世論 What Japan Thinks

japan.internet.com reported on an interesting survey recently conducted by Cross Marketing Inc into news consumption. Between the 10th and 12th of January they interviewed 300 mobile phone users from their monitor group; the sample was split 50:50 male and female, and 20.0% aged 18 or 19, 20.0% in their twenties, 20.0% in their thirties, 20.0% in their forties, and 20.0% in their fifties. Note that the full survey (available at a fee) covers many genres of news other than just the politics and technology groups featured in this article.

In particular regarding political news coverage, the results presented here have data points that are reassuring and others that are a bit depressing. The good news is that a relatively small one in five uses the internet as their primary politics news source. Whilst there are exceptions, like my favourite, Trans-Pacific Radio’s Seijigiri, certainly in the English-language world the perception I have is that many people gravitate towards the http://www.MyViewIsCorrectAndYouAreWrongWrongWrong.com sort of site. The bad news is that television is the most popular medium. Although I am in no way an expert on Japanese television news, not even a regular follower, I do get the impression that mainstream bulletins have little or no analysis, and there are few in-depth current-affairs programmes to rival, for instance, Newsnight in the UK, although I do hear that that’s gone downhill recently.

Personally, about the only current affairs program I enjoy (even though it is a little celebrity-heavy at times they at least give the lightweights little air-time, but that Kevin guy makes me want to throw stuff at the telly!) is “Bakusho Mondai’s Hikari Ota’s If I Were Prime Minister…”. That’s a login-free New York Times story, and it describes the show far better than I could. It’s worth catching every Friday 8pm to 9pm on NTV.
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japan.internet.com today reported on the results of an opinion poll conducted by goo Research on the subject of search engines and advertising keywords. They interviewed 1,099 ordinary members of their monitor group by means of a private internet-based questionnaire. 52.8% of the sample was male, 24.9% in their twenties, 21.6% in their thirties, 22.2% in their forties, 20.6% in their fifties, and 10.7% in their sixties. This article is only a excerpt from their full report, which seems to have lots more relevant statistics regarding this subject.

I’m very curious to know whether search keywords are used as heavily in other countries. The majority of television adverts seem to have keywords, often with no URL, greatly outnumbering those with only URLs. I also wonder if any of these Japanese advertising search terms have been usurped by googlebombing, as they do seem ripe for targeting.

Interestingly enough, the page on “Google bombing” in Wikipedia is translated into 17 other languages, but Japanese is conspicuous by its absence. Googlebombing (Google 爆撃, bakugeki) only appears once in Japanese Wikipedia in the middle of another page discussing SEO techniques. Surely there must be some well-known Japanese Googlebombs, or even Yahoobombs, since that engine is the winner in Q1?
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In addition to the the question posed in the headline, I’d like to ask my Tokyo-based readers if your Japanese friends have tried taking you there, and what did they want to take you to there?

I discovered today another new-to-me web site, but this time it’s of a rather prominent research company, Macromill Inc. They’ve got some interesting opinion poll results on their site, but one that caught my eye was this one on the image of the towns within Tokyo. Over one day at the end of September last year they interviewed 1,032 people from their online monitor group, evenly split 516 male and 516 female, and each sex also evenly split with 129 people in each age band from between 20 and 29, 30 to 39, 40 to 49, and 50 years or older.

This is a slightly old survey, and since I am not a Tokyo expert by any long shot, I’ll skip a full translation (although give me a shout if you would like to see more!) and instead focus on the most relevant portion for my readers, a couple of images related to foreigners. Note that although the Japanese word 外国人, gaikokujin, means anyone from overseas, it is usually taken as referring to non-Asian foreigners. (Is it? I and many other English-speaking foreigners often assert this, but is there any evidence to support or disprove this supposition?)

