世論 What Japan Thinks

I got the following message through another mailing list, so I’ll pass this on to anyone interested out there.

There is a questionnaire that has been authored by Katrin Kalb, a German Master Thesis student of Sophia University. The results of the thesis will be made available to the Japan National Tourist Organization (JNTO) to improve travel and tourism in Japan.

This is YOUR chance to make a difference for future travellers (including you) Make your observations and concerns heard. For a meaningful statistical evaluation, the student needs at least 300 responses, so please help by filling it out (will take 10 minutes) and forward it to people who you think can answer the questions.

Unfortunately the group of people being questioned is somewhat limited: western foreigners living for duration of at least 7 months in Japan (where at least three months should have been passed when completing the
questionnaire). You, or your partner should have a salaried (that is stable) income.

http://www.befrager.de/befragung.aspx?projekt=306

The URL is German, but the questionnaire is in English.

Note that there is also a German version of the questionnaire available. There does seem to be a small prize draw if you leave your email address after completing the survey.

japan.internet.com, in conjunction with JR Tokai Express Research, carried out an internet-based survey of 330 people employed by national and local government, and by private enterprises to find out how well they knew various English computer-related buzzwords and acronyms. The sample was 72.7% male, with 23.0% in their twenties, 42.7% in their thirties, 24.8% in their forties, 9.1% in their fifties, and just 0.3% aged sixty or over. Note that those interviewed are not necessarily IT specialists, or even IT users, in their workplace.

Note that the questions are testing to see how confident the respondents are in their knowledge, not if they are correct or not. I do remember one incident at work regarding the GPL (actually, I remember lots of incidents with lots of technical terms) where one senior person was holding forth at length and with great confidence about a certain aspect of it but was, in fact, talking utter cobblers.

I’m rather surprised at FTTH scoring almost double of RSS and SNS, though. As far as I am aware, FTTH is rarely used in advertising for high-speed home internet access; it is usually just fibre-optic (光ファイバー, hikari faiba-) or NTT’s trademark B-FLET’S (B for Broadband, F for “flat rates, friendly Internet access, and a flexible environment”, and “Let’s” for “Let’s IP Service”).

How well do you do in knowing these terms?
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japan.internet.com, in conjunction with goo Research, carried out another of their short surveys, this time regarding what first sprung to mind when thinking about web services. They interviewed 1,036 people, 57.9% female, by means of an internet questionnaire. 2.7% of the respondents were teenagers, 23.0% were in their twenties, 42.3% in their thirties, 22.7% in their forties, 7.3% in their fifties, and 2.0% in their sixties.

Whereas an earlier survey looked at primarily how brand image is conveyed via advertising, these web services are perhaps not sold as heavily through conventional advertising channels, but instead make their mark by some combination of word of mouth, familiarity and accessibility.

The mere one percent naming Gmail as the first mail provider to come to mind seems very surprising to me, although I wonder if Google has been targetting that service towards the English-speaking demographic at the expensive of foreign language speakers? How does the Gmail brand image rank in other countries, including at home in the USA? Does anyone know?

One nice thing, however, about Gmail being below the Japanese radar is that our office’s firewall does not block it (yet…), unlike Hotmail, Yahoo! web mail (Japan but not the UK) and the other big providers. Not that I check personal mail at work; no no no, not me at all.

In addition, Gmail is still invitation-only, but that hasn’t stopped SNS services spreading widely amongst the Japanese. By the way, if anyone out there would like a Gmail invitation, I have lots to give away!
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japan.internet.com, in conjuction with JR Tokai Express Research, conducted a survey to find out where businesspeople obtained their information from. 331 people from all over the country were questioned, with 73.4% of the sample male. 21.5% were in their twenties, 42.3% in their thirties, 27.2% in their forties and 9.1% in their fifties. The survey was most likely conducted via a private internet poll, although this is not clearly mentioned.

I’m surprised that almost nine in ten regularly visit a portal, yet not even half visit a search engine, just scarcely beating the number who visit route-finding web sites, although I suppose it means that a good number of people do their searching directly from the portal.
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At the start of February MyVoice performed a survey of their internet monitor group to find out what people thought about learning English. 16,057 people, 46% male, completed an internet-based questionnaire. 3% of the respondents were teenagers, 23% were in their twenties, 37% in their thirties, 25% in their forties, and 12% in their fifties.

Teaching English is a huge business in Japan. Actually, I would argue that it is not learning English, it’s being seen to be learning, or just the buzz of hanging around foreigners that is popular here. One of my wife’s pals, for instance, has been going to various classes and homestays for at least ten years, yet her English is still barely useable; she just seems to be feeding her fantasy of getting a gaijin boyfriend.

