世論 What Japan Thinks

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.
Read the rest of this entry »

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.
Read the rest of this entry »

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.
Read the rest of this entry »

This slightly broken English in the post title is the catchphrase of not just Osaka’s, but a national promotion to persuade people to view looking after their teeth as a lifelong commitment. I’ve covered teeth in a number of other posts, but the statistical fact I learnt yesterday on a train covered in posters for said campaign was that current 80 year olds (in Osaka only? in the whole of Japan?) only have on average around four teeth left.

The reasons for this poor record are not just as revealed in the earlier surveys, a lack of regular care and maintentance by a professional, but also a large number of dentists who would often rather just yank a tooth instead of repairing it. There’s also more than a fair share of incompetent dentists, of course, but fortunately mine doesn’t fall into either category.

Just a quick report tonight from Nielson//NetRatings Japan on internet usage from home computers (not mobile phones) for the month of May 2006. First the graph for time spent on the top six sites.

This 16.3% for Yahoo! Japan represents about 125,000,000 hours, or an average of around 168,000 simultaneous users. However, when looking at time spent per user who visited each site, for mixi it was 4 hours and 28 minutes per person, over an hour longer per person than for Yahoo! Japan. In total, 42,400,000 people accessed the internet from home during May, with an average time spent online per person of 18 hours and two minutes.
Read the rest of this entry »

Watching Trivia no Izumi tonight, I saw this rather entertaining optical illusion, assuming your browser chooses a suitable Japanese font:

杏マナー杏マナー杏マナー杏マナー杏マナー杏マナー杏マナー杏マナー杏マナー杏マナー杏マナー杏マナー杏マナー杏マナー杏マナー杏マナー杏マナー杏マナー杏マナー杏マナー杏マナー杏マナー杏マナー杏マナー杏マナー杏マナー杏マナー杏マナー杏マナー杏マナー杏マナー杏マナー杏マナー杏マナー杏マナー杏マナー杏マナー

Or going uphill:

ーナマ杏ーナマ杏ーナマ杏ーナマ杏ーナマ杏ーナマ杏ーナマ杏ーナマ杏ーナマ杏ーナマ杏ーナマ杏ーナマ杏ーナマ杏ーナマ杏ーナマ杏ーナマ杏ーナマ杏ーナマ杏ーナマ杏ーナマ杏ーナマ杏ーナマ杏ーナマ杏ーナマ杏ーナマ杏ーナマ杏ーナマ杏ーナマ杏ーナマ杏ーナマ杏ーナマ杏ーナマ杏ーナマ杏ーナマ杏ーナマ杏ーナマ杏ーナマ杏

In further trivia news, by harnessing the power of 200 standard fire extinquishers, you can generate enough upthrust to lift a man a whole two centimetres.

The Japanese Government’s Statistical Bureau recently released statistics on what I think is the biggest problem that will face Japan in the coming year, namely the decline in the number of births, which coupled with the aging population, is going to put an enormous strain on Japan’s finances in the years to come.

This year too (measured on the first of April) the number of children aged under 15 hit another record low, a 25 year unbroken decline in the birth rate. The headline figures are 17,470,000 children under 15 years old, representing 13.7% of the population, down 0.1 percentage points from last year. There also seems to be an imbalance in the sex distribution, with 105.3 boys for every 100 girls. The reason for this may be worth investigating.
Read the rest of this entry »