世論 What Japan Thinks

At the start of February MyVoice performed a survey of their internet monitor group to find out what people thought about learning English. 16,057 people, 46% male, completed an internet-based questionnaire. 3% of the respondents were teenagers, 23% were in their twenties, 37% in their thirties, 25% in their forties, and 12% in their fifties.

Teaching English is a huge business in Japan. Actually, I would argue that it is not learning English, it’s being seen to be learning, or just the buzz of hanging around foreigners that is popular here. One of my wife’s pals, for instance, has been going to various classes and homestays for at least ten years, yet her English is still barely useable; she just seems to be feeding her fantasy of getting a gaijin boyfriend.

I’m also a bit surprised that amongst three in four reckon that English lessons should start before the end of primary education. Although the earlier one starts learning a language the better, on the whole, there are more foreign languages than just English!
Read the rest of this entry »

infoPLANT surveyed 6,128 users of DoCoMo iMode phones in mid-January by means of a questionnaire available through a publically-accessible iMode menu option regarding people’s views on matters relating to stocks and shares. The sample replying to this survey was 62.1% female, with 3.1% teenaged, 38.9% in their twenties, 41.9% in their thirties, 14.0% in their forties, and just 2% aged 50 or over.

Note that some of the raw data that I have translated looked a bit dodgy, so I cannot vouch for the quality of this survey as there may very well be errors in the raw data in addition to any biases in the survey methodology. I note that those with no interest in shares tend to select the “Other” option to the second and third question, which suggests perhaps there needs to be new services dreamed up to engage those disinterested, but on the other hand it probably means that it was just the default option people had to select to complete the form, as there was no “Not interested” answer available!
Read the rest of this entry »

MyVoice carried out a fun survey of their MyVoice internet community at the start of December last year to find out their views on potato crisps. 14,846 people completed the internet-based questionnaire. 58% were female, 4% in their teens, 23% in their twenties, 38% in their thirties, 23% in their forties, and 12% in their fifties (was no-one older than that?).

I really love Japanese crisps; there is a huge variety of flavours, and Calbee especially put out lots and lots of special limited edition bags. One series that started about two years ago was plain flavour, but salted with salt from various parts of the country. Okinawa’s Ishigaki is the only one I can clearly remember, although they did also have one from Kyushu and one from Hokkaido. Another great series, where they release two new snacks (corn or other starch shapes rather than standard potato crisps, I suppose) every six months is still ongoing; they’ve had ume flavour (sour plums), soy beans, onion and pumpkin, to name the ones that spring to mind, all accompanied by very imaginative advertising. They’re difficult to find, but well worth picking up. We also have two bags of more normal crisps sitting around awaiting eating; one is in the international cuisine series, an Italian (allegedly) basil and cheese flavour, and the other is as pictured above, 梅かつお, ume-katsuo, sour plums and bonito fish flakes, which will probabaly be as revolting as it sounds. However, the package design is excellent – note the plum flowers, with the release of this product timed to coincide with the plum blossoms.

Note that a standard bag of crisps weighs in at about 65 to 80 grammes and costs a little over 100 yen, although the supermarkets I frequent often have one or two flavours on special offer of 99 yen a bag. Imported stuff like Kettle Chips can cost well over 400 yen each, although last month I was lucky enough to find some Canadian crisps on clearout sale for 100 yen at my local supermarket.
Read the rest of this entry »

NEPRO JAPAN Co, Ltd recently carried out a survey to see what people do to economise on their mobile phone bills. For one day at the start of December they questioned 5,013 people across the three main Japanese carriers, DoCoMo’s iMode, Vodafone’s Vodafone live! and au and TU-KA’s EZweb, by means of a public poll available through the main menus of all three carriers’ systems. 40% of the sample were male; 4% were teenagers, 41% in their twenties, 39% in their thirties, and 16% aged forty and over.

Note that this one-day public questionnaire will tend to attract the people who are already heavy users of mobile web services, although in this case this is probably a good thing.

Mobile phone bills in Japan are rather difficult for me to understand; even something as simple as displaying how much you’d be paying if you were on the most basic plan as a means of comparison would help. Even better would be a recommendation of your best plan based on your last six month’s worth of charges.
Read the rest of this entry »

This is my first translation from JR Tokai Express Research, apparently part of the Central Japan Railways group of companies, and it’s a very topical subject, a look at what people are thinking about regarding the upcoming Turin Olympics. They interviewed 436 people by means of an internet questionnaire over four days at the start of February, although it is not clear how they collected this sample. 110 people were in their twenties, 111 in their thirties, 110 in their forties, 110 in their fifties and 95 ages sixty or over. The numbers for each sex is not given.

