世論 What Japan Thinks

We had a visit today from the census representitive for next month’s census. The questions are mostly very simple – age, place of work, size of house (Japan has a target to within 20 years get the average family living space up from the current about 50 square metres to 100 square metres. Hoever, there are very few flats available over 100 square metres, at least not without getting into funny money, and even many houses barely top that in living area), hours worked per month, etc. The one problematic one I saw was there is a nationality box, Japanese or other, with a write-in area. All children from an international marriage are dual nationality until aged 20, so what do they tick? I saw on The Community mailing list the prevailing opinion was to tick both boxes and let them sort it out. One person did phone city hall, and their advice was to select Japanese for the kids, but that just hides the issue. Many international children may have special schooling requirements, especially if they have moved back from overseas.

On a lighter note, there is no box for religion, so we cannot repeat the efforts in New Zealand and the UK where people selected Jedi-ism as they religion. Perhaps instead for country of origin we can write in Endor (but that’s the Ewok land, isn’t it? Ohh ‘eck, I’m no Staar Wars geek!)

Recently (how recently is not stated!) goo Research published this survey on blog awareness and usage in Japan, their 19th survey in their series on blogging. 1,042 Internet users aged from teens to their 50s were surveyed, with 58.83% (uggh, what’s with the two decimal places? I’ll round to one for the rest of this story) of the sample women. The following results were obtained:

Q: Within the last month, have you looked at someone else’s blog?

Yes	75.4%
No	18.9%
Don’t know what a blog is	5.7%

The viewers percentage has tripled since their first survey last April and the don’t knows have decreased from almost 41% first time out.

Q: Within the last month, have you posted a comment on someone else’s blog?

	All	Male	Female
Yes	25.4%	22.2%	27.8%
No	74.6%	77.8%	72.2%

Q:Have you made a blog yourself?

Yes	27.2%
No but I want to try sometime	33.3%
No, and don’t plan to	32.2%
Don’t know what a blog is	7.3%

The number not knowing what a blog is has increased! Perhaps people paniced at this question and realised they didn’t really understand things after all?

There now follows a large table describing what blogs people use, but rather than reproduce the whole lot, the highlights from the sample of 283 bloggers are livedoor leading at 17.7%, down from 23.4% last time (last month?); goo at 16.2% down from 17.7%; and Rakuten at 15.2% from 15.6%. Yahoo! and not listed others are the only gainers, 2% and 4% respectively.

One reason for more losers than winners is that the question allows multiple answers. The last time the average blogger used just under one and a half services; this time it is just under 1.4 services, suggesting either people are keeping less blogs or moving their blogs to a single provider.

Q: About how often do you update your blog? (Sample size=283)

Daily or so	21.9%
Twice or thrice a week	26.9%
Once a week	13.8%
Twice or thrice a month	14.1%
Once a month	5.6%
Once every two or three months	6.7%
Less than once every six months	11%

Q: Has your blog received a trackback? (Sample size=283 I think)

	All	Male	Female
Yes	68.2%	72.6%	65.5%
No	31.8%	27.4%	34.5%

On the other hand, only 33.9% have sent a trackback to another blog.

Q: Do you use an affiliate (cash-for-clicks) program? (Sample size=283)

I participate in one already	16.6%
I definitely want to join one	26.5%
I want to join one	25.1%
I don’t really want to join one	14.8%
I don’t want to join one	6.4%
Don’t know	10.6%

Finally, bloggers and those who wanted to be bloggers were asked what were the three most important factors when selecting a blog service to build a blog in. Of the 630 respondents, the top three answers were “Easy to make” at 77.5%, “Easy to understand management system” at 59.0%, and finally “Freedom of layout” at 37.1%. Strangely, I thought, magazine recommendations was right down at the bottom, less than 1% selecting it as a key factor.

Looking at this survey on Japanese and their language, performed last year in January and February, it seems that three out of four of the 3,000 Japanese surveyed would normally read my blog’s title as yoron rather than seron! Only 18.9% plumped for seron whilst 73.6% went for yoron, with the remaining 7.5% either use both readings equally or just don’t know. Further investigation indicates both readings are perfectly acceptable, so one is neither more or less correct than the other.

According to a survey published in the Nikkei Shimbun of 865 foreigners incarcerated in various prisons around Japan, performed in September and October of last year, the vast majority would prefer to do their time back in their home country. Note the slightly onimous (but statistically perfectly accurate) opening phrase, highlighted for your benefit, translated directly from the original article.

Amongst the continually growing foreign prisoner population, 80% answered that if they could choose where to be imprisoned, they would select their home country rather than Japan. Amongst Chinese prisoners, who make up almost half the total number, well over 80% of them hoped for their home prisons. The main reasons given was distance from their families and the differences in language and culture. The Ministry of Justice Correctional Office said that there is a possibility of introducing international prisoner transfers with some of those countries that we cannot currently transfer to.

One could read some sinister undertones into this news item, as a lot of people are wont to do these days, but I shall not. One reason the foreigner prison population is growing is that the foreigner population is also. The exact statistical correlation is difficult to discern, however.

It’s the annual be nice to old folks day today, and the big statistical news is that this year over 20% of Japan’s population is over 65, passing Italy on 19.5%. The issue of the aging population and the lack of children in Japan is littered with interesting facts and figures, so I’ll have to dig out a few references to translate sometime in the near future.

Mixi is one of the most popular invite only Social Networking Service (SNS) in Japan, apparently, like Friendster et al. in the USA. They are not my cup of tea (just like I’m not really into all this blogrolling and incestuous linking here), but obviously other people like them. There was a report from a workshop at the Social Infomatics Fair 2005 at Kyoto University containing some interesting statistics on the social webs that had built up.

