世論 What Japan Thinks

In early December NEPRO Japan looked at the usage of video-enabled mobile phone calls amongst the Japanese mobile-phone using population. They surveyed 4,575 people across the country, 59% female, and 42% in their twenties. The participants were self-selected by means of a link available for just one day from the iMode, Vodafone live! and EZweb service provider’s portal web site.

This survey is self-selecting, so the accuracy is somewhat suspect. For iMode users, most of DoCoMo’s new sales are of phones with video calling features, and users of these new 3G phones tend to choose fixed price plans, so use iMode more, thus are more likely to find these surveys, biasing the survey towards the heavy user, I suspect.

Personally speaking, my current phone has no video calling facility, and I have no real desire to use the feature even if available, as mail is usually sufficient, and it’s a bit embarrassing, plus I don’t know what happens about sound quality if you have to hold the phone twenty or thirty centimetres away from your face. Perhaps a headset becomes necessary for proper use, therefore since BluTooth has only now just started appearing in a significant number of phones we may see an increase in users this year?
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Last September, DIMSDRIVE Research questioned 13,855 people, 6,102 male, by means of an internet-based survey about what their least favourite souvenir from overseas was.

The whole business of buying おみやげ, omiyage after trips, whether they be to abroad or to domestic locations, is a horrendously expensive process, often involving buying absolute tat for friends and expensive gifts for those you may respect, of feel obliged by society to respect. My wife, for instance, always has to buy her dentist (who is, in my opinion, at least mildly incompetent) some decent wine or the like; for me personally, receiving a gift is a very impersonal act, as I know from my own experience that the person offering the gift just rushed round Duty Free and picked up a handful of the closest boxes of not-too-expensive nor not-too-cheap chocolates with a picture of their holiday resort on the front to distribute as required. Postcards, on the other hand, I love writing and receiving, as the person has to make some effort to write them, but in Japan, even with the traditions of nengajou postcards for New Year, mochuu cards for deaths, chuugen cards in the summer, etc, holiday postcards are almost never sent, and in fact are very difficult to find even at the big tourist spots.

Anyway, back to the rankings.
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INFOPlant performed a survey at the end of last November to find out people’s views on buying domestic cars. 8,559 people, 38.8% male, filled in a questionnaire available through an iMode menu.

I don’t see myself buying a car of any origin in the forseeable future. Living right in front of the railway station and with all stores offering cheap home delivery for big stuff, it’s so much cheaper to just rent whenever I have a need for my own transport. Also, running costs, or more accurately, sitting in the parking area not running anywhere costs, are pretty steep in Japan, even if the vehicle itself is relatively cheap.
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In mid-November of last year DIMSDRIVE Research asked 5000 members of their internet monitor group, 50.8% of them female, to tell them what kanji character best described themselves.

There is another more famous Kanji of the Year survey performed by Kiyomizu Temple and the Kanji Kentei organisation that chose 愛, ai, love as the character of the year, but that vote is for the character best representing the year in general, not people themselves. Given that “love” is a positive emotion, it is quite a contrast (and rather depressing) that almost all of the kanji chosen here represent negative feelings or thoughts.

For me personally, I’d probably choose 疲, tsukare, tired out.
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With today being Japan’s Coming of Age Day – 成人の日, seijin no hi – Seiko (the watch people, as a watch is a popular present for these new adults from their parents) published a survey of soon-to-be adults to see what their views were regarding time. They questioned 517 people, 258 male, 259 female, in the middle of November last year. The demographics were almost exclusively students, numbering 89.6% of the total, with 3.5% part-timers or other temporary staff, just 1.8% in full-time employment, 0.4% self-employed, and 1.0% full-time housewives.

On the TV today, there was the usual coverage of the various Coming of Age Ceremonies, but the one I always find the strangest is the new tradition of spending it at Tokyo Disneyland, where it seems people are not celebrating their last chance at being a child by dancing with Mickey and Minnie, but are instead just continuing their relationship with Disney. Interviews with the participants afterwards always shows a child-like wonder at having touched Mickey and Minnie, the sort of reaction I would associate with a ten-year-old, not a twenty-year-old!
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In November last year, DIMSDRIVE Research interviewed via an internet-based questionnaire 3,604 people (1,620, or 45.0% male) regarding what foreigner they thought was good at Japanese.