Also note that Q1 specifically mentions foreigner friends, so it is presumably not just where they would recommend the average tourist should go. On the other hand, the respondent may be thinking of a friend from abroad coming to Tokyo for the first time, so perhaps it is the tourist spots that they are thinking of?
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DIMSDRIVE Research recently looked at a hot topic in Japan, the recent drastic reduction in tuna quotas. Between the 13th and 18th of December they interviewed 7,149 people from their monitor group by means of an internet-based private survey. 43.5% of the sample was male, 1.0% in their teens, 15.8% in their twenties, 35.3% in their thirties, 27.9% in their forties, 14.4% in their fifties, and 5.6% aged sixty or older.

When I translated an earlier opinion poll by DIMSDRIVE Research on tofu, I postulated that that was the nation’s favourite food, and this survey doesn’t disprove my guess.

Perhaps connected with this survey is my recent examination of a press release by the Institute Of Cetacean Research on whaling. It might be interesting to perform a survey see if people would switch from tuna to whale if the quotas for the former were cut and the latter increased.
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japan.internet.com recently reported on a survey conducted towards the end of December by Cross Marketing Inc into the topic of online avatars. They interviewed 300 prescreened people from their monitor pool who were either very or a little familiar with, or had just heard of avatars. The sample was the usual for Cross Marketing equal split of males and females, and a fifth in each age category, from teens to those in their fifties.

Avatars are these wee icons or animated characters that represent one’s person in online spaces; I plan to set up a MyBlogLog community for my site so my visitors can see each other, or at least an idealised representation of themselves. I did plan to try out one or more of the services listed below in order to try to design a little electronic me, but they all seem to choke on Opera. At least that saves you from having to witness my hamfisted art skills…
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goo Rankings (forgive me publishing yet another goo Ranking!) published a summary of the top-linked sites from their blog service.

Since this is not a survey, there’s obviously no demographic information, instead it had been generated from looking at all the outgoing links from all the blog entries posted during the month of December.
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japan.internet.com finally got out of holiday mode and published their first summary of a survey for the new Year, one conducted by JR Tokai Express Research on the 28th of December on the prospect of domestic robots. 330 members of their research monitor group successfully completed the internet-based questionnaire. 46.7% of the sample was male, 13.3% in their twenties, 51.2% in their thirties, 27.0% in their forties, 6.4% in their fifties, and 2.1% in their sixties.

This is a subject that I have previously reported on, but in the year or so since I did that translation there seems to have been a bit of a shift in favour of robots.

Note that in Q2, the “robo-partner” answer does seem to mean seeing the robot as a spouse!
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DIMSDRIVE Ranking recently published as part of their 106th ranking survey what award people would like to win. 5,086 people were asked what they thought over five days at the start of December 2006. Note that some of the awards are made-up.

For some reason Japan sticks “-ist” on the end of many of these awards, such as the Best Jeanist mentioned in the headline. Perhaps if Alfred Nobel had been born Japanese, rather than lend his name to those prizes, he might very well have named them “Best Brainist”. Or perhaps not.

In sort-of related news, Tokyo Times covers the recent Best Pearl Dresser award in its own inimitable style.
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In one of these strange and totally unscientific surveys that goo Rankings rather often conducts, we find out who the Japanese consider to be a model international couple. That is “model” as in “role model”, not “fashion model”. There is no demographic or other information for this poll, except that it was conducted over three days towards the end of November.

I believe the gist of the original Japanese question is after which international couple’s example would they like to model their relationship. One wonders about the thought processes that went on in the selection of two other-kind-of-model brides.

You may also note that all bar one seems to be a marriage with a white foreigner.

UPDATE: Following feedback from Roy, I’ve promoted (demoted?) Kumiko Goto to just “model”.
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The above phrase may often be heard throughout Western homes a couple of days into the New Year as everyone has had their fill of left-over turkey, but what about in Japan? goo Ranking decided to find out what people fancied eating when they got fed up with お節, osechi, the traditional Japanese New Year cuisine. As usual, there’s no demographic information, and the survey was unseasonably carried out at the end of November.

This site described the posh shop-bought osechi, but most often it is home-made, and in our case consists of miso soup with mizuna and mochi. I fortunately managed to break the monotony with a 10-pack of Mister Donuts (twice!), but I could fair go a pizza myself!
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