世論 What Japan Thinks

japan.internet.com recently published the results of a poll by goo Research into awareness about domains. 1,081 members of their internet monitor group successfully completed a private internet questionnaire at the start of September. The demographic breakdown was 55.8% female, 2.4% in their teens, 21.9% in their twenties, 39.9% in their thirties, 26.2% in their forties, 9.3% in their fifties and 2.7% in their sixties.

I find it quite frankly hard to believe; no, make that impossible to believe that over a quarter (or three in ten if you include those who used to have one) have their own paid-for (or free from AOL) top-level domain. I strongly suspect that this figure includes ISP sub-domain owners; I don’t know about in Japan, but when I was a Demon customer you got a whole sub-domain to yourself, @foobar.demon.co.uk, to do whatever you wanted with. Also included must be free mail vanity addresses; Plala lets you use domains like foobar@wonder-boy.jp, foobar@surfer-wave.com to create extra accounts. Finally, blogging services might also be mistakenly included, counting http://foobar.bloggingservice.com subdomain as a domain. Note how email counts as the most popular use of these domains, which backs up my suspicions. Also note that registering a .jp address costs 20,989 yen for two years, and a .co.jp costs 42,000 yen for two years, and requires you to be a registered company; my two years of hosting for this place, including two .com domains, costs me less than than!

I’ve never heard of the .mobi mobile phone domain until this survey, though.
Read the rest of this entry »

japan.internet.com recently published the results of a survey conducted over three days at the end of August and the start of September by Cross Marketing into mobile phone applications. They interviewed 300 mobile phone users from their monitor group by means of a private internet poll; the group was split 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.

Note that here “application” refers to, in the DoCoMo world, the iAppli, Java-based applications, some of which come preinstalled, and others can be downloaded that provide functionality (or fun) in addition to the basic set of tools. My phone, for instance, came with a shoot’em up game, a dog simulator, TV remote control, a graphical mail application (I think, I can’t work it!) and some sort of IM chat application (but I can’t figure that one out either, though!).
Read the rest of this entry »

japan.internet.com recently published the results of a survey by Cross Marketing Inc into how people check the time. They interviewed 300 mobile phone users from their internet monitor group at the end of August, 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.

You may remember a previous survey about two months ago where it was reported that about 40% of Japanese use their mobile phones as their main alarm clock. I also rarely wear a wristwatch, prefering to peek at my mobile for the time checks. It’s not quite as convenient as a watch, but a watch just gets in the way when I’m typing, I feel.
Read the rest of this entry »

japan.internet.com published the results of goo Research’s 27th regular monthly survey into mobile phone upgrade needs. Over four days towards the end of August 1,000 mobile phone owners from their monitor group successfully completed an internet-based questionnaire. 55.3% of the group was female, 2.3% in their teens, 20.7% in their twenties, 42.0% in their thirties, 23.3% in their forties, and 11.7% aged fifty or more. I believe people were asked about their own personal phone rather than company equipment.

The almost zero interest in foreign phones (if we discount Sony-Ericsson) is both quite surprising and rather predictable to me. The design aesthetic of Western phones is quite different to the Japanese; fat stubby bricks versus thin rounded clamshells, to attempt to sum up the differences in a single phrase. Samsung is Korean, however, as might Pantech be (I’ve never heard of them before!), but I wonder if their non-existent sales is related more to poor model appeal rather than to nationalistic sympathies. Japanese phones do really poorly overseas (discounting Sony-Ericsson again) so perhaps the reasons are similar for both imports and exports?
Read the rest of this entry »

japan.internet.com published the results of a survey performed in the middle of August by Cross Marketing Inc into the use of mobile phone email. As usual for this company, they interviewed 150 men and 150 women who owned mobile phones by means of a private internet survey. One sixth were in their teens, twenties, and so on up to the sixties. Although the full survey covered many aspects of mobile phone email, this extract concerns just sending email.

This is another of these surveys that in itself is perhaps not too interesting in itself, especially to one who is not a resident of Japan, but as I was translating I could relate it to how I have seen others use email and have realised their way of using is not really that odd after all.

