世論 What Japan Thinks

The Yomiuri Shimbun (Osaka only?) recently published the results of an opinion poll conducted in conjunction with goo Research to find out what users of Hankyu and Hanshin think about the takeover plans by Hankyu. Over four days at the end of June they got 1,065 members of the goo Research monitor group who were resident in the Kinki area to respond successfully to their internet-based questionnaire. 2% of the sample were under twenty years old (actually just 18 or 19 years old), 20% in their twenties, 41% in their thirties, 25% in their forties, 9% in their fifties, and 3% sixty or older. 58% of the sample was female. Note that sample sizes for the various sub-groups are not described.

For those of you not familiar with the Osaka private railway situation, both Hankyu and Hanshin run between Osaka and Kobe, along with a few other lines, of course. Although price-wise both services are much the same, Hankyu are nominally the first-class service, Hanshin third-class. (The ex-state-owned JR is second-class.) Hankyu has plush green seats with wood-panel effect walls in the carriages, and their line runs at a higher elevation between the two cities; the line, in fact, when passing through some of the posher areas like Shukugawa, Ashiya and Mikage defines the land prices to some extent; the hill side is more pricey than the sea side. Hanshin on the other hand passes through a lot of council housing estates, industrial areas, and the like, and while their trains are kept in tip-top nick, like almost all trains in Japan, of course, they are built to a much more basic design and finish.

The other business area where the contrast between the two companies could not be clearer is in their most famous subsidiaries; the manly and sweaty Hanshin Tigers baseball team versus the trying-to-be-manly-but-not-succeeding and definitely not showing any sweat Takarazuka Revue, the all-female song-and-dance theatre.

Finally, just as a bit of trivia, the name 阪神, hanshin, is just an abbreviation of the kanji for Osaka and Kobe, whilst 阪急, hankyu, is a contraction of Osaka Express.
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NEPRO Japan recently conducted a survey to find out what people thought regarding the introduction of mobile phone number portability. Over one day at the start of June they presented a public survey through the menu systems of the three main mobile phone providers; DoCoMo’s iMode, Vodafone’s (Softbank’s) Vodafone live!, and au’s EZweb. They received 3,982 valid responses, with 60% of them being from women, 3% in their teens, 38% in their twenties, 41% in their thirties, and 18% aged 40 or older. Note that sample sizes for each of the questions is not clear from the text.

Number portability is basically the ability to keep the same number when switching mobile phone providers; however,it doesn’t address email address portability, which if anything is more important than keeping the same phone number. Perhaps the service providers will forward mail on payment of a small fee, as there are certain differences between the services; the one I am most familiar with is that DoCoMo mail saves photos to a web site and mails just the URL whereas au does photos as attachments. (or so I believe anyway)

Also note that even though numbers may be portable, the handset will almost certainly not be.
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infoPLANT recently performed a survey by their usual means of a self-selecting public poll available through the iMode menus regarding eating out. 5,926 people successfully completed the questionnaire between June 6th and 13th of this year, of which 67.2% were female.

I’ve previously translated a more detailed poll on eating out habits, but this one contains perhaps a few new revelations that weren’t apparent from the earlier survey. For me, I feel anything over 2,000 yen is a bit dear, and 2,500 yen is definitely pushing the boat out, although it must be noted that we don’t drink alcohol and usually only have just the one soft drink each, often free or discounted within the course menu we usually choose.

I often use discount coupons from free papers like Hot Pepper, but I didn’t realise that they were so favoured by women. It’s also interesting to note that although men eat out much more frequently than women, most of the restaurants I go to the ratio is more like 80% or more female. An interesting future survey may be on the type of restaurant people frequent; men appear to me to spend their time in pubs or the Japanese equivalent of a Greasy Spoon.

Since word of mouth is the top way of finding where to eat, why doesn’t someone start an English-language Japan restaurant Web two point naught CGM AJAX thingamajig?
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Just a quick report tonight from Nielson//NetRatings Japan on internet usage from home computers (not mobile phones) for the month of May 2006. First the graph for time spent on the top six sites.

This 16.3% for Yahoo! Japan represents about 125,000,000 hours, or an average of around 168,000 simultaneous users. However, when looking at time spent per user who visited each site, for mixi it was 4 hours and 28 minutes per person, over an hour longer per person than for Yahoo! Japan. In total, 42,400,000 people accessed the internet from home during May, with an average time spent online per person of 18 hours and two minutes.
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At the start of June MyVoice surveyed its internet monitor community to find out about their use of internet auction sites. 14,023, 54% female, successfully completed their private internet-based questionnaire. 3% of the sample were in their teens, 22% in their twenties, 39% in their thirties, 24% in their forties, and 12% in their fifties.