I’m also a bit surprised that amongst three in four reckon that English lessons should start before the end of primary education. Although the earlier one starts learning a language the better, on the whole, there are more foreign languages than just English!
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iSHARE recently surveyed the memberrs of CLUB BBQ to see what their opinions on various issues surrounding mobile phones were, but the only results they posted in this news release were regarding electronic money and phone features. 718 people, 72% male replied to the private internet questionnaire carried out, according to the article, over two days at the end of February this year, but I presume this is a typo for January.

Note that CLUB BBQ is a free mail service that in return for free usage the members must regularly fill out surveys. It’s interesting that for this survey, and many others that iSHARE have performed, the men outnumber women two to one, whereas most other internet monitor-based surveys are around 60% female, perhaps indicating the CLUB BBQ is a more male-oriented site; judging by the various anime characters around the iSHARE web site I would say that this would seem to be true. This might suggest that the average CLUB BBQ user may very well be a heavier user of technology.
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goo Research recently carried out some research on the fallout from the “Livedoor Shock”, as it is being called in Japan, and Horie’s arrest. The research was carried out in conjunction with the Yomiuri Shimbun.

Just as background, when the story broke on the 16th of January, The Tokyo Stock Market Mothers Index in particular, within which many new IT firms are listed, fell around 22.4% over the following two days.

For this survey, 1,092 people (I believe they all owned shares) were questioned to see how they had felt the effects of the Livedoor Shock. Note that the survey was conducted on the 1st and 2nd of February, by which time the main TOPIX index had recovered all its losses, but as can be seen later, the personal investors were still hurting, suggesting that they were holding IT-heavy portfolios or other high-risk investments.
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japan.internet.com, in conjunction with JR Tokai Express Research, carried out a rather short survey on the use of SNS, or Social Networking Services. The survey was carried out by means of an internet-based questionnaire amongst 442 members from all over the country belonging to their private research monitor group. 58.1% of the sample was male, 33.3% were in their twenties, 37.6% were in their thirties, 24.4% were in their forties, and 4.8% were in their fifties.

According to figures gathered at the end of September of last year, there were almost four million users registered across all the SNSes in Japan; the big ones being mixi and GREE. Note that this would include some degree of duplication, both from people registering in more than one service and from people registering twice. Note also that I have previously translated another survey on the usage of SNSes. However, this survey suffers from a small sample size, in particular Q1SQ2 had only 13 respondents so not much can be drawn from the results.

Personally, I barely have enough time to conduct a real-life social life, let alone a second virtual one!
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At the start of this month japan.internet.com in conjunction with goo Research got 1,089 replies to an internet-based questionnaire about the use of Question and Answer sites in particular, and looking up things in general. The user demographics were 23.0% in their twenties, 41.0% in their thirties, 25.9% in their forties, 7.2% in their fifties, and 2.8% in their sixties. 53.3% of the sample were female.

From the English language point of view, I’ve only ever questioned and answered on Experts Exchange in the dim and distant past, and glanced at Google Answers once or twice recently. I’m much more of a BBS and Usenet person myself.

One question not addressed by this survey (or perhaps only addressed if you pay money to get the full survey results) is how much people trust the answers they get. However, even a seemingly simple question like that may not have a simple answer. Thinking of Wikipedia, for instance (which isn’t a Q&A site, admittedly), depending on the information I am searching, my trust level varies. In fact, I have recently stopped linking to it as I feel that because the pointed-to page can change, I may no longer be referring to the same information that I was pointing to in the past; in addition for controversial subjects the page can get frozen, or at least adopted as a base line, at a non-neutral point of view, despite the protestations of neutrality from the ‘pedia-philes.
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infoPLANT surveyed 6,128 users of DoCoMo iMode phones in mid-January by means of a questionnaire available through a publically-accessible iMode menu option regarding people’s views on matters relating to stocks and shares. The sample replying to this survey was 62.1% female, with 3.1% teenaged, 38.9% in their twenties, 41.9% in their thirties, 14.0% in their forties, and just 2% aged 50 or over.

Note that some of the raw data that I have translated looked a bit dodgy, so I cannot vouch for the quality of this survey as there may very well be errors in the raw data in addition to any biases in the survey methodology. I note that those with no interest in shares tend to select the “Other” option to the second and third question, which suggests perhaps there needs to be new services dreamed up to engage those disinterested, but on the other hand it probably means that it was just the default option people had to select to complete the form, as there was no “Not interested” answer available!
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