世論 What Japan Thinks

[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.

Alcohol consumption is one of the subjects in Japan that I find extremely fascinating; there is no stigma to getting drunk, in fact it is almost a badge of honour to be “strong with alcohol”. However, this manifests itself within society as, I fear, a nation of “kitchen drinkers”, the wonderful Japanese-English term for secret boozers (the term applies to both men and women) who enjoy rather more than they should at home. There is almost no alcohol eduction here, not even something as simple as the western recommendations of no more than 21 units per week (for men), although I have heard doctors on TV recommend taking one or two days off per week. I have spent some time trying to track down official consumption recommendations with little success; Japanese official units of alcohol appear to be larger than Western ones, and even around 150 millilitres of alcohol per day is portrayed as perhaps being dangerous after ten to fifteen years of continuous consumption.

Also, drunks are basically celebrated on television; the most famous is perhaps Kaoru Sugita, a well-known alcoholic“talent” whose tales of her own drunken violence would have her on Oprah or in the Betty Ford clinic in the USA, but here they are just fodder for the entertainment circuit. I also have my suspicions about another middle-aged famous actress and entertainer who I suspect fuels her spontaneity with booze.

I, personally, drink almost never at home – the only times I can remember since I got married was two or three times I got a free sample beer. This weekend I’m off to Oyamazaki distillery, where I am due to get a 300ml sampler of whisky free present from them which will no doubt sit in a cupboard gathering dust until we end up giving it away as a gift!

Anyway, back to the survey.
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In December, DIMSDRIVE Research interviewed 5,000 people, 2,457 male, from their internet monitor group about their views on the top e-business news stories of 2005. The age demographics were 1.4% in their teens, 15.6% in their twenties, 34.3% in their thirties, 28.7% in their forties, 13.3% in their fifties, and 6.7% aged sixty or over.

I find it interesting that the women rated IT firms buying baseball teams more highly than the men, as baseball does tend to have a more male image. I personally would have rated spyware and phishing more highly, but I don’t the the subject has got as much coverage in the Japanese press as it gets in the west.

I don’t think I need a crystal ball to predict what the biggest story of 2006 will be.
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japan.internet.com recently published a short survey on the usage of internet tools at home. There is a fuller survey report available at a price. They interviewed just 300 internet users, equally split between male and female, aged between 20 and 49 from all over the country, on the 20th of December 2005.

I’m an Opera and Becky! man myself.


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Hopefully this doesn’t trip everyone’s spam filters, but I’ve just added a new page linked from the right-hand margin that contains a list of lots of companies that will pay you pennies, well yen (or sometimes just shopping points), to fill in surveys for them. Most of them require you to be a resident of Japan at least, and a few do require you to be in fact “native” Japanese. They all do seem relatively reputable companies, and I personally have signed up with a few.

Note that everything on the target web pages is naturally in Japanese, so if nothing else, it is good practice for your Japanese reading skills. Please only sign up if you are genuinely interested in helping out with market research; the rewards available are usually so small that just randoming selecting answers is not going to make you rich. This will be an ongoing project, so you may wish to visit later on to see what extra has been added, although I will add blog entries whenever I do update the page.

Sompo Japan DIY Life Insurance (yes, that is a strange name!) recently released a survey of 500 housewives of salarymen from all around the country regarding the 2005 winter bonus and the family finances, performed over three days at the start of December. The respondents were evenly distributed by age, 125 in each decade of age from their twenties to fifties. Thanks to Mari’s Diary for initially writing about it and bringing it to my attention.

To help explain this survey, there are a few cultural notes that are important. First, Japanese women do tend to run the family budget, giving their husbands a usually rather small pocket money allowance. Next, in Japan most companies have a summer and winter bonus for full-time employees, where the employees usually receive two months salary, plus or minus some amount that reflects company performance, so effectively adding about a third onto the average person’s salary. There is often little or no performance-related element within this bonus. Also, many home loans have low monthly payments plus a twice-yearly bonus element that can be up to 6 months-worth of payments in one go. Finally, note that although it is well-known that one does not tip in Japan, there is an established system of giving those who do things for you gifts of money or other items; for example, even after paying hospital fees, it is quite common to give your surgeon a few hundred thousand yen, in addition to gifts to anyone who came to visit you when in hospital. Perhaps it is this point of view that is responsible for one of my pet hates, game shows being packed with celebrities who almost never give the money to charity, even on big money shows like Who Wants to be a Millionaire.
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Last August, Central Research Services, Inc performed a survey regarding the introduction of lay judges to the Japanese judicial system by questioning 1,384 adults from an initial pool of 2,000 by means of face-to-face interviews. This is the third time they have carried out this survey, once in 2003 and once in 2004, so the main text will compare this time’s results with previous results. The results were presented mainly as a textual report rather than raw data, so that is the way I too will present this translation.

