世論 What Japan Thinks

japan.internet.com, in conjunction with a new-to-me company Cross Marketing Inc (ugh, Flash-based survey reports!), performed a survey of 300 mobile phone users (exactly 50:50 male and female) at the start of this month to find out what habits they had regarding mobile phones. 17.3% of the respondents were in their teens (in fact, aged 18 or 19 only), and each of the four decades of age from twenties to fifties were represented by 20.7% of the sample size.

I previously presented another survey that looked at the use of extra features of a mobile phone, but the percentages are quite different between the two. More investigation may be needed to discover why this discrepency has occured, although I wonder if the sample selection method is the problem. The earlier survey was a self-selecting one that would tend to attract heavy users, I suspect, but for this one, although the respondent selection method is not described, given the small survey size and the balanced age grouping, I suspect there is a much more rigourous selection process.
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NEPRO JAPAN recently published an interesting survey on how mobile phones have changed users’ lives. They got replies from 4,610 people who answered a questionnaire available for one day at the start of February through iMode, vodafone live! and EZweb mobile phone service menus. The sample consisted of 40% male, 4% in their teens, 38% in their twenties, 41% in their thirties, and 17% aged forty and over.

Some of the figures are quite amazing, such as one in four spending over three hours a day on their phone. However, when you consider that the average commute for people is over 90 minutes per day (must find exact figures – I’ve just seen an in-train poster stating that statistic) and many people will be busy mailing or gaming (when they aren’t sleeping), the hours soon add up.

Question 3, on whether people use a fixed or a mobile line at home may very well be biased by people who still live at home but do not pay the fixed line phone bill.

Note also that this survey is self-selecting through a mobile phone menu, so people who only spend a couple of minutes per day on the phone are most unlikely to ever have seen this questionnaire!
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MyVoice carried out a survey at the start of February to find out about the image of various mobile phone companies. This is the fifth time they have carried out this survey, but the first time I have translated one! They interviewed 16,172 members of their MyVoice community by means of an internet questionnaire. 46% of the sample was male, 3% teenagers, 24% in their twenties, 38% in their thirties, 24% in their forties, and 11% in their fifties.

vodafone really has a terrible reputation in Japan, certianly amongst the English speaking community, mainly based around their reception coverage, as they apparently measure reception at the city office of each district in Japan, and if they get a signal there they claim to have coverage for the whole district, or so I have heard.

Note that this survey was taken before the recent news about Vodafone pulling out of the Japanese market (probably) broke.
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iSHARE recently surveyed the memberrs of CLUB BBQ to see what their opinions on various issues surrounding mobile phones were, but the only results they posted in this news release were regarding electronic money and phone features. 718 people, 72% male replied to the private internet questionnaire carried out, according to the article, over two days at the end of February this year, but I presume this is a typo for January.

Note that CLUB BBQ is a free mail service that in return for free usage the members must regularly fill out surveys. It’s interesting that for this survey, and many others that iSHARE have performed, the men outnumber women two to one, whereas most other internet monitor-based surveys are around 60% female, perhaps indicating the CLUB BBQ is a more male-oriented site; judging by the various anime characters around the iSHARE web site I would say that this would seem to be true. This might suggest that the average CLUB BBQ user may very well be a heavier user of technology.
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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.
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infoPLANT recently conducted a survey regarding iMode users’ use of pay sites. As usual for infoPLANT, this survey was conducted via a public survey from within the iMode menu system. The survey was open for 12 days over Christmas and the New Year, and they received 6,366 valid responses, 61.1% of them from females.

As a side note, I myself recently signed up with this menu option (Toku-suru Menu) but I never actually saw any questionnaires that I could fill in and win, just a maze of twisty little passages leading to semi-spammy mailing lists!

Note that if you calculate the number of people subscribed to ring-tone sites relative to the total sample size, you find out that 34.4% of the total repsondents pay for ring tones, be it either on a one-off basis or on a monthly all-you-can-download plan. There are another 17.6% who pay for ring tunes, higher-quality music for their phone, but since there will be a number of people who pay for both services, it is difficult to estimate the total percentage that pay for music on their phones.
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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.
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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%

infoPLANT recently carried out a survey to find out what people do with their mobiles (other than phone calls and mail, of course) and what they want their next mobile to do. By means of an option placed within the public iMode service menus for twelve days in the middle of December they got 7,905 respondents to their questions, 37% male. More detailed demographics were not available.

In my case, the calculator feature is about the only one I use with any degree of frequency, although I am rather controlled by my wife’s phone’s alarm and schedule! I do have a number of ring tones downloaded, but as my phone is in manner mode nearly all the time, that probably doesn’t count. For my next phone, the one feature I perhaps want most of all would be a smoother input method, but not voice-based, as that would be far too embarrassing on the train!

It would be interesting to see how these figures compared with a similar survey performed in Europe or the USA.
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In early December NEPRO Japan looked at the usage of video-enabled mobile phone calls amongst the Japanese mobile-phone using population. They surveyed 4,575 people across the country, 59% female, and 42% in their twenties. The participants were self-selected by means of a link available for just one day from the iMode, Vodafone live! and EZweb service provider’s portal web site.

This survey is self-selecting, so the accuracy is somewhat suspect. For iMode users, most of DoCoMo’s new sales are of phones with video calling features, and users of these new 3G phones tend to choose fixed price plans, so use iMode more, thus are more likely to find these surveys, biasing the survey towards the heavy user, I suspect.

Personally speaking, my current phone has no video calling facility, and I have no real desire to use the feature even if available, as mail is usually sufficient, and it’s a bit embarrassing, plus I don’t know what happens about sound quality if you have to hold the phone twenty or thirty centimetres away from your face. Perhaps a headset becomes necessary for proper use, therefore since BluTooth has only now just started appearing in a significant number of phones we may see an increase in users this year?
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