世論 What Japan Thinks

Over five days at the start of January, MyVoice looked at that Japanese staple, rice. 10,245 members of their online monitor community successfully completed the survey. 54% were female, 2% in their teens, 18% in their twenties, 40% in their thirties, 26% in their forties, and 14% in their fifties.

My translation for Q3 is not very good, I fear, but I hope you get the general picture! I eat rice almost every day, and at home we use a mix of half white and half brown rice.

I was surprised in Q4 that 3.3% said they like their rice with soy sauce, as not doing it is one of the first points of etiquette drilled into foreigners, so please feel free to print out this survey to justify your bad manners next time you do so in polite company!

Follow this link for more information on Japanese rice cookers.
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Over the first 5 days at the start of the New Year, MyVoice surveyed its monitor group to find out their views regarding foreign language learning. 10,504 people successfully completed the survey; 54% were female, 2% in their teens, 19% in their twenties, 40% in their thirties, 26% in their forties, and 13% in their fifties.

Note that putting Q1 and Q3 together we see that around half of the poplation would like to study English but currently aren’t doing anything about it. You may want to cross-reference the results here with a similar survey on English last year, also conducted by MyVoice.

I’m trying to find a way to tie this into the news today that 7 NOVA “English” “teachers” got busted for drugs, but I’m failing miserably.
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infoPLANT recently published the results of a survey they conducted into the consumption of soft drinks. Over a week towards the end of December last year 5,933 people chose to complete a survey promoted in the NTT DoCoMo iMode menuing system. The basic demographics were 37.5% male and 62.5% female.

It might be interesting to cross-reference these results with one earlier this month into water consumption and last year’s look at can coffee consumption. As well as the water mentioned previously, I’m a Diet Coke fan and also like soba tea and 爽建美茶, soukenbicha, a lovely blend of various grasses and teas. Although I’m a regular black tea drinker at home, I don’t touch bottled tea as it’s usually undrinkably sugar-laden, as is much of the canned coffee. Black coffees are straight, but I can’t cope with the bitterness, so I stick with the 微糖, bitou, slightly sugared, which are usually paletable. I don’t actually buy them myself, but we have a monthly workplace casual meeting where the company provides soft drinks and nibbles.
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Over the first five days of 2007, MyVoice conducted a survey within their internet monitor group into the matter of mineral water. This is the third time they have conducted this survey, but the first time I have translated it! 10,732 people successfully completed the private online questionnaire. 54% were female, 2% in their teens, 19% in their twenties, 39% in their thirties, 27% in their forties, and 13% in their fifties.

My almost every day mineral water is the below mentioned Crystal geyser sparkling lemon (or sometimes lime), although Suntory’s Tennensui is also rather nice. However, all this talking about mineral water reminds me of a Penn and Teller show on the subject, which also reminds me that I am glad indeed that Penta Water does not feature on the list.
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Over one week in the middle of December infoPLANT gathered responses to a survey on baseball. 5,272 people, 57.4% female, successfully completed a self-selecting survey through DoCoMo’s mobile phone iMode menuing system.

In Q2, almost a quarter of all men and a sixth of all women questioned said they attended a professional baseball match at a stadium last year, a figure I find a little hard to believe, quite frankly, making me suspect there might have been a lot of self-selecting bias going on. I shall have to investigate other surveys to see how the numbers compare.

In Q3, not surprisingly the team most people saw was the season’s champions, Nippon Ham Fighters, but perhaps surprisingly they were the only team with more female than male viewers, no doubt helped in part by the biggest Ham of them all.
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UPDATE: This diet does not work!

I’m sadly unable to find any surveys related to the biggest buzz on the English-language internet last week, the release of Apple’s iPhone, so instead I’ll report on goo Ranking’s look at the biggest buzz on Japanese web sites, namely what keywords people are using in goo’s search engine to look for natto. The data was collected between the 7th and 16th of January 2007, or Heisei 19 in the Japanese calendar, thus the title.

