世論 What Japan Thinks

japan.internet.com recently reported on research by Cross Marketing Inc regarding people’s views on restaurant search web sites. They interviewed 320 people who had used a restaurant search site by means of a private internet questionnaire; half of the sample were male, and a quarter in each of the age groups of their twenties, thirties, forties and fifties.

This particular segment of the market seems to have assumed the title グルメ, gurume, the Japanese transliteration of gourmet (actually from the French, not English), which is the reason that a number of the web sites listed below start with Guru-.

In my experience, Guru-Navi seems the first stop for most of the people I know; one benefit of the site is that many of the listed restaurants also have discount coupons available for printing out.
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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.
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japan.internet.com recently published the results of a survey conducted by JR Tokai Express Research on commercial email magazines. They interviewed by means of a private internet-based questionnaire 331 people working in private industry. 76.1% of the sample was male, 14.5% in their twenties, 45.9% in their thirties, 32.9% in their forties, 6.3% in their fifties, and just 0.3% (one person) in their sixties.

Many major companies with online presences produce these email magazines, although one drawback I find is that whilst subscribing is easy, unsubscribing can be a pain, as there is rarely a one-click solution; often one needs to log into an account, find the settings, then turn them off. I have had to redirect a few of them straight to the spam bin as I’ve been unable to find out how to turn them off!
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japan.internet.com reported on goo Research’s 26th monthly survey on blogging. 1,075 people from goo’s internet monitor group successfully completed a private questionnaire at the start of July. The demographics were 58.4% female, 3.3% in their teens, 25.6% in their twenties, 39.4% in their thirties, 22.0% in their forties, 7.8% in their fifties, and 2.0% aged sixty or over.

Looking at the headline, if you discount the “don’t knows” as having too little traffic to bother counting, on a good day I’m in the top 2% percent of Japanese blogs traffic-wise! Of course, another explanation is that the bloggers with more traffic are too busy keeping their sites ticking over to bother answering questionnaires.

It also may be instructive to cross-reference these results with over 90% of bloggers being anonymous and most bloggers earning peanuts in affiliate schemes.
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japan.internet.com, in conjunction with goo Research, recently published the results of a survey into what people think when blogs crash and burn. They interviewed by means of a private internet questionnaire 1,084 people from their monitor group, 57.1% female, 22.9% in their twenties, 43.4% in their thirties, 24.4% in their forties, and 9.2% in their fifties.

I must admit to quite enjoying a flame war on the whole, as long as the level of abuse remains relatively intelligent. However, this being the internet, things usually deteriorate to either mindless flaming or argument by Google, where people quote the first URL they find that agrees with their position.

Now I think about it, I do dislike a real flare-up; intelligent abuse is usually not serious, I feel, and will soon blow over.
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japan.internet.com recently published the results of a survey conducted on the 5th of July by JR Tokai Express Research into viruses and spam. They interviewed 330 members of their monitor panel who used a PC or Mac at home. 70.0% were male, 0.9% were in their teens, 11.2% in their twenties, 34.5% in their thirties, 33.3% in their forties, 16.1% in their fifties, and 3.9% in their sixties.

This looked at people with PCs or Macs, where I presume that PCs implies a Windows OS. One might think that Linux users would distort the virus figures, but as a previous survey on home operating systems showed, just one person in 300 was running Linux as a primary home operating system. In Q1, I presume virus covers trojans and rootkits and prehaps even spyware, and in Q1SQ, catching one from a LAN includes the internet.

In Q2, if you add up the number of people reporting using spam filtering, you have at maximum just a small majority using anti-spam methods. However, this figure may be affected by first, people being unaware of their ISP’s spam filtering, and second, if you’re relatively careful, you can get almost no spam. My wife, for instance, just gets one a day even though she has given her email address out to quite a few mail magazines and other web sites.
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japan.internet.com recently published the results of research by goo Research into how well IT buzzwords are understood. At the start of July they interviewed 1,033 members of their internet monitor group. 42.6% of the sample was male, 1.8% in their teens, 20.3% in their twenties, 41.9% in their thirties, 23.2% in their forties, 10.4% in their fifties, and 2.2% in their sixties.

Most of the buzzwords seem to get imported straight into Japanese as the English term, be it a complete word or an abbreviation. The rest perhaps just end up as katakana renditions of the term, like, for example, Social Network[ing] Service/Site, which ends up in Japanese as just SNS or Social Network Service or Site spelt out in katakana, which doesn’t really help many Japanese as the word “social”. Actually, there’s already a slang term in Japanese for SNS, 出会い系サイト, deai-kei saito, but perhaps it is loaded with overtones of seedy (or downright fraudulent) dating sites, whereas SNS suggests a different, more Western-style location?
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japan.internet.com published JR Tokai Express Research’s on television versus the internet. Sampled were 331 people employed in public or private enterprises; 74.0% male, 11.8% in their 20s, 32.9% in 30s, 33.2% in 40s, 17.5% in 50s, and 4.5% in 60s.

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Just a quick report tonight from Nielson//NetRatings Japan on internet usage from home computers (not mobile phones) for the month of May 2006. First the graph for time spent on the top six sites.

This 16.3% for Yahoo! Japan represents about 125,000,000 hours, or an average of around 168,000 simultaneous users. However, when looking at time spent per user who visited each site, for mixi it was 4 hours and 28 minutes per person, over an hour longer per person than for Yahoo! Japan. In total, 42,400,000 people accessed the internet from home during May, with an average time spent online per person of 18 hours and two minutes.
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At the start of June MyVoice surveyed its internet monitor community to find out about their use of internet auction sites. 14,023, 54% female, successfully completed their private internet-based questionnaire. 3% of the sample were in their teens, 22% in their twenties, 39% in their thirties, 24% in their forties, and 12% in their fifties.

Internet auctions is one thing I’ve never done, although I did have two ideas for businesses there than never took off. The first probably required a partner in the USA or UK for bulk shipping, but would consist of buying Hello Kitty mobile phone straps and other cheap nick-nacks, charging $5 on top for postage, and raking in most of the profit, even if sold for list price, on the overcharging for handling. The second was to open lots of bank and credit card accounts all over the place and get the free cartoon character (or even perfumed) plastic cards and pass books, promptly close the accounts then sell the stuff on eBay. Shortly before implementing the scheme, however, I discovered that this was probably highly illegal and would also destroy any credit rating I might have in Japan!
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