世論 What Japan Thinks

I just noticed an interesting article on Mutant Frog regarding the top-ranked Japanese and US blogs. Worth checking out for a wee bit more background about what’s hot in the Japan blog world. And, of course, I have a few blog surveys available, and I should have another interesting (to me, anyway!) one translated this week.

goo Research, in cooperation with the Nikkan Kogyo Shimbun Ltd, performed an internet-based survey in Decemeber of 2005 amongst 1,076 people regarding their views on NEETs and Freeters. At the same time, 218 companies also answered a similar set of questions, and the answers have been gathered together for presentation in this report, although the text does not make it clear whereabout the company answers have been included. Unfortunately, neither the sex nor the age breakdown of the survey is available, as that might have provided extra clues to interpreting the results.

First, I had better translate a couple of terms. NEET, or Not in Education, Employment or Training, was first coined in the UK to refer to teenagers, mainly, who left school with neither a job not ongoing education lined up. In Japan, it refers to a much wider population; there is no age limit, and as for employment, NEETs may do casual or very short-term labour (in fact, there are a number of heavily-advertised web sites that advertise these pocket-money jobs) and may very well have completed a university degree, but due to various factors have not decided to commit themselves to a job. I am not sure from where exactly they get money to support themselves, but it is most likely from their parents.

Freeters, on the other hand, is a purely Japanese word, formed by taking the English word “freelance”, or perhaps just “free”, and the German word “arbeiter”, meaning part-time, or at least not a full employee, 正社員, seishain. Many of the part-time jobs are in the service industry, so a freeter may flit from flipping burgers in McDonalds for three months, to doing the late night shift at the local convenience for another two months, to two weeks not working at anything at all.

The essential difference is perhaps that a NEET spends more time not working whereas a Freeter works just enough to fund his own time off. Along with the overall decrease in young people, with NEETs and Freeters not contributing much in the way of taxes, the ability of the government to pay pensions in the future is further threatened by the casualisation (is that a word?) of the workforce.
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japan.internet.com and goo Research recently performed a survey to see what brands sprung to mind when various products were mentioned. They questioned 1,084 people from goo’s pool of monitors, 42.53% male, 57.47% female, with 66.14% aged from 10 (well, it’s actually from 15, as that’s the minimum age for joining the goo Research monitor group) to 39, and 33.86% aged from 40 to 69.

As a slight digression, the original story did have these percentages to two decimal places, which seems an unnecessarily high degree of accuracy. Since the sample size is 1,084 people, one person equates to just over 0.09% of the sample, therefore quoting the percentages to two decimal places implies more accuracy than is possible from the sample size.

As a second slight digression, I’ve been a bit disappointed by goo Research recently – their main research results index now mostly points to japan.internet.com stories which only report a handful of the highlights from their survey, rather than the full gory details. Perhaps for you as a reader the short sharp story is easier to digest, but for me, often the juicer statistics are glossed over.

Note that this questionnaire is related to brand awareness, not actual sales figures, which often differ quite greatly from the numbers presented below; Matsushita/Viera is number one in terms of sales of flat screen TVs in Japan, USA and Europe, for instance.
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Earlier this month iShare surveyed members of their CLUB BBQ service to find out mainly about people’s attitude to children and mobiles, but there were also additional questions regarding people’s partners and mobiles. This report, however, only featured three results, but I’d love to get hold of the full set of results so I could translate it! They got 880 replies to their private internet-based survey, with 73% of the sample size being male. The ages of the respondents were between 30 and 50.

It may be instructive to cross-reference these results with the other survey I have just presented on the same subject.
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ITmedia recently published a short summary of an internet-based survey carried out by Yahoo! Research amongst 545 mothers of children due to start Primary School (in Japan, this means children aged six) this Spring regarding their children’s safety. The percentages by sex of these soon-to-start-school children were 52.1% boys and 47.9% girls.

A figure of 17.6% of those people polled said that they intend to very soon give their children a mobile phone or pager. 0.6% already made their children carry one, and 81.6% said they had no plans to do so.

As for the reasons for giving their children phones, the almost unanimous top reason at 95% was for safety. Almost seven in ten said it was in order to know where their children were, and 44% saying it was to keep track of them on their return home. Only one in five said it was to know when to go and meet their children when it was time to return from normal school or extra cram school. Next, at just 9%, was in order to facilitate parent-child communication.

