世論 What Japan Thinks

japan.internet.com recently published the results of a survey carried out over three days in early September by goo Research into the use of instant messenging (IM) software. 1,063 members of their internet monitor group successfully completed their private questionnaire; 46.9% of the sample was male, 22.7% in their twenties, 44.0% in their thirties, 22.7% in their forties, 8.4% in their fifties, and 2.3% in their sixties.

I’m both surprised and not surprised by how low the figure for usage at work is, namely less than 9%. Surprised because I get the impression from Slashdot that the vast majority of American workers use it, and in fact it seems to be actively encouraged in many big corporations. Not surprised, because my workplace has the network locked down pretty tight (in places…) so I expect the more common ports are blocked, although you can, of course, use most of the IM software through the HTTP port 80, but then the proxy might have blacklisted the servers. I’d better stop here before I (a) get all bitter and twisted about company policy, and (b) leak some confidential information through my bitterness and twistedness!
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Over a week in the middle of July DIMSDRIVE Research look at that Japanese staple, tofu. They interviewed 4,171 members of their internet monitor group by means of a private questionnaire; 65.0% of the respondents were female, 1.7% in their teens, 18.7% in their twenties, 33.7% in their thirties, 25.3% in their forties, 13.0% in their fifties, and 7.6% aged sixty or older.

Tofu (and soy beans in general) is just about my favourite Japanese food, and I recommend everyone to try a posh tofu restaurant at least once, even if you, like AA Gill of the Times, believe it to be no more than “congealed river scum”. Recently, I’ve not eaten it as much I usually do, although I still have some two to four days a week, it’s abura-age or Koya-dofu, not the plain block tofu.

Also, this weekend I had a wonderful tofu lunch at Seed’s Kitchen in Takarazuka (I should ask them for a discount for this free advert!). As pictured down towards the bottom of that page, it features seven different styles of tofu and rice with black soya beans for just 1200 yen.
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japan.internet.com recently reported on goo Research’s 27th regular monthly survey into blogs. The reported results this time were for the basics of blogging. Over four days at the start of September they interviewed 1,074 people from their internet monitor group. Demographically, 56.0% were female, 2.6% in their teens, 21.6% in their twenties, 41.2% in their thirties, 20.6% in their forties, 10.8% in their fifties, and 3.3% aged sixty or older.

I’d love to see how these figures compare with other countries; over half the bloggers update at least once a week, with women 8 percentage points higher than men. Blogs are now almost universally known, and with over a third of the people having blogged, blogging is becoming a standard practice for internet users.

It’s also interesting to see that men prefer the passive communication of trackbacks, whilst women much prefer actively commenting on other people’s blogs.

Finally, I’d like to see them ask how many people have their own hosted solution.
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Whith the Autumn national road safety campaign coming upon us soon, it is quite timely to look at this survey published by japan.internet.com and carried out by Cross Marketing Inc into mobile phones and hands-free equipment. They interviewed 320 car drivers who also own mobile phone from their internet monitor group, exactly 50:50 male and female as usual, and 25.0% in their twenties, 25.0% in their thirties, 25.0% in their forties, and 25.0% in their fifties. How often they actually drove cars is not noted, however.

When reading the answers in Q3, remember first that the respondents are being asked to admit if they break the law and second that the response, “Often” (my translation of やや守る, yaya mamoru) is open to interpretation; would people who refrain from calling or mailing out but answer incoming calls select “often” as their reply? My completely unscientific observations would suggest that there’s a lot more scofflaws than just the 7% this survey suggests.
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infoPLANT recently published the results of a survey they conducted into the use of mobile phone web sites. As usual for infoPLANT, they gained their respondents by means of a self-selecting public questionnaire, available for a week at the end of August through DoCoMo’s iMode mobile phone menuing system. 4,472 people, 62.1% female, successfully completed the survey.

Whenever I publish a translation of infoPLANT’s surveys I always add a disclaimer about the self-selecting nature of the survey. However, this survey gives a good picture of the habits of heavy iMode users, as I believe most of the infoPLANT respondents are, so this can be a good reference when trying to understand the other polls they have conducted.

Also, when I saw the results of the poll, I couldn’t resist the temptation to run the story with such a title!
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This slightly old survey by goo Research into Japanese dignity and morals was conducted over the last weekend in May this year. 2,114 people from their internet monitor group successfully completed a private questionnaire: 51.2% of the sample was female, 17.9% in their teens, 16.7% in their twenties, 19.0% in their thierties, 22.2% in their forties, 18.1% in their fifties, 4.6% in their sixties, and 1.5% seventy or older. By occupation, 3.2% were board-level management, 32.8% regular employees, 5.2% contract employees, 7.4% self-employed, freelancing or working from home, 5.8% part-timers or casual workers, 18.4% housewives (no househusbands!), 18.9% students and 8.3% otherwise, or not at all, employed.