In February of this year, the number of users stood at around 360,000. Note it seems to be over a million now. The purpose of the research was to try to identify what sort of network of relationships had built up between users.

“My Mix” (in Japanese it’s pronounced closer to “My Mick”) is the slang term used to indicate the number of direct friends someone has registered; this would be roughly analogous to one’s blogroll in the blogging world.

According to a researcher named Kikuo YUTA from the Network Informatics Laboratories, 50.8% of the users have four or less people in their My Mix; 23.6% have but a solitary soul (perhaps just the person that invited them?) as a friend. On the other hand, the average length of a My Mix is just under 21.

For people with five or more names in their My Mix, the numbers stack up as follows:

5 to 11 friends	17.1%
12 to 25 friends	24.3%
26 to 40 friends	15.4%
41 to 87 friends	20.6%
88 to 197 friends	10.1%
198 to 1301 friends	2.9%

This adds up to 90.4% – what happened to the other 9.6%, you may very well ask. Well, here the story write-up is very vague (or I don’t understand it, of course), but what has happened is that the above table represents the share of the total number of links for each of the population sizes. This is explained further in the next paragraph.

A large minority of the My Mixers were very tightly intertwined, making them hubs for all the human relationships. Those with over 41 people in their My Mix list made up only 4.8% of the population, but accounted for 33.6% of the links. On the other hand, those with less than five in their My Mix (50.9%) had just 9.5% of the links.

Hmm, isn’t this just data simply derived from the population distribution, or is there a deeper meaning I am missing?

Kikuo YUTA also said that the high density of links in mixi was very rare – usually structure develops over time, but here it came into being almost right from the beginning. “It is the first time in the world such a unique structure has been found”, he said.

Maybe I’m missing something, but I would think that anything invitation-based would tend to have the sort of tight structure that they are describing? Being in Japanese limits the scope for spreading into disparate groups, I would think. Japanese just love being unique, however. Reading ahead I see more explanation… The rest of the article talked about other human aspects of the network, and whilst very interesting, is getting away from the main purpose of this blog, polls and surveys, so I’ll not translate. Also, the Japanese was getting rather hard!

With the XBox 360 release date now announced, and the new Revolution controller previewed (and I must say it looks interesting!) more research shows the PS3 still the top must buy for people. It will be interesting to see if the Revolution moves up on the back of its showing at the Tokyo Game Show.
Read the rest of this entry »

This week’s silly survey, once again from Trivia no Izumi, took 100 mongrels and 100 owners, and when they went out for a walk, the owner fell over ill and hoped Lassie would come home and drag someone out to rescue their dying master. Of course, most people brimmed with confidence regarding their dog’s intelligence, but quite unsurprisingly to me, all failed miserably. A few dogs did demostrate concern, I thought, but then again others just took the chance to have a free run-around.

I saw a link to quite a surprising survey (not really a poll, but it’s an interesting statistic nonetheless) about the state of Japanese teeth, in particular children’s teeth.

According to a survey by a Nagoya dentist, in 1997 about 4.9% of children were missing adult teeth completely. However, last year the figure had ballooned to 11.6%, and on average each child was missing one or two adult teeth (excluding any wisdom teeth), with the worst case being missing six, over 20% of them!

The story provides no explanation that I can see for why, but it does seem a worrying statistic!

There’s been a survey of opinions on “Warm Biz“, the new initiative after Cool Biz this summer. Cool Biz was to set air conditioners to 28°C and wear short sleeves and no tie, an initiative supported and strongly promoted by Prime Minister Jun-chan. Warm Biz is basically the opposite, to wear thermal undies and set office thermostats to 20°C for the winter. The company I work for supports Cool Biz in theory, but our air conditioners are not very subtle at all, so if they are on they are using blowing out 24°C or 25°C air, which is rather cold on my bare arms. If they are off, like right now, there is no moving air in the office at all so it gets hopelessly stuffy. Note that with Warm Biz they hope to save almost 2.5 times as much energy as with Cool Biz. However, I discovered that Cool Biz saved just a few percentage points of the forecast amount.

The survey took place on the home page for Club BBQ for 24 hours over the 25th and 26th of August, where there were 2,321 self-selecting respondents, 70.8% male, 29.2% female. The sex balance may seem off, but Warm Biz is mainly aimed at businessmen, I feel, so it is not too much of a problem, at least not compared with it being a self-selecting survey.

First up, 78.0% said they supported Warm Biz. Conversely, only 56.7% said they wanted Cool Biz to continue next year.

Perhaps people find it easier to add another layer than take one off. The number of people I see wearing T-shirts under their shirts is quite amazing – I wonder if this is another example of Japanese folk wisdom?

67.3% of those surveyed had heard of Warm Biz, with this perhaps due to the aftereffects of Cool Biz permeating throughout the population.

With 78.0% saying they support Warm Biz, though, where did the extra 10% or so come from? Perhaps this survey was done after reading an article regarding Warm Biz? Over 90% had heard of Cool Biz, however.

Reasons for supporting it included people advocating it themselves (perhaps their office is usually too hot in winter?) and that it will save money on heating. On the other hand, just like for Cool Biz, the most popular dissenting opinion was it being too difficult to work under these conditions.

Regarding Warm Biz becoming established, only 31.4% agreed. 35.9% discounted Warm Biz as just a reaction from Cool Biz, and 48.7% reckoned that there wouldn’t be much difference from last year, indicating many people think it’s just a passing fad.

Back to Cool Biz, 56.7% thought it has been a success this year, although it is supposed to keep running until the end of September.

Looks like still quite a bit of work to do before the public warms to Warm Biz!