世論 What Japan Thinks

Given that the much shorter http://wjt.com is owned by the WJT Buddhist Ministries (who they?), and even if they were willing to sell the price would be way outside the What Japan Thinks annual budget, I instead decided to invest $4 in the even shorter http://wjt.pw – the pw is supposed to be for Professional Web, but Pretty Worthless would be just as accurate, I suspect. As you may have noticed already, for now it just redirects back here, but I might do something more with it later. If you want your own vanity .pw domain, I can recommend NameCheap most heartily, and not just because the link below contains an affiliate code!

The other matter mentioned in the title, slightly modified content, is to not just stick exclusively to the pie chart/demographics/tables format but do something a bit more chatty. I remember a few years back trying this out, but I chose to do each survey twice, once with the usual format, and once in a more textual format, which seemed more effort than it was worth. Since then, however, a number of the companies I use for surveys have gone bust, merged, or hidden their contents behind member-only walls, and even good old goo Research reports in japan.internet.com now only average one instead of three graphs per article. Furthermore, I have recently discovered a source that collects together a lot of survey-related press release and reports on them in a shorter, more chatty form. A good number of these press releases come from perhaps slightly unreliable sources, but what they lack in rigorousness of method they perhaps make up for in number of participants. For example, web sites with straw polls beside news columns.

Hmm, the above is probably rather unclear; let me post some examples this week, and let me know what you think.

You may have read the news that the Royal Society of London has made available online its archives from the foundation in 1665 to 1881, so naturally I thought I’d see what people thought of Japan all these years ago. The earliest hit was from 1669 (doi: 10.1098/rstl.1669.0027 Phil. Trans. 1 January 1669 vol. 4 no. 45-56 983-986), in an article entitled “Some Observations Concerning Japan, Made by an Ingenious Person, That Hath Many Years Resided in That Country; as they Were Communicated in French by M. I; Whence they are Thus English’d by the Publisher; Who Some Months Agoe Accasion’d This Accompt by Some Queries, Sent to That Traveller“, which may be read online for free here.

The article title comes from this description of the Japanese:

Another article deals with the poison oak tree, the sap of which is used in Japan and China to make lacquer. Page 869 talks about it being known as Sitz-dsju and page 870 as the Fashi-no-ki. Can anyone decode either name into Japanese or Chinese? The current Japanese name is Urushi, but a relative is Rhus succedanea (or Toxicodendron succedaneum), or Hase-no-ki, which looks like a match.

There’s a search engine there, so have fun!

Just a quick note to say that along with most of the rest of Japan I’m on holiday until next Sunday, so posts may be rather intermittent. I’ve got a number of good surveys that need translating, but whether or not I can find the time…

In the meantime, you can catch me on Google Plus where I am reasonably active. Drop me a note if you want an invite.

Thanks,
Ken

I just noticed that Metropolis magazine wholesale cut-and-paste my recent survey on weird service station food, without even a back-link.

If you’re going to translate goo ranking surveys, please do so in your own words or acknowledge the site you are copying from.

I never thought I’d write such a headline, but the news is that Japan’s most popular jailbait vocal group is donating half a billion yen (over 6 million dollars or just under 4 million pounds) towards earthquake relief:

Donate some cash yourself or I’ll post another video of them!

US Red Cross
UK Red Cross
Japan Red Cross

I’m still not quite in the mood for posting, so instead here’s how to donate to the relief effort through the Red Cross:

US Red Cross
UK Red Cross
Japan Red Cross

ANything you can give will be most welcome by those suffering in the north of Japan.

As most of my readers will have heard about the series of huge earthquakes, I thought I’d better post to say that here at What Japan Thinks I’m well out of the danger zone in Kansai, and well away from the coast so no personal worries about tsunami.

I hope all my readers and their families in Japan are safe too. While I prepare my next post, you may like to read a few surveys on earthquakes.

Update: Google have set up a person finder service and other useful links:

http://www.google.co.jp/intl/en/crisisresponse/japanquake2011.html

Although it’s not my holidays until next Wednesday, many of my readers seem to have already gone on holiday, so I’ll be cutting down my posting frequency, working on other projects (there’s two Facebook things I must do) and posting more goo Ranking nonsense for the next two weeks.

Just a quick note for smartphone owners – I’ve added a mobile-friendly low-bandwidth plugin to the site, so if you visit with your mobile browser the site should look much better than before. I went to a mobile phone shop this evening after work and surfed here on a demo Xperia, and I was very pleasantly surprised at how nice it looked!

The plugin is WPtouch.

I’m not sure how this will appear in my RSS feed, so if it doesn’t, please click through and press the Like button, if you’re on Facebook. And if you like WJT, of course!