This survey is in response, I presume, to a recent best-selling (2 million at the last count) 日本人論, nihonjinron book, 「国家の品格」, “kokka no hinkaku”, “Dignity of a Nation” (please visit this link to marxy’s translation and analysis of the book) by an apparently bonkers right-wing author, Masahiko Fujiwara.

As this was a difficult translation, and perhaps subject to personal bias, I’ll also note the Japanese term that I translated, so that others can either check or apply their own personal biases instead! First, the two basic terms: 道徳観, doutokukan, I have translated as morality; 品格, hinkaku, as dignity.

In addition, the font used in the graphs in the orginal is too small, so some of the kanji were very difficult to read, so I may very well have a mistake or two there.
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[part 1] [part 2]

Following on from my earlier post regarding a survey on smoking by goo Research, I now present a translation of a related opinion poll from DIMSDRIVE Research on smoking manners. In mid-June they interviewed 8,273 people from their internet monitor group. 56.8% of the sample was female, 1.2% in their teens, 17.5% in their twenties, 36.2% in their thirties, 28.1% in their forties, 12.7% in their fifties, and 4.3% aged sixty or over; average age was 42.2 years old for men, 36.6 years old for women. As further demographic information they also published the occupations of the sample; 2.1% were company director level, 37.3% were ordinary full-time employees, 6.3% self-employed, 11.9% in part-time or casual labour, 3.2% worked for local or national government, 2.4% were freelancers, 24.5% housewives, 3.6% students, 1.0% retired, 4.8% unemployed, and 2.9% in others jobs.

This part of the survey focuses on manners; one of the many things that annoys me is how Japan Tobacco get around the ban on advertising smoking products by instead having a smoking manners campaign instead; be sure to check out the full gallery there! I think any resident of Japan would tell you that it seems that far less than the percentages mentioned in Q8, for instance, actually carry out these points of etiquette. I’m also very suprised by throwing away cigarette ends being seen as bad manners by many more non-smokers than lighting up in non-smoking areas!
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[part 1] [part 2]

Following on from my earlier post regarding a survey on smoking by goo Research, I now present a translation of a related opinion poll from DIMSDRIVE Research on smoking manners. In mid-June they interviewed 8,273 people from their internet monitor group. 56.8% of the sample was female, 1.2% in their teens, 17.5% in their twenties, 36.2% in their thirties, 28.1% in their forties, 12.7% in their fifties, and 4.3% aged sixty or over; average age was 42.2 years old for men, 36.6 years old for women. As further demographic information they also published the occupations of the sample; 2.1% were company director level, 37.3% were ordinary full-time employees, 6.3% self-employed, 11.9% in part-time or casual labour, 3.2% worked for local or national government, 2.4% were freelancers, 24.5% housewives, 3.6% students, 1.0% retired, 4.8% unemployed, and 2.9% in others jobs.

One important thing to note when reading these figures is that men tend to be much more likely (almost twice as likely) to smoke, and tend to smoke more, so be wary of quoting these figures directly. If you are interested in that breakdown, either refer to the original survey or ask me and I’ll do a translation of every last statistic.
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japan.internet.com recently published the results of a poll by goo Research into awareness about domains. 1,081 members of their internet monitor group successfully completed a private internet questionnaire at the start of September. The demographic breakdown was 55.8% female, 2.4% in their teens, 21.9% in their twenties, 39.9% in their thirties, 26.2% in their forties, 9.3% in their fifties and 2.7% in their sixties.

I find it quite frankly hard to believe; no, make that impossible to believe that over a quarter (or three in ten if you include those who used to have one) have their own paid-for (or free from AOL) top-level domain. I strongly suspect that this figure includes ISP sub-domain owners; I don’t know about in Japan, but when I was a Demon customer you got a whole sub-domain to yourself, @foobar.demon.co.uk, to do whatever you wanted with. Also included must be free mail vanity addresses; Plala lets you use domains like foobar@wonder-boy.jp, foobar@surfer-wave.com to create extra accounts. Finally, blogging services might also be mistakenly included, counting http://foobar.bloggingservice.com subdomain as a domain. Note how email counts as the most popular use of these domains, which backs up my suspicions. Also note that registering a .jp address costs 20,989 yen for two years, and a .co.jp costs 42,000 yen for two years, and requires you to be a registered company; my two years of hosting for this place, including two .com domains, costs me less than than!

I’ve never heard of the .mobi mobile phone domain until this survey, though.
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goo Ranking recently looked at who is Japan’s favourite Ken. Unless you are some sort of expert on the Japanese entertainment scene, I’m sure most of these names will mean nothing to you, so feel free to look them up on Google. However, I cannot understand how they came to omit me from the rankings. I’m shocked and heartbroken!

I’ve never tried this before, so here’s a good excuse to include a YouTube video of my favourite Japanese Ken, the macho samurai warrior Matsuken Samba.