世論 What Japan Thinks

Just a quick pair of statistics for today, taken from the article by japan.internet.com on the SmartPhone Contents Report Vol.04 by Video Research Interactive.

Demographics

Between the 8th and 12th of February 2013 21,789 internet users completed an internet-based questionnaire. For the final report, the data obtained from the survey was weighted according to Ministry of Internal Affairs and Communications statistics on internet users in 2011.

Sadly, my employer does not make it into either of the lists…
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Just a quick statistic today, a look at an investigation by Video Research Interactive (VRI) into web sites visited by the F2 demographic, namely women aged between 35 and 49 years old.

Statistics gathering methodology

Taking the 200 most popular Japanese web domains in November 2012 as a base, VRI used their own particular methodology to determine the percentage of visits that came from the F2 demographic between the 1st and 30th of Novermber 2012. It is not noted whether the counts included smartphones and mobile phones along with PCs.

Note that over all 200 domains, the F2 demographic made up 15.7% of all visitors.

In lieu of a picture, here’s an ad for Belle Maison:

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Today I present a statistic rather than a survey for a change, a look by Biglobe’s Twipple service at the top-trending Twitter keywords (not hashtags) for September 2012, as reported by japan.internet.com.

About 1.384 billion Tweets were generated in Japan in September 2012, and these formed the data from which the following top ten was generated. It is also noted that “typhoon” racked up 57.15 million tweets on its peak day, whereas the second-placed “iPhone 5″ managed just 6 million at its peak.
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japan.internet.com recently reported a survey by the US company comScore into the domestic mobile marketplace.

Demographics

Between April and June of 2012 4,000 mobile phone or smartphone users aged 13 or above completed a survey, but information on how the sample was generated, more detailed demographics, etc was omitted. Furthermore, the data has been post-processed, I think, to reflect the overall demographics of Japan, so the numbers below can be treated as statistics rather than survey results.

Note that in Japan around 102,700,000 people aged 13 or above have mobile devices.

If we further note that 23.5% of the population own smartphones and Apple is 32.3% of that, in S1 that would put Apple at 7.6%, just behind Sony. Unfortunately, we cannot do a similar simple calculation to estimate Samsung’s market share in Japan.
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I recently got this interesting set of statistics on home appliance market share, from a survey conducted by GfK Marketing Service Japan. The data was collected from a database called ACSISS-E that is updated daily based on sales in a representative sample of Japanese electrical superstores.

The report named the top three brands in each of 22 categories of home appliance. I will try to find their data on audio-visual equipment, mobile phones, etc to report on later in the week.

Note that according to a survey last month, electrical superstores are probably the most popular place to shop for electrical items, not the internet as one might think.

Also note that most of the brands below are premium ones; Zojirushi are about middle of the road, and Tiger are cheap. Panasonic have the best showing, but they are usually close to the most expensive in each category.
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Central Research Services Inc recently published a survey looking at victims of crime, etc in Japan, and comparing it with similar surveys from Europe.

Demographics

In 2011 2,000 people over the age of 15 were randomly selected from resident registers to take part in the survey. At the end of May all bar those from two sampling points in Tohoku that were affected by the earthquake were interviewed face-to-face, and the remaining people were interviewed at the end of July. In total 1,251 responded to the questionnaire, with 50.5% of the sample female and 49.5% male. The age breakdown was not given.

These are really very surprising figures for me! I didn’t expect Japan to be so low on police legitimacy, for one thing. Recently there has been a spate of reports of police uselessness when responding to crimes, miscarriages of justice, etc which would have influenced public distrust of the overall criminal justice system, but questions on direct interactions with the system would suggest that even the average bobby on the beat is a bit bent.

Note that the European data was taken from European Social Survey, 2009, “Trust in Justice: European Social Survey”.
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With today being a public holiday for the annual Coming of Age Day, where everyone who had their 20th birthday in the last calendar year gets tarted up in their best togs and get together in their local town hall to listen to boring speechs. However, although they statatistically became adults in the previous year, goo Ranking took a look at when people felt they truly reached adulthood.

Demographics

Over the 25th and 26th of November 2011 1,074 members of the goo Research online monitor group completed a private internet-based questionnaire. 57.4% of the sample were female, 11.6% in their teens, 14.7% in their twenties, 26.9% in their thirties, 25.0% in their forties, 11.1% in their fifties, and 10.7% aged sixty or older. Note that the score in the results refers to the relative number of votes for each option, not a percentage of the total sample.

Here’s some new adults with a random dude:

And here’s a local mayor trying to get hip with the kids:

For my part, I felt I became an adult when I moved out of university dorms and started flat sharing, which incidentally was just round about my 20th birthday. Note that this doesn’t feature in the list below – for some reason flat-sharing is not popular at all in Japan.
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A couple of weeks ago I published a translation of a survey into Toho Cinema’s proposed 300 yen cut to a standard admission ticket, but since then I came across a Japanese-language article telling me why it is a portent of things to come.

First, the article listed historical prices for cinema tickets, calling it cartel pricing. However, there was no adjustment for inflation, but I found a site with historical CPI data, so I’ll use January 2011 as a base.

I think that table is saying that the correction to 1,500 yen makes prices cheaper than what they were in 1970. If the price remains at 1,800 yen, the 1970 price adjusted for inflation is 576 yen, which means that current prices are within 4% of what they were in 1970 allowing for CPI; this actually destroys the author’s argument about how prices have risen drastically since 1970. However, let’s move onto the other points.

Currently, although 1,800 yen is the standard price, one day a week is Ladies’ Day, where women get in for 1,000 yen. Furthermore, over 60s get in for the same discounted price, but Toho Cinemas are talking about getting rid of Ladies’ Day and limiting the OAP discount to the over 65s. The reason for this is that at the moment over 60% of tickets sold are at 1,000 yen, just one-tenth are at the full price, and another tenth at 1,500 yen, so if this goes through it will mean eight times as many people paying more than paying less!

The final statistic provided is that in 2004 the average ticket price was around 1,200 yen, but by last year it had dropped to under 1,100 yen, according to unnamed sources in the cinema business. Although there seems to be a bit of a slippery-slope argument here, it is iinteresting food for thought!

Rather than just another survey on consumer interests, here’s something a bit different, a look at recent trends in smoking and drinking rates amongst Japanese schoolchildren. The multiple surveys were conducted and analysed by Central Research Services.

Demographics

I only have concrete demographics for the 1996 and 2000 surveys; both surveys asked students at about 70 to 90 junior and senior high schools, getting over 100,000 replies both times, representing over 60% of the students enrolled in each institution.

The remarkable drop in smoking and drinking rates is quite surprising, and I must admit to being a bit skeptical about the results on first reading. However, the survey report referenced a paper entitled Decrease in the prevalence of smoking among Japanese adolescents and its possible causes: periodic nationwide cross-sectional surveys (English) that tried to explain the huge drop. Their conculsion is as stunning as the statistics themselves – more schoolchildren have no friends, thus no peer pressure to indulge in such underage vices.

Photo from Don’t fry leeks,please on flickr.
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Yahoo! JAPAN recently annouced the results of a number of their “Best of 2008″, and one of the categories was the most clicked-through headline from Yahoo! News. The data was collected from all headlines displayed through Yahoo! NEWS between the 1st of November 2007 and 31st of October 2008.

You’ll notice that all of them are basically domestic stories, and most of the topics are either (or both) entertainment or death-related. You will note that nothing about politics, such as the minor matter of a change in prime ministers appears in the list, but in Japan’s defense I wonder if because these topics might have multiple reports, the clicks per story get diluted.

Click-through each link to find some English reporting on the story.
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