Although the host city’s name in English is Turin, the Japanese use (as would be expected, of course) the Italian pronunciation as the guide for adopting it into Japanese, thus Torino. As one of these “You know you’ve been in Japan too long…” moments, I’m familiar with the locations of Torino, Firenze, Munchen, etc, but occasionally I have to pause to translate Vienna and Naples in order to understand where they are. Mind you, back when I was a kid, and in fact up until I was about 25 years old or so, I was under the impression that Ibiza and Eye-bee-tha were two totally separate places.
Read the rest of this entry »

At the end of November and start of December DIMSDRIVE Research surveyed 6,459 people, 2,709 of them male, by means of an internet-based questionnaire to find out what they thought of influenza and related topics. The age breakdown was 1.3% 19 or under, 18.0% in their twenties, 36.8% in their thirties, 27.1% in their forties, 12.4% in their fifties and 4.4% sixty and over.

Last year there was quite a bit of bird flu in some of the chicken batteries, but as far as I am aware there was no transmission to humans. At that point there was a knock-on effect on chicken and egg consumption, but now the bird flu news is all from overseas, so I suspect no-one is connecting it with food yet. As can be seen below, the Japanese a big fans of gargling, and indeed in a couple of the buildings of the company I work for there are strategically-placed iodine-laced water fountains for gargling. However, the effectiveness of gargling with iodine has been questioned by another study, although note that it does point out that it was not double-blinded.

Just this lunchtime, however, I did see a kid in my local bread shop, with his head at just the right height to sneeze over the bread on display coughing away, without a word from him mother. Covering one’s mouth with one’s hand when coughing is not really that popular.
Read the rest of this entry »

japan.internet.com and goo Research recently performed a survey to see what brands sprung to mind when various products were mentioned. They questioned 1,084 people from goo’s pool of monitors, 42.53% male, 57.47% female, with 66.14% aged from 10 (well, it’s actually from 15, as that’s the minimum age for joining the goo Research monitor group) to 39, and 33.86% aged from 40 to 69.

As a slight digression, the original story did have these percentages to two decimal places, which seems an unnecessarily high degree of accuracy. Since the sample size is 1,084 people, one person equates to just over 0.09% of the sample, therefore quoting the percentages to two decimal places implies more accuracy than is possible from the sample size.

As a second slight digression, I’ve been a bit disappointed by goo Research recently – their main research results index now mostly points to japan.internet.com stories which only report a handful of the highlights from their survey, rather than the full gory details. Perhaps for you as a reader the short sharp story is easier to digest, but for me, often the juicer statistics are glossed over.

Note that this questionnaire is related to brand awareness, not actual sales figures, which often differ quite greatly from the numbers presented below; Matsushita/Viera is number one in terms of sales of flat screen TVs in Japan, USA and Europe, for instance.
Read the rest of this entry »

Earlier this month iShare surveyed members of their CLUB BBQ service to find out mainly about people’s attitude to children and mobiles, but there were also additional questions regarding people’s partners and mobiles. This report, however, only featured three results, but I’d love to get hold of the full set of results so I could translate it! They got 880 replies to their private internet-based survey, with 73% of the sample size being male. The ages of the respondents were between 30 and 50.

It may be instructive to cross-reference these results with the other survey I have just presented on the same subject.
Read the rest of this entry »

ITmedia recently published a short summary of an internet-based survey carried out by Yahoo! Research amongst 545 mothers of children due to start Primary School (in Japan, this means children aged six) this Spring regarding their children’s safety. The percentages by sex of these soon-to-start-school children were 52.1% boys and 47.9% girls.

A figure of 17.6% of those people polled said that they intend to very soon give their children a mobile phone or pager. 0.6% already made their children carry one, and 81.6% said they had no plans to do so.

As for the reasons for giving their children phones, the almost unanimous top reason at 95% was for safety. Almost seven in ten said it was in order to know where their children were, and 44% saying it was to keep track of them on their return home. Only one in five said it was to know when to go and meet their children when it was time to return from normal school or extra cram school. Next, at just 9%, was in order to facilitate parent-child communication.

As a bonus question, they also asked what colour of satchel, a particularly Japanese custom for all new entrants to school, they planned to buy. Traditionally, boys get black and girls get red ones.

Q: What colour of satchel do you plan to buy for your child newly entering school?

Colour	Percentage
Black	24.8%
Red	23.7%
Pink	18.1%
Navy blue	13.3%
Green	2.6%

Yesterday we looked at St Valentine’s Day in Japan; today we’ll move on to White Day. Last year, MyVoice surveyed 13,295 members (5,573 or 42% male) of their internet community to find out what they thought of the uniquely Japanese White Day. The age breakdown for this survey was 5% in their teens, 23% in their twenties, 39% in their thirties, 22% in their forties, and 11% aged fifty and over.

White Day is a uniquely Japanese event, as far as I am aware. After Valentine’s Day ended up as a day for only women to give presents for men, in order to redress the balance, and of course increase sales of chocolates, White Day was dreamed up, the chance for men to buy a present, usually white chocolate, thus the name, in return for any they may have received the month before.
Read the rest of this entry »