To most people who have never been to Japan this probably sounds like a really bizarre question to ask, but with Japan having only about 2% non-Japanese residents, and with the vast majority of these actually being born in Japan and often bred as Japanese (Google for zainichi), the number of non-native speakers of Japanese is very low, and of course Nihonjinron tells the Japanese that we gaijin cannot learn the language properly. (Actually, Japanese is relatively easy for basic speaking fluency, as most verb and noun conjugation is regular, the core vocabularly is quite small, and pronunciation is mostly straightforward. However, the intricacies of polite language and kanji (although kanji is not excessively difficult, there’s a lot of it to learn!) inhibit most people from getting to perfect mastery.) In fact, being told you are good at Japanese by a Japanese person is more often than not お世辞, oseji, flattery, bordering on the line of patronisation, which I suspect is the reason that the third-placed person is there.
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DIMSDRIVE performed internet-based research involving 5,274 people in September of last year to find out which country’s citizens would people most want to marry. It is not stated whether or not the people interviewed were single or not.

The Asia versus the West split is quite noticeable in the men, but really striking amongst the women. I previously translated statistics regarding international marriages in Japan that shows that the ideals being expressed here do not seem to be realised.

On a slight tangent, I watched the last episode of an NHK English learning program which features an English-speaking Western blonde angel that prods a clueless office worker along the path to success at her job getting a date with her transferred from New York colleague, the ideal tall, muscular, tanned, well-coiffured white executive. The angel’s job was done because the glaikit Misaki finally pulled her man.
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Just for a change, I’ll round up a few statistics that have been recorded over the Japanese New Year.

First, the Red and White Song Contest, a venerable Hogmanay institution in Japan, comparable to Scotland’s dearly missed Scotch and Rye with 80% viewing share, but recently losing badly in the ratings to the commercial competition, in particular K-1 and its fixed (I strongly suspect so, anyway) freakshow fights. Back at the Kohaku, as the Japanese title is usually abreviated to, fronted this year by the Guinness World Record holding Mino Monta (for appearing for 34 hours and 45 minutes per week on TV!) in an attempt to boost ratings. The first half got 35.4% share and second half managed 42.9% in Tokyo and the surrounding regions, breaking a seven year ratings slide. The Osaka area got 32.0% and 39.4% respectively, with two other channels showing fights, namely Fuju TV’s PRIDE and TBS’s K-1 getting 17.0% and 14.8% respectively in the Tokyo area.

This year the number of nengajou, New Year greetings cards, continued their six year slide in volume, due mainly, it seems, to the increased usage of electronic mail. The numbers were down 7.8% from last year, with about 2,052 million being sent this year. Even though this year is the Year of the Dog, and Japan is dog crazy, there was still that quite sizeable slide. Due to a death in the family this year, we didn’t send or receive any, except from people we forgot to notify with a mochuu hagaki or who forgot our notification.

Eight people in Tokyo were taken to hospital due to mochi-related incidents.

New Year’s television was 98.735% terrible. (I may have made this last stat up)

[part 1] [part 2]

DIMSDRIVE carried out a survey at the start of December to find people’s views regarding electronic money. They interviewed by means of an internet-based questionnaire 6,430 people from all over Japan, 2,736 (42.6%) male, all members of their monitor group.

In the second half of this survey, most of the users seem to be doing small transactions, and are attracted mainly to the speed, and as noted previously, convenience stores and railway kiosks are the most popular locations, so that suggests the main users are perhaps commuters are the regular users, darting in and out for a newspaper and an energy drink on the way to work. For those who haave not used electronic money, the main issue (other than the inability to perform transactions due to not having had the opportunity nor the hardware) seems to be education of the consumer.
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[part 1] [part 2]

DIMSDRIVE carried out a survey at the start of December to find people’s views regarding electronic money. They interviewed by means of an internet-based questionnaire 6,430 people from all over Japan, 2,736 (42.6%) male, all members of their monitor group.

The Suica system comes out tops for name recognition, but that may be because it is promoted as not just electronic money, but more importantly as a rail pass. Suica is the preferred system for issuing railway season tickets, so it gets heavily promoted in that respect, and is also often featured on in-train advertising, therefore it has very high name recognition, as can be seen here.

However, Edy scores higher as the first thing that springs to mind regarding electronic money, perhaps because the advertising for Suica is weighted towards the season ticket features, not shopping.
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