世論 What Japan Thinks

I just read an article on IT Media about music sales figures for 2007, published by the RIAJ, the Recording Industry Ass. of Japan.

The total units sold (CD, DVD, VHS, vinyl, etc) for the year were down 8% compared to last year at 318.66 million disks, with revenue down 4% to 391.1 billion yen (over 3.5 billion US dollars), making an average price per disk (or tape, etc) of 1,227 yen, or just over 11 US dollars. Note that this includes both singles and albums. Why the average earnings per disk increased by 4% is not discussed.

Sales of audio-only recordings were down 10% to 266.82 million disks, with a 5% revenue drop to 333.3 billion yen. From that total CD sales were down 10% to 260.34 million disks (representing 97.5% of all sales) and revenue down 5% to 327.2 billion yen. Album sales dropped 11% to 198.65 million disks with revenue down 5% to 280.2 billion yen, making an average price per disk of 1,410 yen or almost US$13 per disk. The biggest loser was Western music, which saw a drop of 23% in unit sales, representing a 17% revenue cut.

On the other hand, music videos were up 6% to 51.85 million disks or tapes with revenue up only 2% to 57.8 billion yen, representing about a 4% drop in price per unit. From that figure, almost all the sales were of DVDs, up 6% to 51.53 million disks with revenue up 3% to 57.4 billion yen.

The sales figures for pay downloads are scheduled to be released towards the end of February.

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Following up a lead I saw on a post on SEO Book, I downloaded a list of the top one million web sites by traffic. With a quick search for the key phrases “japan”, “nippon”, “nihon” and “tokyo” and a sort, I condensed the 600 or more hits down to the short list below of the top twenty most visited Japan-related domain names. Note that the vast majority of the sites were actually pr0n-related, so I deleted them (and one dodgy search engine spam site) and thus present the edited top twenty. The full data is from Quantcast. FAQs about the data, and an interesting search feature, can be found here. Oh, and I’m at position 225,812, just in case you’re wondering.

UPDATE: I just had a trackback from The Otaku, and I see that site should be in the table at position number four. If there’s anyone else I’ve missed, please give me shout!

UPDATE 2: I forgot Danny Choo too! In he goes at number 9, although quite frankly he barely passes my pr0n filter.

UPDATE 3: And 3yen and metropolis.co.jp! Sorry guys!

UPDATE 4: And JREF comes in at number 12.

UPDATE 5: Thanks to a post on Japanator, I’ve revisited the list, and found many (too many?) extra sites, all manga and anime-related.
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ITmedia News recently reported on some research by Video Research Interactive into where F1 women (F1 just seems to be the marketing code-word for the women between the ages of 20 to 34) spend their time on the internet. There were two sets of figures recorded; one on which sites had the biggest percentage of F1 women, and which sites had the largest absolute numbers of F1 visitors. The data was collected over an unstated period, but I suspect it was for all of 2006.

It’s perhaps interesting to note that mixi has a significantly high number of young women users. I’m also rather surprised to see Geocities as the seventh overall most popular site in Japan. I thought the US version, at least, was basically dead.
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Just in case you missed their podcast, I’d just like to remind you of another great post by the guys at TPR. This one looks at the facts and myths regarding suicide in Japan, and reveals, to my surprise, that Japan is not an outlier in the worldwide figures. I strongly recommend you pay them a visit, and if you haven’t already, please listen to the content in the archives; I’m not a podcast fan at all, in fact these guys are the only people I listen to, and I always try to catch every episode they do.

Just a quick pointer to an article they posted there on various statistics regarding marriage in Japan.

NOTE: Click here for the Kanji of the Year 2007 results.

The results for the Kanji of the Year 2006 are finally released. Although perhaps much of the English language Japanese press has already covered the top three (I thought the results were released today, not yesterday!), this blog entry will cover the top 20 in full, plus language notes as the survey is sponsored by the 漢字検定, kanji kentei, a kanji training and testing company. I’ll also add my views on each kanji.

There were 92,509 total votes submitted from the start of November to the start of December; 4,534 were sumbitted on postcards, 408 by fax, 36,936 through a web page, 15,968 through vote collection boxes located in 111 places nationwide, and 34,663 total votes through 451 groups, presumably schools or other educational or cultural groups.

One big theme for the year was “life”, which heavily influenced the voting. First, a key story of this year was the birth of a male in the royal lineage, the first in forty years, and now second in line to the throne, Hisahito, the offspring of Prince Akishino and Princess Kiko and, I suspect, some medical wizardry. Next, bullying caused many schoolchildren to commit suicide, and drunk drivers also took many lives. From a statistical viewpoint, I have yet to see the raw data, so I cannot be sure if there has actually been an increase in either of these two death rates, or if it is just an increase in reporting.

Other life-related news story were Kim Il-Jong’s nukes, old folks’ increased medical costs, problems with transplanting dodgy organs, doctor shortages, and so on.

Talking of the Kanji Kentei, if you’re wanting to study for it, there is new software out for the Nintendo DS that covers the syllabus for all 12 kanji levels, from total novice to 6,000 character wizards.
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The BBC just recently published a set of interesting statistics on British abroad and foreigners in Britian. Relevant to this blog are the number of British in Japan - about 23,000 - and the number of Japanese in Britain, 37,293 according to the 2001 census. This figure includes naturalised Japanese, however.

goo Ranking recently published the results of the top 100 search keywords used through their search engine for the first 10 months of this year from January 1st to October 31st. The top word, either individually or extracted from multi-word searches, got 100 points, and the rest of the words got a percentage rating for their frequency. I presume that the adult keywords have been filtered out.

There’s perhaps some interesting analysis that can be done of this data, but I’ll leave that for someone else to tackle! Links have been added to some of the search terms.
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In yesterday’s Seikyo Shimbun as part of an introduction to Warm Biz there was a chart of electricity usage in the average Japanese home, derived from data by JCCCA, Japan Centre for Climate Change Action, and their Low-Energy Home Electrics Fact Sheet.

Device	Percentage
Air conditioning	24.9%
Lighting	16.2%
Refrigerator	15.5%
Television	9.9%
Electric carpet	4.4%
Electric toilet seat	4.1%
Clothes drier	2.9%
Dishwasher and drier	1.7%
Other	20.3%

Lighting seems very high to me, and you’ll perhaps notice that washing machines is not noted: in Japan, most washers use cold, not hot water, so they need no heating element for water.

goo Ranking recently published statistics of the number of outbound links from blogs it manages under the http://blog.goo.ne.jp brand.

This being raw statistics, there’s no sample size, and note that some of the links might be to more than one page within a site, not just the top page.
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