世論 What Japan Thinks

Yesterday was Sunday, but I was all jet-lagged, so please forgive me this post of postponed silliness (only mildly silly in itself, but I find the vast majority of Japanese blogs make Twitter look like Shakespeare) from goo Ranking into standby topics used in blogs, for both men and women.

Demographics

Between the 21st and 25th of May 2009 1,082 members of the goo Research monitor group completed a private internet-based questionnaire. 51.4% of the sample were male, 7.3% were in their teens, 16.0% in their twenties, 28.1% in their thirties, 27.9% in their forties, 10.8% in their fifties, and 9.9% aged sixty or older. Note that the score in the results refers to the relative number of votes for each option, not a percentage of the total sample. In this case, obviously 100% of the Japanese online population does not blog!

It’s a bit of a short survey, but after posting a detailed look at blogging habits I did comment about politics not featuring in the list of subjects, but here politics makes an appearance.

I should have some of them ready for when I have jet-lag…
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Although this survey from iBridge Research Plus and reported on by japan.internet.com into cosmetics shopping sites has as the survey base women who are already online, discovering that the majority of them who have shopped for cosmetics in the last year have does it at least once online in that period.

Demographics

On the 22nd of June 2009 300 female members of the iBridge monitor group completed a private internet-based questionnaire. 24.3% of the sample were in their twenties, 38.0% in their thirties, 24.3% in their forties, 10.0% in their fifties, and 3.3% in their sixties.

I don’t think my wife’s bought online, except for a tester kit that cost a bit of money for delivery. She’s won quite a bit, though, including one that came with a Christian book that seemed to be part of a vaguely pyramid-shaped affiliate scheme…
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Given the high level of ownership of digital cameras reported in this survey from goo Research and featured on japan.internet.com, one has to wonder, as the question wasn’t answered in the article, why almost half the people manage less than 5 gigabytes of stored images.

Demographics

Between the 4th and 9th of June 2009 1,042 members of the goo Research monitor group completed an internet-based questionnaire. 52.5% of the sample were male, 16.3% in their teens, 17.7% in their twenties, 21.3% in their thirties, 16.3% in their forties, 15.6% in their fifties, and 12.8% aged sixty or older.

On the other hand, Q3 asks specifically about photographs one has taken oneself, and since it is the wife who usually uses the camera, probably less than 2 GB of the 20 GB or more is actually mine…
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< ?PHP
include "/home/whatjapa/public_html/libchart/libchart.php";

$chart = new PieChart(400, 200);

$chart->setTitle(“Have you ever seen the ‘Train Channel’?”);
$chart->addPoint(new Point(“Yes”, 59.3));
$chart->addPoint(new Point(“No”, 40.7));

$chart->render(“/home/whatjapa/public_html/image09/seen-train-channel.png”);
?>
Here’s a whole lot of buzzwords relating to the business of digital signage, the subject of a survey conducted by iBridge Research Plus and reported on by japan.internet.com.

Demographics

On the 8th of June 2009 300 members of the iBridge monitor group resident in the Tokyo area completed an internet-based questionnaire. 50.7% of the sample were male, 15.3% in their twenties, 33.0% in their thirties, 33.7% in their forties, 14.3% in their fifties, and 3.7% aged sixty or older.

In Q1 I present both the English and the Japanese. For my readers who don’t understand Japanese, you’ll just have to take my word on the difference between “sign” and “signage” or “bulletin board” and “board”. For my readers who do understand, I cannot explain the difference in usage between “sign” and “signage” or “bulleting board” and “board”, except that’s just how the buzzwords have been coined!

In Q2, a number of the Tokyo lines have television screens in them that display information such as upcoming stops, platform exit information, news and advertising, colloquially known as the “Train Channel”.
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With a great deal of fuss regarding privacy in Japan related to Google’s Street View, resulting in them promising to reshoot everything but from a lower camera angle, this recent survey from iShare into Google Street View found that virtual walkthroughs of theme parks was a popular feature that should be expanded.

Demographics

Between the 20th and 25th of May 2009 569 members of the CLUB BBQ free email forwarding service completed a private internet-based questionnaire. 58.2% of the sample were male, 35.7% were in their twenties, 29.7% in their thirties, and 34.6% in their forties.

In May of this year Google announced a Street View Partner Program to allow private facilities such as theme parks and other tourist attractions to invite the Google Trike to pedal through the location. In Japan, Kyoto’s Kodaiji temple and Asahigawa Zoo in Hokkaido were among the first locations to sign up.