As a bonus question, they also asked what colour of satchel, a particularly Japanese custom for all new entrants to school, they planned to buy. Traditionally, boys get black and girls get red ones.

Q: What colour of satchel do you plan to buy for your child newly entering school?

Colour	Percentage
Black	24.8%
Red	23.7%
Pink	18.1%
Navy blue	13.3%
Green	2.6%

Yesterday we looked at St Valentine’s Day in Japan; today we’ll move on to White Day. Last year, MyVoice surveyed 13,295 members (5,573 or 42% male) of their internet community to find out what they thought of the uniquely Japanese White Day. The age breakdown for this survey was 5% in their teens, 23% in their twenties, 39% in their thirties, 22% in their forties, and 11% aged fifty and over.

White Day is a uniquely Japanese event, as far as I am aware. After Valentine’s Day ended up as a day for only women to give presents for men, in order to redress the balance, and of course increase sales of chocolates, White Day was dreamed up, the chance for men to buy a present, usually white chocolate, thus the name, in return for any they may have received the month before.
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Since Valentine’s Day is looming large on the horizon, let’s take a look at a survey of the MyVoice community about how their Valentine’s day was last year. They received 15,003 replies to their internet questionnaire, with 57% or 8,571 of the respondents female. Almost 40% of the sample size was in their thirties, and in addition 5% were teenagers, 24% in their twenties, 22% in their forties, and 11% aged fifty and over.

First, a quick background on St Valentine’s Day in Japan; on this day, the women buy men presents only – the men’s turn comes around on White Day, March 14th (and I’ll be presenting a translation of a similar survey on that topic presently) – but they do not buy for their love only, they should also buy for their bosses, colleagues, and others, this being another example of the formalised tipping that goes on in Japan.
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DIMSDRIVE Research recently carried out a survey on free presents given away with foodstuffs, a rather popular method of promotion here in Japan. They surveyed 5,925 people, 2,410 male, from all over the country by means of an internet-based questionnaire in mid-December. The average age of the men was 40.2 years old, and of the women 35.7.

A gaijin ex-colleague of mine did collect the cards for some series or other – I forgotton the name of it, but it wasn’t one of the mass market animes. He bought one or two boxes of the chocolates and dutifully chomped his way through the whole lot at work, not ever offering me a single one, although he assured me the chocolate was disgusting.

I occasionally buy bottled drinks that come with free gifts if they have a nice strap to give away. Ocha Ken was an excellent series, although I only bought two bottles. Hopefully they revive it this summer. At the back of a cupboard somewhere is a dozen or so scented tea candles from Sokenbicha (sokenbicha looks really ugly in romaji; 爽健美茶 is much nicer!) that I really should light one day!
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[part 1 | part 2]

DIMSDRIVE Research recently carried out a survey on free presents given away with foodstuffs, a rather popular method of promotion here in Japan. They surveyed 5,925 people, 2,410 male, from all over the country by means of an internet-based questionnaire in mid-December. The average age of the men was 40.2 years old, and of the women 35.7.

First a quick Japanese lesson! The word used for these free presents is 食玩, shokugan, which as of the time of writing doesn’t appear in any online Japanese to English dictionary, but hopefully that will soon be rectified by Jim Breen and his WWWJDIC. I’ll use the term “free gift” as the translation of the term for the purposes of this post.

Next, a British English to American English lesson! “Sweetie” is “candy”, “rubbish” is “trash”.

The picture up top, taken from my mobile phone, so excuse the poor quality, is of my PC case at work. The figures all came free with Diet Coke through various promotions surrounding One Piece, Lupin III and Dragonball Z.
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[part 1 | part 2]

I have translated this slightly old survey from Hi-Ho Marketing Services regarding alcohol consumption and attitudes. This survey was carried out at the end of May 2003 by means of an internet questionnaire amongst 6,055 people from all over the country. 43.4% of the respondents were male, and 67.4% were married. 40.0% were in their thirties, and just a fraction under 25% were in their twenties and their forties.

The second half of this survey sees lots of people engaging in what might be called dangerous drinking habits, such as having a drink or two before bedtime. This casual view of alcohol is backed up by a later question where people identify it as a stress-reducers and a source of fun. In fact, the final question about attitudes misses out many negative issues, such as it being a cause of traffic accidents or domestic violence, leading me to suspect that this survey may have been commisioned by one of beer producers.
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