Internet auctions is one thing I’ve never done, although I did have two ideas for businesses there than never took off. The first probably required a partner in the USA or UK for bulk shipping, but would consist of buying Hello Kitty mobile phone straps and other cheap nick-nacks, charging $5 on top for postage, and raking in most of the profit, even if sold for list price, on the overcharging for handling. The second was to open lots of bank and credit card accounts all over the place and get the free cartoon character (or even perfumed) plastic cards and pass books, promptly close the accounts then sell the stuff on eBay. Shortly before implementing the scheme, however, I discovered that this was probably highly illegal and would also destroy any credit rating I might have in Japan!
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japan.internet.com, in conjunction with goo Research, published the results of a survey carried out in the middle of June into advertisements in search results. This was part of a bigger survey on search engines in general, but sadly the results are not available to the general public. They interviewed 1,031 members of their monitor panel by means of a private internet-based questionnaire. 55.8% of the respondents were female, with 23.9% of the total sample in their twenties, 40.8% in their thirties, 25.8% in their forties, 8.0% in their fiftiesm and 2.0% in their sixties.

One very suprising result is that MSN has a mere 3.7% market share as a primary search engine. Given that MSN is the default page for Internet Explorer in most new installs of Windows, this indicates perhaps a serious level of dissatisfaction with MSN overcoming user inertia.

Another surprise is over two-thirds of users go at least three pages deep into search results. However, the question is not phrased explicitly to find out the maximum or the average, but I feel the answers given indicate the average limit of the user’s patience. I don’t know if this result indicates if people are bad at formulating queries or the search results are usually pretty poor.
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At the start of May MyVoice surveyed the members of their internet community by means of a private survey regarding portable music players. They got 14,913 valid responses to their internet questionnaire, with 54% of the sample female, 4% in their teens, 21% in their twentiesm 39% in their thirties, 24% in their forties, and 12% in their fifties.

I have a Sony hard disk-based music player on test, but rather than a product review (I’ve mentioned it before myself, and Gen Kanai has a long thread or three on issues with the software) I’ll review myself. Before I got the machine on loan, I hadn’t used a portable player since perhaps my university days.

The first thing I noticed, for perhaps three or four days wearing it on my commute to work, was that the world seemed different; I felt I was stepping back from reality into a little cocoon that shielded me from some of the – well, I don’t really know what, just a transparent bubble that kept everyone else from intruding into my personal aural space, and to some extent my consciousness too. Once these feelings faded – or at least until I assimilated them as a normal commuting state – and as I started loading the player up with a decent amount of music, I noticed I was becoming a very selfish and intolerant listener. Before, I used standard CDs almost exclusively, and even ripped content was played on a per album basis, and I’d often keep the same album loaded up for days if not weeks at a time, playing it over and over. Now, with 300 tracks at my fingertips I find myself hitting the Next Track button an awful lot, tracks get marked down on a whim, and I find myself seeking out my favourites far too often. Part can be attributed to a lack of functionality in the software on the player; I’d love an enhanced random shuffle mode that took into account rating when selecting what to play so I’d only hear my one star tracks once in a blue moon, and skipping a track before getting past the intro downrates it a bit.

I think I should get rid of the player before it destroys my sense of musical appreciation completely, and buy a 128Mb player that I can only load one or two albums at a time onto. Yes, I’ll never listen to music on that player again.

Meanwhile, back at the survey, the Japanese people had this to say about the matter.
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japan.internet.com reported on goo Research’s first regular Social Networking Service (SNS) usage survey. They interviewed by means of a private internet poll 1,067 members of their monitor group. 56.3% of these surveyed were female, 1.6% were in their teens, 20.8% in their twenties, 43.2% in their thirties, 21.4% in their forties, 9.1% in their fifties, and 3.9% in their sixties.

I really should join mixi just for the sake of seeing what the fuss is all about, as as I occassionally get searches from people looking for invites to said service. If any of my readers could oblige, I would be most grateful!
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japan.internet.com, in conjuction with Cross Marketing Inc, published the results of a survey into communication over the internet. They interviewed 300 computer users at the start of June regarding this question, with exactly half of the group of each sex. Similarly, teenagers made up 20.0% of the respondents, as did those in their twenties, thirties, forties and fifties.

For me personally, as a bit reclusive, I’ve found blogging a great way of meeting people. I’ve made – well, I’ll not number them in case people start counting, but I’ve had a good few other contacts which I should follow up to make them into at least mail friends. I’ve been very pleasantly surprised at the amount of positive postings and private mail I’ve received, but if you feel I’ve not been replying as much as you might expect (or just not at all!), I’ve got your mail on file and this blog really does eat up 90% of my home PC time, and I’m rather introverted about everything anyway, so sorry folks!
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japan.internet.com recently republished a report from Cross Marketing Inc on how people’s kanji ability has been affected by computers. They interviewed 300 people in the middle of June via a private internet questionnaire. Exactly half the sample was of each sex, and similarly exactly a sixth were in their teens (well, aged 18 or 19), a sixth in their twenties, and so on up to the sixties.

I’m not too surprised by the results of this survey. Informational programs on TV have occasionally mentioned how the wide availability of mobile phone email and the rich dictionaries within the handsets has encouraged people to convert more words to kanji, even those words that use characters outside the recommended set. In addition, with kanji more text can be crammed into a message than if things were spelt out fully in kana.
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