世論 What Japan Thinks

Trivia no Izumi has a silly wee survey they conducted with 100 kids aged around 6 or 7 I think. The idea was that their mothers gave them 10 yen to buy a sweetie from a shop, but the owner of the shop fumbled the coin dropping it into a box only to pull out a 100 yen and 500 yen coin, asking the kid to choose which one of the two he or she dropped. Apparently this is based on a famous children’s tale. Of course, all the children who lied were later being told off by their mother and went back to the shop to fix everything up.

The final result, as you can see from the graph to the right, is that 63 out of the 100 children were honest enough to admit that it was neither of these coins that they dropped; 29 said it was the 100 yen, 7 chose the 500 yen, and one kid with a promising career ahead as a yakuza (or a politician, I suppose) said both were his.

The hidden cameras captured the kids mulling over their thievery, with the most enterprising soul claiming the 100 yen first, going out to the Kinder Egg-like toy vending machine (what do you call them?) only to find it required 200 yen, so he returned inside and said it was actually the 500 yen coin he had dropped…

With stories about the dangers of Winny flying around, japan.internet.com jumped on the bandwagon (see my previous stories on Winny usage and the greatest security threats of 2005), publishing a survey carried out in conjuction with goo Research to find out about people’s use of file sharing software. They interviewed 1,071 people from their internet monitor group. 41.6% of the respondents were male, 23.2% in their twenties, 44.1% in their thirties, 25.2% in their forties, and 7.5% in their fifties.

This survey talks about confidential data leakage due to Winny viruses, but I have not seen any information that confirms it is due to viruses, and not just down to people sharing their whole hard disk or the like.

I did once or twice use Winny, but gave up as first the download rate was unbelievably slow, second the selection of material was pretty poor (or my understanding of Japanese was), and third it was, as is much Japanese user interface design, incredibly cluttered and unintuitive for me to use.
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NTT DoCoMo recently published an interesting survey they performed to find out what people thought about mobile phone credit cards. They interviewed 1,800 people from all over Japan in February by means of a web-based questionnaire. The sample was exactly 50:50 male and female, and 150 people of each sex from each decade of life, from the teens to the sixties, responded. Note that the teens consisted only of 18 and 19 year olds, though.

First, mobile phone credit cards are just what the term implies – they are mobile phones with a credit card’s contactless RFID chip embedded within them, so instead of your traditional bit of plastic, your mobile phone now becomes the device with which you Chip and Pin.

Note that currently credit cards are not as widely used in Japan as they might be in Europe and the USA. In addition, most shops and restaurants that are part of a chain will accept credit cards (although one of my local supermarkets doesn’t), but independent shops on the whole do not accept them. Note the answers to Q5, where over four in five use their credit card once a week or less, and the perhaps slightly loaded answers in Q7 (there is no indication if the question allowed a free answer or just a selection from a list, with perhaps lower-scoring answers omitted from the results) suggesting that plastic is preferred for luxuries or large purchases.

Overall, I think that this survey suggests that people will see mobile credit cards as an extension of the current mobile wallets, so they will treat them as something to use everyday for even the smallest transactions. From the provider’s point of view, small transactions still have a fixed basic fee associated with them, so charging a bottle of cold tea to your phone’s credit card could cost the retailer up half the retail price in transaction fees. How shop owners can cope with this new threat to their profit margins remains to be seen, and would in fact make a good theme for a future survey.
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japan.internet.com, in conjunction with JR Tokai Express Research, at the start of March performed a study to find out what people thought regarding their Internet Service Provider (ISP). They interviewed by means of an internet-based questionnaire 330 people, 54.2% male, resident in the Kanto area. 26.4% of the respondents were in their twenties, 46.1% in their thirties, 20.0% in their forties, 5.8% in their fifties, and just 1.8% in their sixties.

I find the results here a little difficult to believe, although the respondents all lived in Kanto (Tokyo and surrounding areas), so there would tend to be a distinct bias towards fatter pipes since most, if not all, of the Tokyo exchanges are wired for ADSL, and ADSL prices these days are barely much more than that of a phone line. In addition, perhaps the people who sign up to be survey monitors do tend to have better internet connections than the average person. I am not convinced of the accurancy at all.

