世論 What Japan Thinks

goo Research recently carried out a survey on Oseibo gifts, the traditional end of year gift-giving period in Japan, in conjunction with Yomiuri Shimbun and NTT Resonance. Just 1,079 people were questioned from their internet monitor group, but no breakdown by age or sex is reported, nor is the sample size for each individual question noted.

Luckily at my place of work there is no Oseibo bribery gift-giving custom from employee to boss, but we do get the occasional free calendar or diaries from associated companies, and a friend of the family usually gives us a couple of jars of instant coffee.
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Trivia no Izumi (Fount/Spring of Trivia) outdid itself tonight, with a survey to find out when people who had been married for three years first heard their wife pass gas! They interviewed 1000 Japanese husbands by means of an internet poll, and as you can see in the pie chart on the right, almost half the wives (43%) couldn’t keep it in for more than a year. 29% first let rip in the second year, 16% avoided a bottom burp until their third year, and 12% of husbands have been spared their wives’ anal emissions.

For good measure, this segment of the show also had face-to-face interviews with some of the husbands describing the how and where of their wives’ flatulance, accompanied by their wedding photos, leaving their neighbours in no doubt who they were talking about!

To finish up this item of trivia, they persuaded one of the wives who had never passed gas in front of her husband to try to do it, so their hidden cameras could capture this moment for posterior-ity…

Oh, and I certainly will not tell you what category my wife falls into!

According to a short article found on the Yomiuri Shimbun’s web site, they performed a face-to-face interview-based opinion poll in the middle of November to discover people’s attitude towards national politicians and politics. I wonder how much of the negative attitudes towards politicians was fired by the election of Taizo Sugimura and his all-too-honest youthful enthusiasm for the freebies awaiting him? Perhaps even the mostly positive image of Horiemon was soured by people realising that the whole business of Koizumi’s assassins was just too cynical a ploy?

The headline figure was that 69% felt there were too many Diet members, versus 24% who thought it was just about right, and 2% wanted more representitives.

Regarding respect for national politicians, 76% felt it had decreased from in the past, and 72% felt that the convictions (of the political, not the criminal, kind!) of the politicians had also decreased. When asked about their image of the current crop of Diet members, the top answer was “No convictions” at 38%, next being “Self-preservation” at 37%, “Acting in their own self interests” at 36%, then “Bias towards special interest groups or industries” and “Cannot understand popular sentiment” at 27% for each. All of the top ranked answers were negative images.

Only a third trusted politicians, whereas two-thirds did not, and with just 2% don’t knows, there are serious issues that the political machine needs to address to recapture the hearts of the person on the street.

Dentsu released a report on this year’s top products and predictions for next year’s big things, based on various public and private marketing surveys and a little bit of guess work by various style magazines. As I don’t read any of these style magazines, be they English or Japanese, some of the topics are a bit difficult to work out, so apologies in advance!

Just in case you’re wondering, the picture to the right is of Miki Ando (Mikitty), who represents at least three of the products listed below – figure skating, flat screen televisions (she’s one of the Viera advert figures), and Nintendo DS adverts. And she’s got an awfully nice smile.
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MyVoice conducted a survey into the use of MP3 players, especially in relation to Podcasting amongst 15,525 members (60% female) of their MyVoice community at the start of November.

I’m not much of a Podcast fan myself (although I have an idea for one for here…) nor a portable player owner, so I have never got into the whole idea at all, so I suppose I’m glad to see that four in five are in some degree of ignorance of the whole subject, and, barely four in one hundred have actually listened to one! Comparing the figures for Japan with those for other countries may be an interesting line of research, however, which I should do sometime soon. In fact, I am thinking of writing a regular column on survey analysis, so watch this space to see what develops.
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goo Research carried out their eighth survey into web-based mail service opinions, in conjuction with Anchor Research and japan.internet.com. 1,065 people from goo’s internet montior group replies to the poll questions, 41.41% male, and 40.75% in their thirties.

I use web mail rather heavily – in fact my mail for this domain is managed through a webmail service, autoforwarded to GMail, where I then pick it up, along with two other mail boxes. My permanent mail address is reserved for non-blog-related spam. Note that in Q7 below I discover data that significantly disagrees with that obtained from a previous survey regarding New Year cards.
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infoPLANT carried out a survey to find the most popular comedian in Japan, either single performers or manzai double-acts. 8,302 people filled in their choice through the opinion poll offered in an iMode mobile phone menu option during one week at the start of October. 30.4% of the respondents were male, and 69.6% female.

The most often chosen solo performer was none other than the man of the moment here, Lazer Ramon HG! “Hard Gay Number One Fuuuu!”, as he might exclaim. HG’s a guy who inspires as much hate as he does love – I find him very funny, on the whole, mainly as he is far more spontaneous than the average comedian, whereas others hate what they see as the negative image of gay people that he portrays. Although he does dress up like the stereotypical leather man, the character behind it is rather a fun-loving sort of image, I feel. Of course there’s the other category of haters that find his pelvic thrusting at children (not as bad as it sounds, really) a bad influence, which I say I must agree with, and I would try not to let any kids of mine watch him.
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InfoPLANT conducted a self-selecting survey in the middle of October through the iMode menuing system, to which 9,290 people replied, with just a third of them male, to find out what people do in the train.

I have a two hour commute myself, with about 40 minutes each way actually spent in the train. My usual activities are mobile phone mailing and reading a book, with my current reading material being a kanji study text book. I don’t usually sleep during my normal commute, although at the weekends I often feel my eyelids rather heavy. I’m not surprised at the high use of mobile phone games, but most of the men, especially, seem to play just mah jongg or pachinko games.
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Forgive the horrendously punny headline with a rather naff neologism, but MyVoice recently conducted a survey of their MyVoice internet community here in Japan to find out their views regarding Social Networking Services (SNS). 15,537 people, 60% female, completed the web-based opinion poll, with almost four in ten of the respondents being in their thirties.

Speaking personally, I’ve never really been into online communities, and even when I seriously played MMRPGs, I kept friendships at purely functional levels in-game, and although I was more outgoing on message boards, I never moved to private messaging or email, let alone anything more serious. I get the impression that mixi and others do appeal to the demographic that are looking for “anything more serious”, though! It’s interesting that people would much, much prefer to invite real-life friends, though.
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goo Research recently carried out a massive opinion poll to investigate how people in Japan use internet banking.In cooperation with NTT Resonance and Mitsubishi Research Institute they surveyed 43,074 members of the goo Research internet monitor group and ordinary goo users. This public poll was conducted for two weeks in the middle of October, with 56.0% of the respondents female. 2.2% were in their teens, 23.3% in their twenties, 40.4% in their thirties, 23.8% in their forties, 7.8% in their fifties, 2.1% in their sixties, and just 0.4% over seventy.

It seems that both conventional banks’ net services and net-only banks do not give any significant discounts on transaction fees – Japan still has lots of fees for doing almost anything outside working hours or more complicated than withdrawning money – but even with that worries about security, which is probably as much due to perceptions as actual danger, need to be addressed to give potential customers the assurance that the services are safe.
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