Natto is fermented soya beans, and if you search YouTube for natto you can see rather a lot of foreigners (and one cat) trying to eat it. (link flood coming up!) The shortage of natto has been widely blogged about, and was sparked by Aruaru Daijiten, a popular health (and quackery) show, who in their first show of the New Year introduced the natto diet, which is basically one pack of natto before breakfast and evening meals, then eat just as much as you normally do, assuming the natto hasn’t put you off your food altogether! The most beneficial way to eat natto is to stir it at least 50 times then leave it to stand at room temperature for 15 minutes. It’s something to do with assisting the production of DHEA to increase your metabolic rate, apparently.

In other related news, World Net Daily (I can’t believe I’m linking to that rag!) reported how soy beans turn you gay; natto may be one of the most potent soy bean products, if this video is to be believed! (Note – not really recommended for viewing at work, and probably highly offensive to the typical World Net Daily reader)
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japan.internet.com reported on an interesting survey recently conducted by Cross Marketing Inc into news consumption. Between the 10th and 12th of January they interviewed 300 mobile phone users from their monitor group; the sample was split 50:50 male and female, and 20.0% aged 18 or 19, 20.0% in their twenties, 20.0% in their thirties, 20.0% in their forties, and 20.0% in their fifties. Note that the full survey (available at a fee) covers many genres of news other than just the politics and technology groups featured in this article.

In particular regarding political news coverage, the results presented here have data points that are reassuring and others that are a bit depressing. The good news is that a relatively small one in five uses the internet as their primary politics news source. Whilst there are exceptions, like my favourite, Trans-Pacific Radio’s Seijigiri, certainly in the English-language world the perception I have is that many people gravitate towards the http://www.MyViewIsCorrectAndYouAreWrongWrongWrong.com sort of site. The bad news is that television is the most popular medium. Although I am in no way an expert on Japanese television news, not even a regular follower, I do get the impression that mainstream bulletins have little or no analysis, and there are few in-depth current-affairs programmes to rival, for instance, Newsnight in the UK, although I do hear that that’s gone downhill recently.

Personally, about the only current affairs program I enjoy (even though it is a little celebrity-heavy at times they at least give the lightweights little air-time, but that Kevin guy makes me want to throw stuff at the telly!) is “Bakusho Mondai’s Hikari Ota’s If I Were Prime Minister…”. That’s a login-free New York Times story, and it describes the show far better than I could. It’s worth catching every Friday 8pm to 9pm on NTV.
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japan.internet.com finally got out of holiday mode and published their first summary of a survey for the new Year, one conducted by JR Tokai Express Research on the 28th of December on the prospect of domestic robots. 330 members of their research monitor group successfully completed the internet-based questionnaire. 46.7% of the sample was male, 13.3% in their twenties, 51.2% in their thirties, 27.0% in their forties, 6.4% in their fifties, and 2.1% in their sixties.

This is a subject that I have previously reported on, but in the year or so since I did that translation there seems to have been a bit of a shift in favour of robots.

Note that in Q2, the “robo-partner” answer does seem to mean seeing the robot as a spouse!
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As part of their 102nd Ranking Survey, DIMSDRIVE Research looked at average sleep time. 5,391 members of their monitor pool responded to their internet-based questionnaire at the start of October. In related news, Mutantfrog Travelogue reported on a recent government survey (which I might translate in full later) that showed the average Japanese person wakes up at 6:43AM.

Whether the figures below are for an average weekday, or if they include weekends, I don’t really know. Also unclear is whether time spent trying to fall asleep or dozing in the morning is included. For myself, I’m lucky to get 6 hours on weekdays and perhaps just around 8 hours on weekends. With the holidays coming up, I’d love to get a solid 8 hours kip for a week, but…

Note that women get only slightly more sleep than men – although the average salaryman may come home late from work or the pub after the wife has gone to bed, it is the lot of the housewife to wake earlier to prepare breakfast and packed lunches for her hubby and offspring.
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With Japan’s population aging at quite a pace, japan.internet.com published the results of some timely research by JR Tokai Express Research into old folks-targeted web sites. They interviewed 330 mature people from their internet monitor group; 74.5% were male, and 70.9% were in their 50s, 26.1% in their sixties, and 3.0% in their seventies.

Note being of that age yet, I cannot really comment, but my father is currently learning how to surf as part of free training provided by the Scottish (or British?) government for everyone of a retired age. Currently all of the internet is delegated to my mother, so we’ll see wht he gets up to after he finished his training!
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