The system of lay judges was passed into law in 2004 and is due to be introduced in 2009. One thing I always regretted when I lived back in the UK was never being asked to serve on a jury, as being a very civic-minded sort of person, seeing first-hand and participating in the legal process would be quite an honour to me. A friend of mine once sat on a jury for someone charged with nicking car radios. After the first and only day at trial, my friend went back to his car and found, rather ironically, that his radio had also been pinched.

The support for this new law, however, has grown weaker, shrinking from about half the population being behind it two years ago to now just over a third. In addition, as can be seen from the pie chart on the right, just one in twenty has the confidence in their own abilities to perform as a law judge.

Note that Japan has not had a trial by jury system since 1943.
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DIMSDRIVE Research asked 4,205 people, 2,129 of them male, to name a great company founder or proprietor, in an internet-based survey carried out at the start of October last year.

Note the date that this was taken. It was before the problem with the Matsushita Fan Heaters cropped up, and before Takafumi Horie found himself in hot water regarding some share dealing. Since this second story is currently under criminal investigation, I will refain from comment, although I do note that there seems to be some element of the population that back Horiemon, and in fact some are suggesting that he will emerge from this scandal stronger, not weaker.

Regarding the Matsushita problem, however, I felt their response was very thorough, especially compared to the recent problems with Mitsubishi truck wheels falling off, and if anything too thorough, as for a month they pulled all their TV advertising and replaced them with simple information spots about the product recall, manned almost every kerosene stand with employees to ask purchasers if they have a National Fan Heater, and had leaflets distributed with everyone’s gas bill.

Why Japan has so many paraffin heaters is another matter altogether; even in my brand new block of flats with the almost unheard of luxury of double or bonded pair glazing on all windows and underfloor heating, the people directly above us own one. Thank goodness our place is also kitted out with a full complement of smoke detectors!
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infoPLANT recently carried out a survey to find out what people do with their mobiles (other than phone calls and mail, of course) and what they want their next mobile to do. By means of an option placed within the public iMode service menus for twelve days in the middle of December they got 7,905 respondents to their questions, 37% male. More detailed demographics were not available.

In my case, the calculator feature is about the only one I use with any degree of frequency, although I am rather controlled by my wife’s phone’s alarm and schedule! I do have a number of ring tones downloaded, but as my phone is in manner mode nearly all the time, that probably doesn’t count. For my next phone, the one feature I perhaps want most of all would be a smoother input method, but not voice-based, as that would be far too embarrassing on the train!

It would be interesting to see how these figures compared with a similar survey performed in Europe or the USA.
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Toppan, a large Japanese corporation, published a press release relating to a survey they performed regarding views on financial institution security and Smart Card-based services. They questioned just 416 adults from Tokyo and surrounding area by means of a private internet-based survey over a couple of days in mid-November. The detailed survey results were not published, but instead the data was presented as a report, so will be translated in that form.

Note that an IC Cash Card is the Japanese term for a SmartCard-based ATM card. This definition excludes, I believe, credit cards with Chip and Pin functionality, and is sometimes associated with extra biometrics information – a good number of the ATMs in Japan are fitted out with fingerprint or vein scanners.

The bank I am with has recently changed their rules so that when using ATMs with a standard magnetic strip-based card, only (only?) 2,000,000 yen (£10,000 or US$20,000) can be transferred to another account per day, down from 5,000,000 yen per day; the same two million yen can also be withdrawn as cash. If using a Smart Card, the amount that can be transferred or withdrawn has been raised to TEN MILLION YEN, fifty thousand pounds or one hundred thousand dollars!
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With the 11th anniversary of the Great Hanshin-Awaji Earthquake (Kobe and surrounding area) on 17th of January 1995 being today, I thought it would be appropriate to present this survey by the Japanese Government’s Cabinet Office regarding people’s opinions on earthquakes. Out of 10,000 people asked, 7,232 people completed questionnaires regarding earthquakes over a two week period at the end of September. Demographic information is available at the end of the survey. Note that for a change, because this was a personal interview-based survey the age spread is much broader than most of the internet-based polls I present. All questions were answered by all 7,232 respondents.

For the last few years, at least once every couple of months there has been a special on TV regarding earthquakes, covering in particular how everyone is going to die horribly when The Big One hits Tokyo. In amongst the tabloid sensationalism is, however, the occasional nugget of useful information. Two nights ago, for instance, they covered how to escape from a lift stuck between floors, then emergency toilets, including how much water is needed to flush a standard three-jobbie plus loo roll down to the nearest main sewer pipe (five litres to go 15 metres, in case you’re wondering and I’m remembering correctly).

This survey was taken before the Aneha scandal blew up, so perhaps if this survey was repeated today, the answers would be rather different.

Although the above-mentioned Great Hanshin-Awaji Earthquake happened before I came to Japan, I have talked to a number of people who were living in Kobe at the time, and almost everyone had some tale of personal or family-related disaster that really impressed upon me the human scale of the disaster. I recommend anyone with the opportunity to talk to someone from the area to sensitively enquire about their experiences.
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