世論 What Japan Thinks

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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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)

Recently, IT Media published a list from Yahoo! Japan of the top search keywords through Yahoo!’s search engine, grouped into various categories. Below are a few of the categories, where I presume the more adult search terms have been removed! First, the top overall keywords.
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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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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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Central Research Services, Inc published a report two months ago regarding leisure activities. The format of their report differs from the usual survey results that I translate as first, they scale the figures up to reflect the whole population (the current population of Japan is somewhere around 127 million), and second, they present the data within a coherent narrative rather than just the usual data dump, so the amount of data available is rather limited. It does say, however, that they interviewed 3,000 people aged 15 and over at some point to get their data. The main data worth presenting is the ranking of participation in various activities, based on how many people from the survey group performed each activity at least once in 2004, so although the lottery, for instance, is high on the list, each participant only spends a couple of minutes per week (or even per year, as the end of year big draw is very, very popular), so if the table was sorted by the actual hours spent, it would look very, very different.

Eating out	72,400,000
Travel within Japan	60,800,000
Driving (or being driven)	55,100,000
Karaoke	49,200,000
Watching videos	48,700,000
Doing the lottery	45,900,000
Personal computing (games, etc)	44,300,000
Cinema	43,900,000
Listening to music	42,400,000
Visiting gardens, museums, zoos	40,600,000
Gardening	37,500,000
Bars, pubs, and other drinking establishments	37,300,000
Bowling	32,000,000
Amusement parks	31,900,000
Physical exercise	30,700,000
Picnic, hiking, hill walking	30,600,000
Board or card games	30,300,000
Console games	30,100,000
Jogging, marathon	26,200,000
Concerts, live music	25,600,000