世論 What Japan Thinks

I hesitate to post this survey as I already get about one dud trackback per day (fortunately eaten by Spam Karma) from a couple of dodgy MFA (Made For Adsense) RSS scrapers from articles on the topic of reducing phone bills, but I will place my faith in the power of karma! So, here goes with a report from MyVoice on the subject of mobile phone bills.

Demographics

Over the first five days of September 2007 13,789 members of the MyVoice internet community completed a private internet-based questionnaire. 54% of the sample was female, 2% in their teens, 18% in their twenties, 39% in their thirties, 27% in their forties, and 14% in their fifties.

I used to have the DoCoMo Packet Back discount, but I didn’t use enough packets to make it worthwhile so I cancelled it. Wifey has the all-you-can-eat deal, and despite prodding, she is not using it enough to get her money’s worth out of it; in fact she ended up spending more money buying MP3 ringtones, 100 yen for a thirty-second clip! I’ll have to search out software that allows you to import audio from SD cards so I can rip music myself.
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I love search engines, not least because they are responsible for generating about 75% of my AdSense income! I get barely any traffic from Japanese-language searches, however. To find out a bit more about what the Japanese do with them, as reported by japan.internet.com, JR Tokai Express recently conducted a survey into the rather grandly titled subject of information gathering power of search portal sites.

Demographics

On the 7th of September 2007 334 members of the JR Tokai Express Research monitor group who were employed in the public or private sector (why limit to these, I don’t know. Perhaps there was additional questions on work-based usage patterns?) answered an internet-based questionnaire. 82.3% of the sample was male, 12.3% in their twenties, 40.1% in their thirties, 38.9% in their forties, 8.4% in their fifties, and 0.3%, or just one person, was in their sixties.

I’d love to know where people most often get their answers from. If the Japanese keyword side of the search engines are as polluted with Wikipedia results as the English side, then perhaps a lot of people are taking the Wikipedia results at face value. There was an interesting case this week about how a rogue edit, making the recently-deceased Ronny Halzehurst a co-author of a pop hit, was copied by lazy journalists, and now these newspaper’s error is used to back up the veracity of Wikipedia’s disinformation.
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I’ve read a grand total of exactly one book on a PDA, and zero on mobile phones. I just found it too tiring squinting at a small screen, and as I’m not on an unlimited plan, downloading material to my mobile phone is prohibitively expensive. To find out what Japan thinks, let’s look at a survey reported by japan.internet.com and conducted by goo Research on the topic of electronic books.

Demographics

Between the 18th and 20th of September 2007 1,088 members of goo Research’s online monitor panel completed a private internet-based questionnaire. 52.0% of the sample was male, 17.3% in their teens, 19.9% in their twenties, 18.0% in their thirties, 17.2% in their forties, 16.6% in their fifties, and 11.0% aged sixty or older.

Note that DoCoMo and SoftBank (and most likely au too) have free manga libraries for their customers, if you have an unlimited contract and looking for something to download and practice your Japanese on.
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I personally go to Subway about once every few months and Mister Donuts with about the same frequency; Subway for carry-out dinner, Mister Donuts to loiter and drink lots of free coffee refills! However, it is obvious that McD’s are wildly popular in Japan, and this recent survey by MyVoice on fast food backs up this casual observation.

Demographics

Over the first five days of September 2007 13,728 members of the MyVoice internet community completed a private internet-based questionnaire. 54% of the sample was female, 2% in their teens, 17% in their twenties, 39% in their thirties, 27% in their forties, and 15% in their fifties.

I’d love to know exactly why McDonalds comes tops of frequency of use in Q3 but MOS Burger is prefered in Q5. One reason is definitely the relative number of outlets; 1,500 MOS Burgers but 3,800 McDs, and the second being price; McDs has plenty of 100 yen menu options, whereas MOS Burgers sell for about 700 yen each. Since MOS Burger’s selling point is quality, they refuse to get into price wars.

Lotteria have recently annouced a 100 yen menu to compete with McDonalds, and the bonus question in Q6 on Krispy Kreme Doughnuts is perhaps inspired by the huge queues outside their shop, even after nine months after opening!

Oh, and the MOS of MOuSe Burger is made up from the initials for “Mountain, Ocean, Sky”, apparently.
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With all the hype and surveys recently about Second Life and Wikipedia, poor old blogging seems to have been forgotton about! I can only recall publishing a single translation on this topic this year, so it was nice to find a report on japan.internet.com of a recent survey by Cross Marketing Inc on running a blog.

Demographics

Between the 19th and 20th of September 2007 300 blogging members of Cross Marketing Inc’s online monitor panel completed a private internet-based questionnaire. The sample was exactly 50:50 male and female, 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.

I’m not sure how accurate the answers in Q3 are as some blogging software makes trackbacks (or pingbacks) automatic, but others require manual intervention, and sometimes a different target URL needs to be specified. I’ve personally only once or twice tried manual trackbacks to blogs that need them, and when I’ve tried they’ve actually failed!
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One thing I feel is very different since coming to Japan is that the insect population is totally different from at home; there we had bees, flies and bluebottles, caterpillars and midges; in our garden now we have praying mantises, crickets, cicidas, big dragonflies, stink bugs, asian tiger mosquitoes(vicious wee black things that bring me out in big allergic bumps) and of course the occasional cockroach, although those do not last long. To find out what the Japanese think of all these various creepie-crawlies, MyVoice conducted a survey on insects.

