世論 What Japan Thinks

[part 1] [part 2] [part 3]

The Cabinet Office of Japan (Gender Equality Bureau) recently published a survey it carried out on violence between males and females. This opinion poll was conducted by post, with 2,888 respondents, 1,578 or 54.6% female, out of 4,500 people initially randomly selected for participation.

This is a very large survey, so I will publish it in three parts.
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[part 1] [part 2] [part 3]

The Cabinet Office of Japan (Gender Equality Bureau) recently published a survey it carried out on violence between males and females. This opinion poll was conducted by post, with 2,888 respondents, 1,578 or 54.6% female, out of 4,500 people initially randomly selected for participation.

This is a very large survey, so I will publish it in three parts.

This is a survey I really don’t want to translate as the figures are rather depressing, but I shall endeavour to make as good a translation as possible as this data is an important record of one aspect of the state of Japanese society. This first part paints quite a bleak picture, especially if you consider that there might be an element of under-reporting. Looking at the raesons why people didn’t discuss their injuries, societal pressure looks quite large as a factor. Domestic violence is, I fear, not a subject that is discussed honestly and openly; in fact, the most recent time I heard about it was in relation to Kaoru Sugita last year, where she was almost boasting about getting drunk and beating up her husband.
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Following my recent article on the Japanese view of April Fools (which, incidentally, has had rather a lot of hits mainly due to people reading the title as being about a certain Ms April fooling around in Japan), I discovered a survey reported by japan.internet.com, performed in conjuction with JR Tokai Express Research, on what people thought about April Fools. They interviewed 331 people in public or private employment by means of an internet questionnaire. The group was 81.6% male, and the participants were 15.7% in their twenties, 39.9% in their thirties, 36.9% in their forties, 6.9% in their fifties, and just 0.6% aged sixty or older.

Apparently there is an organisation called JIAFA, or the Japan Internet April Fool Association, that has, well, I haven’t read it yet, so I don’t know!

This article finished with a wee opinion bit that said that the reason for the decrease may be either just a loss of interest, or that since news spreads like wildfire on the internet, publishing even just one wee white lie may be becoming dangerous.
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With Mother’s Day fast approaching – 14th of May this year – japan.internet.com, in conjunction with JR Tokai Express Research, performed a timely investigation of what people thought about Mother’s Day presents. They surveyed 331 public and private company employees, 81.9% male, by means of an internet questionnaire. The age breakdown was 13.3% in their twenties, 42.3% in their thirties, 37.2% in their forties, 6.9% in their fifties, and just 0.3%, or one person, aged 60 or older. Everybody in the survey had a living mother, apparently, or if not they passed a present to their spouse’s mother or some other maternal figure.

Personally, I’ve only the once ever sent my mother a present, as she doesn’t believe in all the stupid commercialisation of it. That present was in fact a prize I won in a competition in a supermarket!
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I saw on CrissCross News (ex Japan Today) an article on a survey regarding Japanese and April Fools. Basically, it doesn’t seem very popular, with just 20% expressing a positive view of it. Almost two fifth of those who expressed a negative opinion said that their reason for disliking it was because “this kind of thing is difficult to understand in Japan” versus, for example, less a fifth taking the “bah, humbug” option. This “ware ware nihonjin” attitude (see section 9) is one of my pet annoyances in Japan! However, the main anecdote in the story:

“The driver of the bus I was riding announced there was a bomb on board. After everybody disembarked in a big panic, he exclaimed, ‘April Fool! Now wasn’t that fun?’ And all of the other passengers laughed!”

smells a bit fishy to me, and not of the Poisson D’Avril type.

In addition, Mari’s Diary also covered a few April Fools (and non-Fool) news items.

Dentsu Inc recently carried out a survey (their “Trendbox Research”, to use the brand name) to find out what people thought about their brains. At the start of January they interviewed 400 people from up and down the country. Exactly half and half of the respondents were male and female, and 100 people were in each decade of life from the twenties to the fifties.

Brain training is rather a hot topic in Japan today; products on sale range from books of simple arithmetic or simple kanji to read out loud, to the Nintendo DS Brain Training game series, to which I actually contributed a very, very small part!

