世論 What Japan Thinks

[part 1] [part 2] [part 3]

Over ten days in the middle of November last year the Cabinet Office Japan conducted an opinion poll regarding the matter of organ transplants. Of the 3,000 randomly selected people from all over the country, 57.6%, or 1,725 people, successfully completed the survey in face-to-face interviews. 52.9% were female, 9.8% in their twenties, 14.9% in their thirties, 16.1% in their forties, 20.8% in their fifties, 19.4% in their sixties, and 19.2% aged seventy or older.

Here, only 7.9% of the population have donor cards, and of those who have them, two in five are still to indicate their choices on the card, making it less than one in twenty of the population from whom organs can be taken for transplant. As a comparison, in the UK 23% of the population are registered donors.

The questions on differentiating between brain death and actual heart stopping death in Q10 to Q13 are especially interesting. This suggests that the Japanese bascially see brain death the same way as cardiac death. Interestingly, the term “brain death” was not elaborated upon within this survey as it is a more severe state than persistent vegetative state which is perhaps what people associate with the term; I, for one, was unaware of the distinction.
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[part 1] [part 2] [part 3]

Over ten days in the middle of November last year the Cabinet Office Japan conducted an opinion poll regarding the matter of organ transplants. Of the 3,000 randomly selected people from all over the country, 57.6%, or 1,725 people, successfully completed the survey in face-to-face interviews. 52.9% were female, 9.8% in their twenties, 14.9% in their thirties, 16.1% in their forties, 20.8% in their fifties, 19.4% in their sixties, and 19.2% aged seventy or older.

This is another subject that generates a lot of comment from foreigners, but up until now I have never seen any hard figures on the situation. I hope my readers too can get as much out of this data as I did. I also hope my translation is accurate enough!

Since this is quite a lengthy survey, it will be published in three parts.
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Over five days at the start of January, MyVoice looked at that Japanese staple, rice. 10,245 members of their online monitor community successfully completed the survey. 54% were female, 2% in their teens, 18% in their twenties, 40% in their thirties, 26% in their forties, and 14% in their fifties.

My translation for Q3 is not very good, I fear, but I hope you get the general picture! I eat rice almost every day, and at home we use a mix of half white and half brown rice.

I was surprised in Q4 that 3.3% said they like their rice with soy sauce, as not doing it is one of the first points of etiquette drilled into foreigners, so please feel free to print out this survey to justify your bad manners next time you do so in polite company!

Follow this link for more information on Japanese rice cookers.
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A couple of weeks ago japan.internet.com published the results of goo Research’s 29th monthly survey into mobile phone upgrade needs. Over three days at the start of January exactly 1,000 members of their monitor panel (presumably all mobile phone owners) successfully completed a private internet-based survey. 53.0% of the sample was female, 2.1% in their teens, 19.7% in their twenties, 39.0% in their thirties, 25.1% in their forties, and 14.1% aged fifty or older.

Just yesterday, my wife upgraded her phone – what sold the Panasonic P703i to her even more than the pink colouring (actually, she bought the wavey blue one) was the inclusion of Lisa and Gaspard icon sets.
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The Cabinet Office Japan recently published the results of a survey into the lay judge system to be introduced in 2009. Over ten days in the middle of December last year they selected a random sample of 3,000 people aged 20 years or older, of which 1,795, or 59.8%, chose to respond to the survey. More detailed demographic information is yet to be published.

This is another topic where I translated a survey last year. I was always disappointed that I never got selected for jury duty when I was back home.
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NEPRO JAPAN recently published the results of a survey into economising on one’s mobile phone bill. On one day in mid-December of last year they questioned 3,425 people across the three main Japanese carriers, DoCoMo’s iMode, Softbank’s Yahoo! Keitai and au and TU-KA’s EZweb, by means of a public poll available through the main menus of all three carriers’ systems. 44% of the sample were male; 3% were teenagers, 35% in their twenties, 44% in their thirties, and 18% aged forty and over.

Similar questions were asked of a similar group around the same time last year, so one can perhaps observe a trend over the past year.

I’ve actually now worked out how to read my mobile phone bill, I hope, and with all my discounts and whatever in place, it costs me around ¥4,000 per month for just a little talk time, some surfing, and free email exchange with my wife.
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Over the first 5 days at the start of the New Year, MyVoice surveyed its monitor group to find out their views regarding foreign language learning. 10,504 people successfully completed the survey; 54% were female, 2% in their teens, 19% in their twenties, 40% in their thirties, 26% in their forties, and 13% in their fifties.

Note that putting Q1 and Q3 together we see that around half of the poplation would like to study English but currently aren’t doing anything about it. You may want to cross-reference the results here with a similar survey on English last year, also conducted by MyVoice.

I’m trying to find a way to tie this into the news today that 7 NOVA “English” “teachers” got busted for drugs, but I’m failing miserably.
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japan.internet.com recently reported on the results of a survey conducted by JR Tokai Express Search into company intranet accounts and security. They interviewed 330 people from their monitor group on the 24th of January employed in the public or private sector. 94.8% were male (very high for them – it’s usually 80% or so, so I wonder if this is a misprint?), 17.9% in their twenties, 41.5% in their thirties, 32.4% in their forties, 7.3% in their fifties, and 0.9% aged sixty or older.

I’d have to answer “don’t know” to Q2 and Q3 too. Rather timely considering this survey, we’ve just had email from the IS team to say that the minimum password length for the intranet is being increased, plus it must contain at least one alphabetic and one numeric or symbol character, and from next month the password must be changed once every 30 days. As a bonus, we can also put a space character into it.

We have now at least four or five passwords between the user and the corporate network: desktops have BIOS password, Windows log in password, router password, and intranet password. For notebook computers it’s BIOS password, disk encryptor password, Windows log in password, wireless LAN smart card password, and intranet password. All these passwords are on different lifetime schedules, and of course most of them cannot be automated. All I can forsee is that the number of PostIt Notes around monitors will increase!
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Just a quick pointer to an article they posted there on various statistics regarding marriage in Japan.

infoPLANT recently published the results of a survey they conducted into the consumption of soft drinks. Over a week towards the end of December last year 5,933 people chose to complete a survey promoted in the NTT DoCoMo iMode menuing system. The basic demographics were 37.5% male and 62.5% female.

It might be interesting to cross-reference these results with one earlier this month into water consumption and last year’s look at can coffee consumption. As well as the water mentioned previously, I’m a Diet Coke fan and also like soba tea and 爽建美茶, soukenbicha, a lovely blend of various grasses and teas. Although I’m a regular black tea drinker at home, I don’t touch bottled tea as it’s usually undrinkably sugar-laden, as is much of the canned coffee. Black coffees are straight, but I can’t cope with the bitterness, so I stick with the 微糖, bitou, slightly sugared, which are usually paletable. I don’t actually buy them myself, but we have a monthly workplace casual meeting where the company provides soft drinks and nibbles.
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