For me, nearly all my email (around five per day) is to my wife, and her address is set up as a kind of shortcut, so I think I’d be in the “Other” group for Q3.
Read the rest of this entry »

On their phones, I hasten to add. japan.internet.com published this much less interesting than it seems fact as part of its report on a survey by Cross Marketing Inc into the use of paid contents on mobile phones. They interviewed 300 mobile phone users by means of a private internet survey; exactly half of the sample was male, and 20.0% were 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 personally only use the buzzer in manner mode, but my phone is in such a mode all day most days. Ah, I’d better explain that manner mode is a 和製英語, wasei eigo, or Japanese-English expression that means silent mode, turning off all audible ringers. A pet hate of mine is people who leave the keyboard beep on!

Q1: At what volume do you usually set your ring tones to? (Sample size=300)

Maximum volume	17.0%
High volume	18.3%
Medium volume	31.7%
Low volume	14.0%
Silent mode	17.7%
Step-up volume	1.3%
Step-down volume	0.0%

Read the rest of this entry »

japan.internet.com released the results of a survey by JR Tokai Express Research conducted on the first of August into opinions on Smartphones. They interviewed 331 members of their monitor group, 58.3% male, by means of a private internet survey. 13.9% were in their twenties, 36.3% in their thirties, 29.3% in their forties, 13.0% in their fifties, and 7.6% in their sixties. Note that JR Tokai Express Research’s monitor group seems to have a disproportionately high number of business people, so the results should be read in that light, so the knowledge and usage of Smartphones and PDAs (Personal Digital Assistants) is probably higher than in a truely random sample.

Despite, or more likely because, standard phones in Japan having very high specification level, the market for Smartphones seems very limited. There have been a few models released, but they have a niche market and are rarely promoted in the high street shops. I’m surprised a full QWERTY keyboard came so low in the ranking, but perhaps people were imagining that only pinkie-sized could be squeezed into a mobile. However, I still have fond memories of my Psion Series 5 (I lost it in Schiphol Airport, Amsterdam) and its amazing mini keyboard. Something like that with BlueTooth support for a voice headset would be wonderful. Anyone know where to buy a second-hand Psion in Japan?
Read the rest of this entry »

japan.internet.com published the results of a survey by Cross Marketing Inc into pay contents for mobile phones. At the end of July they interviewed 300 people from their internet monitor group. As usual for Cross Marketing, the sample was evenly split, 50:50 male and female, and a fifth aged 18 or 19, a fifth in their twenties, and so on up to a fifth of the sample aged between 50 and 59.

The authors suggest that a key reason for people not paying very much, if at all, for mobile contents is due to the ability now to be able to surf the internet and discover lots of free content. However, to me this ignores certain obstacles like the quality of browsers and the lack of sites designed for mobiles. In addition, the most popular option, downloading ring tones, has recently become much cheaper, with lots of 100 yen (plus 5 yen tax) per month all-you-can-download sites getting heavy television promotion.
Read the rest of this entry »

NEPROJAPAN recently published the results of their research into One Seg mobile phone digital television. Over a 17 hours period from 10am of the 6th of July to 3am the next day they had an open survey posted to the menuing systems of the three big mobile phone companies; DoCoMo, Softbank (or is it still Vodafone), and au. 3,787 subscribers successfully completed the survey; 58% were female, 3% in their teens, 38% in their twenties, 41% in their thirties, and 18% aged forty or older. Note that as a self-selecting survey available for just a limited time, heavy mobile phone users are most likely over-represented in the sample.

I myself quite want One Seg capability, but only (a) if accompanied by playback of MPEG from memory cards, so I rip my own contents, and (b) if available on a device other than a phone. I don’t want the battery going flat on me, and the need for a keyboard, etc, makes the device bulkier than it needs be.

Also note that the basic One Seg service is free, although I did see an advertisement at the weekend for a pay service of about 50 channels.
Read the rest of this entry »

japan.internet.com reported on a survey by JR Tokai Express Research on mobile phones and memory cards. The results presented in the story were in fact extracted from fuller research in JR Tokai Express Research’s 26th regular survey on mobile phone upgrading requirements. 330 people completed their private internet questionnaire; 69.7% of the sample was male, 10.6% in their twenties, 37.6% in their thirties, 33.3% in their forties, 13.0% in their fifties, and 5.5% in their sixties.

With phone cameras now up to 2 megapixels or more, and music download and playback features becoming commonplace, users of both these features may require somewhere to offload the data. I don’t know about the latest music phones, but many of the previous models with memory card slots came with a 16Mb card included. This should be used as a baseline when looking at Q2. Also, the current market price for a 128MB mini-SD card (the most-used format) is about 2,500 yen.
Read the rest of this entry »