Oh, and here’s a bit of brain training I learnt about on TV a couple of weekends ago for getting rid of some chronic fatigue. The idea is that you need to stimulate your frontal lobes before going to bed, as increased activity there results in more cortisone and serotonin, which gets your body recharged quicker, or something like that. So, in addition to taking in sufficient B complex vitamins and calcium, before you go to sleep press your temples as you slowely breath out, then release as you breath in. Repeat ten times, then just before you sleep picture someone’s face – it works best if it is someone you dislike, apparently, but make sure you don’t dislike them too much and stress yourself out!
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NTT DoCoMo recently published an interesting survey they performed to find out what people thought about mobile phone credit cards. They interviewed 1,800 people from all over Japan in February by means of a web-based questionnaire. The sample was exactly 50:50 male and female, and 150 people of each sex from each decade of life, from the teens to the sixties, responded. Note that the teens consisted only of 18 and 19 year olds, though.

First, mobile phone credit cards are just what the term implies – they are mobile phones with a credit card’s contactless RFID chip embedded within them, so instead of your traditional bit of plastic, your mobile phone now becomes the device with which you Chip and Pin.

Note that currently credit cards are not as widely used in Japan as they might be in Europe and the USA. In addition, most shops and restaurants that are part of a chain will accept credit cards (although one of my local supermarkets doesn’t), but independent shops on the whole do not accept them. Note the answers to Q5, where over four in five use their credit card once a week or less, and the perhaps slightly loaded answers in Q7 (there is no indication if the question allowed a free answer or just a selection from a list, with perhaps lower-scoring answers omitted from the results) suggesting that plastic is preferred for luxuries or large purchases.

Overall, I think that this survey suggests that people will see mobile credit cards as an extension of the current mobile wallets, so they will treat them as something to use everyday for even the smallest transactions. From the provider’s point of view, small transactions still have a fixed basic fee associated with them, so charging a bottle of cold tea to your phone’s credit card could cost the retailer up half the retail price in transaction fees. How shop owners can cope with this new threat to their profit margins remains to be seen, and would in fact make a good theme for a future survey.
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[part 1] [part 2]

The Cabinet Office of Japan conducted a survey back in November and December of 2004 to discover what people thought about gender roles in society. Although slightly old, this survey, performed by proper statistical means, should have a high degree of accuracy. They chose 5,000 people for face-to-face interviews, with 3,502 of them consenting to be surveyed.

This is a rather sizeable survey, so the results will be published over two days.

This second half contains a number of rather interesting figures, showing that women seem to be accepting of their fate as housewives.

This was a rather difficult translation job – most of the other surveys just have short and snappy questions and answer options; here there were a few rather tricky sentences that I may have made a mistake or two with…
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[part 1] [part 2]

The Cabinet Office of Japan conducted a survey back in November and December of 2004 to discover what people thought about gender roles in society. Although slightly old, this survey, performed by proper statistical means, should have a high degree of accuracy. They chose 5,000 people for face-to-face interviews, with 3,502 of them consenting to be surveyed.

This is a rather sizeable survey, so the results will be published over two days.

It would be instructive to compare and contrast the results here with a previous report I translated on how women perceive their own roles in the workplace.

Notice that in Q3 the most important thing Japanese think should be does is to change society’s perception, rather than perhaps any legal measures. This option, I suppose, does not force men to change, and thinking back to the previous equal opportunity survey, women are perhaps acknowledging that the equal opportunities laws have not changed anything, so it must be attitudes that should be changed in order for them to see any significant benefit.
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[part 1] [part 2] [part 3]

I see that I attracted a few readers in a LiveJournal kimono forum, so rather than creating a LiveJournal account to reply privately to their questions, I’ll post an update here with some more detailed statistics from the same report that I translated earlier this week.

One other question they had was from the final question about the kimono’s image, as to what “Japaneseness” was. This was my translation of 日本人らしい, nihonjinrashii, which translates more literally to “looking like a Japanese person”.

On a personal note, getting picked up by these kimono wearers (as it were) is the sort of thing that makes me feel all this blogging is worthwhile. I’ve learnt about western kimono fans and they’ve learnt a bit more about how the Japanese view what is their hobby. If there are any readers out there with a pet subject that they’d like to hear more about, please don’t hesitate to ask me and I’ll see what I can find. I’m fascinated by Japanese bowel movements (yes, honestly, but not in that way) or the lack thereof, but I’m yet to find a good survey regarding it.
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