It was not reported in detail, but the most popular places people wanted to see photographed were Tokyo Disneyland and Universal Studios Japan.
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With Father’s Day being next weekend, here’s a timely look with DIMSDRIVE Research at a popular gift for this time of year, electric razors.

Demographics

Between the 13th and 28th or May 2009 9,897 members of the DIMSDRIVE monitor group successfully completed a private online questionnaire. 50.3% of the sample were male, 1.0% in their teens, 13.0% in their twenties, 34.4% in their thirties, 30.3% in their forties, 15.1% in their fifties, and 6.2% aged sixty or older. 63.5% of the sample were married, although I don’t know if that has any significance towards the results.

Both my electric shavers have been presents from the wife. The first was a rather naff Hitachi single-headed alkali battery-operated one that required me to use a razor once a week or more to catch all the bits that it missed, and my current Braun was free via credit card mileage points. I use shaving gel to set up my skin, and barring quite poor performance around the Adam’s apple area, I’m quite happy.

You’ll note that there is no question “do you have a beard, thus no need to shave?”, or even asking how the beard trimming features of the shaver is.
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It’s Sunday, so it must be goo Ranking day! This time they took a look at why people tend to be negative in matters regarding love, with separate rankings for both men and women.

Demographics

Between the 21st and 24th of April 2009 1,071 members of the goo Research monitor group completed a private internet-based questionnaire. 51.4% of the sample were female, 9.2% were in their teens, 13.7% in their twenties, 27.5% in their thirties, 27.5% in their forties, 11.7% in their fifties, and 10.4% aged sixty or older.

I’d have thought for men that number 7=, going out is too much bother, would be more highly ranked, as I feel a lot of Japanese women are high-maintenance.
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Another regular survey today from goo Research, this time being the 10th electronic cash survey, as reported on by japan.internet.com.

Demographics

Between the 1st and 4th of June 2009 1,106 members of the goo Research monitor group completed a private internet-based questionnaire. 53.2% of the sample were male, 16.6% in their teens, 18.4% in their twenties, 21.2% in their thirties, 16.3% in their forties, and 27.5% aged fifty or older.

The only electronic cash I use is at the work canteen and shop, which isn’t really electronic cash, I would argue; it uses the corporate credit card and gets charged through to my credit card just like a normal transaction – electronic cash to me has a rechargeable sum of cash stored in the card that gets subtracted from as you use. However, I don’t think this survey made such a subtle distinction.

Note that the survey concentrates on chipped credit cards, not mobile phones with the same chips.
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Here is the latest set of results from goo Research’s regular monthly survey into internet advertising, their sixth in the series, reported on by japan.internet.com.

Demographics

Between the 25th and 28th of May 2009 1,089 members of the goo Research monitor group completed a private internet-based questionnaire. 52.5% of the sample were male, 16.5% in their teens, 18.1% in their twenties, 21.4% in their thirties, 16.1% in their forties, and 27.9% aged fifty or older.

I was disappointed to see (but not surprised looking at my revenue!) that links such as me urging you to buy crappy keitai straps from Japan don’t seem to find much favour with Japanese, but email newsletters being even further down the pecking order seemed a surprise, and I’m not really sure why contextual ads come dead last.
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There’s one very useful figure in this survey conducted by Marsh Inc and reported on by japan.internet.com into typing, namely the use of romaji versus kana input – wait until after the demographics and I’ll explain it!

Demographics

Between the 5th and 7th of June 2009 300 members of the Marsh monitor group completed a private internet-based questionnaire. The sample was split 50:50 male and female, and 2.7% were in their teens, 17.3% in their twenties, 20.0% in their thirties, 20.0% in their forties, 20.0% in their fifties, and 20.0% aged sixty or older.

Japanese keyboards usually come with two layouts; one way to explain is to take as an example the word Tokyo, in kanji 東京. In romaji, meaning using the Roman alphabet to spell, one types “toukyou” on a standard QWERTY layout and presses the space bar to convert to kanji. For kana input, the five individual kana syllables that make up the word need to be typed, namely とうきょう, with an extra shift key push to get the small よ. On the standard kana layout, the keys correspond to “s4g)4″, so one can see that if you often mix Japanese and English, romaji input saves you having to learn two layouts.

On the other hand nearly all Japanese mobile phones use kana-based input, and indeed a recent phone was advertising as a unique feature the ability to input in romaji and convert to kanji.
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