties, 34.6% in their forties, 13.6% in their fifties, and 5.8% aged sixty or older.

Here, the trust being investigated is the reliability or usefulness of the information provided by the site, I believe. Given the high newspaper readership in Japan, it is very surprising that newspapers rate quite low, beaten by portals (which use these very newspapers as their sources!) and even shopping sites!

Other interesting results outside the top 10 were that the Yomiuri Online was the number three newspaper at position 23. kakaku.com was number 13, my favourite comparision shopping and user review site. For communities, mixi was 20th, beaten by the cesspit that is 2 channel, a bulletin board that caters on the whole for racists and tinfoil hats; young men seemed to be those that trusted there the most.

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That is commenting on blogs, of course, although the same is also true for what I think you were thinking of! This was one of the results published on japan.internet.com in a summary of a survey by Cross Marketing Inc into writing stuff on the internet.

Demographics

Over the 26th and 27th of December 2007 300 members of the Cross Marketing monitor pool successfully completed a private internet-based questionnaire. the sample was 50:50 male and female, and 20.0% in their teens, 20.0% in their twenties, 20.0% in their thirties, 20.0% in their forties, and 20.0% in their fifties.

One of my resolutions for the year is to network more, and although currently I write on bulletin boards just about every day, my rate of commenting on blogs is about once every two or three days. I suppose I should really set myself numeric targets such as 30 comments a month and keep track of how I’m doing.
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Anyone who has been in Japan (or has been reading this blog) for any length of time will be aware of how often QR Codes, these square 2D bar codes, appear in magazine advertisements and promotional flyers. However, one aspect that I haven’t seen investigated up until now has been what other methods do people use to access these URLs. To rectify this, I present a translation of a report from japan.internet.com on a survey conducted by Cross Marketing Inc into mobile search.

Demographics

Over the 19th and 20th of December 2007 300 mobile phone users from the Cross Marketing monitor group completed a private online questionnaire. Exactly 50% of the sample was male, and exactly 20% were in their teens, 20% in their twenties, 20% in their thirties, 20% in their forties, and 20% in their fifties.

Note that in Q1 the number sending an empty email seems perhaps rather high. There could be two explanations for this; first, in-train advertisements do not, on the whole, feature QR codes, perhaps for reason of it being embarrassing to take a photo with the accompanying sound; second, sometimes QR codes encode an email address rather than a URL, so in these cases some of the respondents described the final action.
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With much of Japan soon to be setting out on their New Year holidays, and the rest of Japan due to be kept updated every news bulletin on the traffic situation caused by the first group, japan.internet.com reported on a survey conducted by goo Research into how people will be spending their New Year holidays, specifically regarding internet connectivity.

Demographics

Between the 17th and 20th of December 2007 1,083 members of the goo Research monitor panel completed a private internet-based questionnaire. 52.9% of the sample was male, 17.7% in their teens, 19.9% in their twenties, 17.4% in their thirties, 17.6% in their forties, 16.6% in their fifties, and 10.6% aged sixty or older.

It may be useful to refer to a survey earlier this month on how long a New Year break people are having.

As I have no plans for travel, I cannot say what I plan to do, but if I were, I certainly wouldn’t bother taking a PC with me, but if it was available I would check my mail. Having said that, the last time I took an overnight stay, a couple of the free PCs in the lobby were loaded with slightly suspicious-looking applets in the icon tray, so I gave checking my email a miss just in case there was a keylogger installed on the machines.
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Last year I looked at a survey on influenza issues, but this year it’s a different kind of virus, the computer sort, that we look at in a survey conducted by goo Research into 60-79 year old computer users and security matters.

Demographics

Over the 6th and 7th of December 2007 613 members of the goo Research monitor panel were interviewed. 50.1% were female, 73.6% in their sixties, and 26.4% in the seventies.

One-click fraud is a type of fraud perhaps not unique to Japan, but Google doesn’t turn up any reports from other countries when searching in English. Basically the idea is that you get a spam, or click on a link somewhere and end up at the target page which suddenly tells you you’ve registered and need to pay a vast sum of money for monthly membership, or they’ll send the boys round. This seems to work well in Japan due to some combination of unwillingness of the victims to cause a fuss and weak consumer protection and other law enforcement. Actually, my wife ended up on somewhere similar after filling in details on a prize draw advertised through Chikyuu no Arukikata’s web site (Japan’s top independent traveller guide brand) and had to change email addresses due to 40-plus emails per day pestering her to join a dating site. I told her to complain to Chikyuu no Arukikata for betraying her trust, but even though she is quite expert at flame mails in other cases, she seemed reluctant for some reason I couldn’t deduce.
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The internet, the information super-highway, is supposed to be this great conduit of information by which everyone can gather information on whatever they please. To find out how the Japanese are plugging into these vast resources, japan.internet.com reported on a survey conducted by JR Tokai Express Research Inc into using the internet to garner information.

Demographics

On the 27th of November 2007 331 members of the JR Tokai Express Research monitor group employed in the public or private sector completed a private online questionnaire. 78.2% of the sample was male, 9.7% in their twenties, 37.5% in their thirties, 36.0% in their forties, 12.1% in their fifties, and 4.8% in their sixties.

It is not clear from the survey whether just computer-based internet access was counted, or if mobile phone usage was included.

Quite frankly, this survey seems fatally flawed as Q1 does not include Wikipedia (which is itself fatally flawed) as I must admit that for simple factual data I do reference it, and given that is seems to often appear in four in five of Japanese surfers’ search results, to not include it would be an oversight.

If you too want to gather information on train times, NihonHacks recently had an article on how to do it.
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Here’s another interesting survey that gives lots of little insights into how the average Japanese person uses the internet. Here japan.internet.com reported on a survey conducted by Cross Marketing Inc into web service usage in 2007.

Demographics

Over the 5th and 6th of December 2007 300 members of the Cross Marketing online monitor panel successfully completed an internet-based questionnaire. 50.0% of the sample was male, 20.0% in their teens, 20.0% in their twenties, 20.0% in their thirties, 20.0% in their forties, and 20.0% in their fifties.

The survey did not make it clear as to whether access from both computer and mobile phone was counted. I’m surprised that web mail did not feature in the list of services enquired about. However, every time it pops up I’m surprised by the very high number of internet banking users, with just under half the sample here regularly banking on the internet.

For me, I don’t think there’s anything in particular that I’ve given up this year or imagine I will next year. How about you?
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