Broadband is one of the few things in Japan that is actually cheap – for instance I pay around 2500 yen for up to 10 megabits; we have 100 megabits Fibre To The Home (FTTH) connection to our block of flats, and I share the line with the 32 other homes (although apparently only a handful use it), with the price is slightly subsidised out of the general flat management fees.

With regards to Q2. for me personally my ISP experience has been PRESTEL (1200/75!) -> CompuServe (dialup, first taste of the internet) -> CIX (dialup) -> Demon (dialup) -> GOL (ISDN) -> Jens SpinNet (ADSL) -> Hi-Ho (ADSL) -> Plala (FFTH).
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In the middle of March this year iShare surveyed the users of their CLUB BBQ mail forwarding service to see what they thought about file-sharing (or P2P) software. They got replies from 783 people, 74% male, but no age breakdown is available.

The most (in)famous P2P program in Japan is Winny, which has been responsible for rather a few data leaks. To be strictly correct, however, the software is not responsible, it’s the user for not knowing how to set it up correctly that’s the problem, along with lax security that allows people to install dodgy software on work computers, or to place confidential information on their home PCs. See also my other recent article that ranks it as the second greatest threat of 2005!

Note that since people are being asked to describe how they may be breaking the law, there might be some degree of reluctance for people to answer truthfully, so perhaps the true rate of file-sharing within this survey group is higher than reported. Note also that the population that has been surveyed here is perhaps a bit heavy on otaku.

Finally, BitTorrent is P2P but has a decent number of legitimate uses – how did that affect the results obtained? Is it even well-known in Japan?

UPDATE: translated and published another file sharing software use poll.
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The Information-Technology Promotion Agency, Japan, or IPA for short, or even 情報処理推進機構, jouhoushorisuishinkikou in Japanese, just published their lists of the top ten threats to information security in Japan in 2005 (Japanese PDF).

Please follow the linked articles to find out more information about each vulnerability. Please also read my recently-translated survey on the use of Winny and other P2P software.
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DIMSDRIVE Research recently published the results of one of their ranking surveys, carried out in the middle of January amongst 5,782 members of their internet monitor group, 2,752 male, 3,030 female, to find out what kind of cat they’d like to keep as a pet.

This is a great excuse to publish a photo of the top-ranked and third-ranked breeds, Aria and Andy respectively, captured in a rare moment when they weren’t knocking lumps out of each other or aggravating my allergy with their hair!

The number who don’t want to keep cats is not recorded. Note that a Japanese cat most likely mean a mixed breed with a stubby tail, the most common wild and semi-wild cats you see around the streets here.
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MyVoice carried out another of their quirky surveys at the start of March, asking 15,608 members of their MyVoice internet community about their blissful alcohol moments. 46% of the respondents to their internet questionnaire were male, with 24% in their twenties, 39% in their thirties, 25% in their forties, and 12% in their fifties.

The average Japanese person’s moment of alcoholic bliss is a standard beer whilst eating a meal with the spouse in the living room.

My all too rare, sadly, moments of bliss with alcohol are a cool evening sitting with wifey outside a European bar or cafe sipping a cool continental lager or weissbier.

Oh, and this is my 200th post – if I had some beer in the house I’d raise a glass in celebration!
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Jan Kuczynski let me know about a survey he translated on the colour and ‘feel’ of handsets that people in Japan want. A rather interesting survey that I wish I’d found first. I can’t imagine what a plant-like feel phone would be though!

I also hope that it’s just mobiles that these three women in his logo are holding…

[part 1] [part 2]

The Cabinet Office of Japan conducted a survey back in November and December of 2004 to discover what people thought about gender roles in society. Although slightly old, this survey, performed by proper statistical means, should have a high degree of accuracy. They chose 5,000 people for face-to-face interviews, with 3,502 of them consenting to be surveyed.

This is a rather sizeable survey, so the results will be published over two days.

This second half contains a number of rather interesting figures, showing that women seem to be accepting of their fate as housewives.

This was a rather difficult translation job – most of the other surveys just have short and snappy questions and answer options; here there were a few rather tricky sentences that I may have made a mistake or two with…
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