Demographics

Over the first five days of September 2007 13,734 members of the MyVoice internet community completed a private internet-based questionnaire. 54% of the sample was female, 2% in their teens, 18% in their twenties, 39% in their thirties, 27% in their forties, and 14% in their fifties.

In Q7, I wonder if most westerns are suprised that the Japanese see themselves as ants much more than as bees. Perhaps this is because the word for bee, hachi, covers (I thinks…) not just the honey bee, but wasps and hornets too.

I’ve never actually seen a firefly myself; the closest I come is passing through 蛍池, Hotaru Ga Ike, Firefly Pond, every day, but whatever water-based insect feature that may have been there in the past has, I suspect, long ago been concreted over.
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goo Ranking came up with another of their interesting ranking surveys; as always, the accuracy of the figures and the method for collecting the data is unclear, but hopefully the results make up for the potential lack of quality! Between the 28th and 30th of August 2007 goo Ranking performed a survey asking women about the basic preconditions for potential husbands and men about the basic preconditions for potential wives.
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One topic I often mention here is the apparent lack of sophistication amongst my Japanese colleagues when it comes to technical matters, despite working in a technical atmosphere. Our company recommends (but doesn’t enforce) Becky! and recommends that we avoid Outlook Express due to the many security weaknesses, although everyone should be running a virus scanner locally and our central server also has virus scanning. Despite these warnings, around a third of the engineers in my office still stick with Outlook Express, and most of the Becky! users don’t seem to have any automatic sorting to folders set up. There is one guy who runs emacs mail on Windows, which I think deserves some sort of award.

Ah yes, we had a survey to look at. japan.internet.com reported on one conducted by Cross Marketing Inc on the topic of electronic mail.

Demographics

On the 12th and 13th of September 2007 300 members of Cross Marketing Inc’s online monitor group completed a private internet-based questionnaire. The group was split 50:50 male and female, and 25.0% in their twenties, 25.0% in their thirties, 25.0% in their forties, and 25.0% in their fifties.

As I’ve said before, I’m a big Becky! fan, as it’s got a great set of features without being bloatware and is well worth trying out.
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I haven’t looked at video games for a while, so I was glad to find this survey from goo Research on video game usage by children. Video games cover handhelds, TV-connected games and even PC-based gaming.

Demographics

Between the 25th of June and 13th of July 2007 1,165 elementary school children (or people claiming to be children) responded to a public questionnaire available on the Kids goo web site. The sample was 60.0% girls, 3.4% in first year of elementary school (ages six or seven), 5.0% in second year, 9.9% in third year, 20.3% in forth year, 26.9% in fifth year, and 34.6% in sixth year (ages eleven or twelve). Note that since this is a public internet-based survey there will definite sampling bias.

There’s so much great data in this survey! Q4SQ is perhaps my favourite; based on my casual observations, not surprisingly the DS totally dominates everything else. However, the other new portable, the PSP, is played less than the ancient Famicon and Super Famicon. I’m surprised that these two machines did so well; is this due to parents being cheap, to them having less worries about graphic violence in the older titles, not wanting to spoil the kids on photo-realism, or do kids really choose themselves to play these machines?

Note that this survey was conducted before the new PSP Slim sold quarter of a million units in one week.
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The Cabinet Office Japan recently released the results of a survey they conducted into citizens’ lifestyles. I translated a survey on the same topic conducted two years ago, which may be useful as a cross-reference. See also part 3 of the survey from 2005.

Demographics

Between the 5th and 22nd of July 2007 10,000 members of the public were randomly selected from presumably the electoral rolls. Of that number, 6,086 people actually took part in the survey, conducted by means of face-to-face interviews. The sample was 53.2% female, 9.1% in their twenties, 14.5% in their thirties, 15.4% in their forties, 21.0% in their fifties, 20.7% in their sixties, 15.2% in their seventies, and 4.5% aged eighty or older. In addition, 8.7% lived alone, 24.4% with a spouse, 48.9% in a nuclear household, 15.6% with grandparents or grandchildren, 0.7% in other types of family environment, and 1.7% in other non-family-based living arrangements. 73.7% were married, 12.1% divorced or widowed, 14.0% unmarried, and 0.2% did not answer. 80.2% lived in an owned house, 2.5% in an owned apartment, 3.9% in a rented home, 10.8% in a rented apartment, 0.3% in a company house, 1.6% in a company apartment, 0.4% in other arrangements, and 0.1% didn’t know where they lived. Finally, 27.2% were daily internet browsers at home or work, 16.5% were occasional browsers, 6.8% just used email, and 49.1% barely used it at all, with 0.4% don’t knows.

It’s been an interesting survey; almost all positive answers are up one or two percentage points on last time, although it isn’t clear as to why there has been this slight improvement. Perhaps the outlook for the economy doesn’t look quite as gloomy as it did two years ago?
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