世論 What Japan Thinks

Central Research Services Inc recently reported on a survey into media consumption in 2005. The survey itself was conducted back in October 2005, and although detailed demographics are not available, the sample was randomly selected from residents up and down the country aged between 15 and 69, and conducted by means of face-to-face interviews. The response rate was 57.4%, giving a raw sample size of 3,443 people.

I don’t think this survey teaches us much that intuition suggests to be true, but it’s always interesting to get these hunches backed up by raw data. However, although almost three-quarters read a paper every day, how much they actually read versus just headline skimming is another question that hasn’t been asked here.

Q3 is a rather weird question – perhaps it’s to see if people start with the news or the sports. The tabloids have sports on the back page, but the broadsheets usually have the television listings, then the sports from the second-last page, so I don’t know how that affected the answers.
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Last month japan.internet.com reported on the results of a survey by JR Tokai Express Research into mail client software. They interviewed 330 people from their monitor pool employed in public or private enterprises. 80.6% of the sample was male, 9.4% in their twenties, 45.8% in their thirties, 34.2% in their forties, 9.4% in their fifties, and 1.2% in their sixties.

Not suprisingly, Microsoft rules the roost here, as it does with browsers too. I’m a Becky! user myself at both home and at work; Becky! is, in fact, the recommended work mailer as the Outlook family is prone to be a vector for viruses.
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japan.internet.com reported on an opinion poll conducted by JR Tokai Express Research into the use of dictionaries. 331 members of their internet monitor pool successfully completed the survey, with 61.3% of the group male, 16.9% in their twenties, 41.7% in their thirties, 28.1% in their forties, 9.7% in their fifties, and 3.6% in their sixties.

It may be useful to reference a previously-translated survey on electronic dictionaries. I’m surprised that ALC didn’t make it into the list as it seems rather a popular destination for the people in my office, for instance.
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japan.internet.com recently reported on a survey by goo Research into web site navigation issues. At the end of October they interviewed 1,093 members of their montior group with five or more years of internet experience by means of a private internet-based survey. 50.05% were male (interestingly, lower than the usual goo monitor ratio of closer to 60%), with 19.0% in their twenties, 44.2% in their thirties, 26.4% in their forties, and 10.4% in their fifties.

Regarding scrolling left and right, I recently got a new mouse with a scroll wheel that goes left and right as well as up and down. However, I can’t say I’ve actually ever remembered to use the left-right feature, and in fact it causes more trouble than it’s worth as a wheel-click in my Opera browser opens a link in a new window, but it’s too easy to accidentally push the wheel to the right at the same time, causing Opera not to recognise my click.
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japan.internet.com reported that in the middle of October JR Tokai Express Research interviewed 330 people from its monitor panel on the matter of usage of bulletin board sites. Of the sample, 74.8% were male, 14.8% in their twenties, 41.2% in their thirties, 30.3% in their forties, 12.1% in their fifties, and 1.5% in their sixties. Note that one of the features of JR Tokai’s monitor pool is that they have a large percentage of business men, due in part to the fact that completing these surveys awards points for discounts on the Bullet Train.

2 Channel is a cess pit, quite frankly. I’ve visited there a few times myself, but the combination of heavy slang, both ordinary slang and 2-chan specifics, the general level of vitreol that anonymity promotes, and the utter ugliness of the layout makes me soon give up in disgust.
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Today, japan.internet.com published the results of a survey conducted by JR Tokai Express Research into browsers installed on corporate computers. 330 people from their monitor pool employed in private or public enterprises successfully completed a private internet-based questionnaire. 80.0% of the sample was male, 12.4% in their twenties, 42.1% in their thirties, 30.9% in their forties, 13.0% in their fifties, and 1.5% in their sixties.

The figures for Internet Explorer are spectacularly high. Dropping those with no browser or no computer and the don’t knows, almost 98% of users may be running IE, and even including all the don’t knows still leaves at best (or is it at worst?) just under 90% definitely with Internet Explorer. One reason, of course, is that many corporate intranet applications may require a specific browser, as my employer’s does. Note that Sleipnir is just an Internet Explorer shell, although Gen Kanai’s blog informs me that it can be switched to use the Firefox/Gecko engine instead.

For the open source Mozilla project, at best there are 54 identifiable users, or 18.9% of those who know their browser, but that is assuming that the Netscape, Firefox and Mozilla user groups do not overlap, and of course that the Netscape category doesn’t include people using a pre-open source 4.x (or even earlier!) version.
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japan.internet.com published the results of an opinion poll conducted by goo Research into online gaming. At the start of October 1,079 members of their monitor panel successfully completed a private internet survey; 44.5% of the sample were male, 2.4% were in their teens, 21.0% in their twenties, 43.5% in their thirties, 23.4% in their forties, and 9.6% in their fifties.

One thing I’m not sure of for this survey is whether online games means just massive multiplayer ones or whether it covers smaller games like first-person shooters, or simple card games through Yahoo! and the like.

I never got into trading as I felt it was a waste of money and felt to me as cheating. I didn’t have too much of a problem with buying gold, but when it felt that there were more people interested in farming items for selling either in-game or outside of the game it lost much of its charm.
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With both Amazon and Apple recently opening film and video download services, towards the end of September japan.internet.com, in conjunction with goo Research, looked at what people thought about downloading movies. 1,043 people from their internet monitor group, 55.5% female, successfully completed a private internet survey. 21.8% were in their twenties, 40.1% in their thirties, 25.9% in their forties, 9.1% in their fifties, and 3.2% in their sixties.

The results here are interesting; although there is a slight majority not interested in downloading, those who download want to watch on the television. However, with the proliferation of wide-screen televisions, high-definition broadcasts and Blue Ray disks, a standard lower-than-DVD quality download might look rather poor on a 38 inch plasma display.
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japan.internet.com recently published the results of an opinion poll conducted by goo Research into search keywords in television advertising. At the end of September 1,088 people from thier monitor group successfully completed a web-based private questionnaire. Demographically, 58.1% were female, 21.8% in their twenties, 43.7% in their thirties, 24.0% in their forties, and 10.6% in their fifties.

Recently, Japanese television advertisements (and some print advertisements too) have tended to use instead of URLs a search keyword. Sometimes there are unique, made-up keywords, such as ウサタク, usataku, which, if fed into Google, matches the expected page. Others, however, have much more generic terms, even just HIS, but which, at the time of writing anyway, also works in Google. This seems like they would be a great target for googlebombing, but this seems not to have happened, which does seem a bit odd to me.
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japan.internet.com recently published the results of a survey by JR Tokai Express Research into spyware counter-measures. They interviewed 330 people employed in public or private enterprises (why they limited it like that, I don’t know!), with 81.8% of the sample male, 12.7% in their twenties, 40.9% in their thirties, 31.8% in their forties, 13.3% in their fifties, and 1.2% in their sixties.

One thing that isn’t clear is whether or not the anti-spyware tools are part of an anti-virus package, a firewall, or a specialised checking tool. Personally, I use, and strongly recommend, Spybot – Search & Destroy, and to some extent suggest AdAware as a secondary tool. I also recommend that Windows users ditch Explorer and try Opera instead.
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