世論 What Japan Thinks

iShare recently conducted a rather interesting survey into email addresses on CVs (résumés), which produced the rather suprising result that email addresses were not that popular.

Demographics

Between the 19th and 22nd of January 2010 497 members of the CLUB BBQ free email forwarding service completed a private internet-based questionnaire. 58.8% of the sample were male, 33.2% in their twenties, 30.4% in their thirties, and 36.4% in their forties.

In Q1SQ3, the type of free provider used makes a different; I would give bonus points to someone using Gmail, for instance, but a Hotmail or AOL address would be immediately round-filed!
Read the rest of this entry »

The winners of the 2010 New Year Postcard lottery for the Year of the Tiger have been announced, and the winning numbers and prizes are as follows. The number to check is the six digit number at the bottom right of the card. Note that some cards do not actually have numbers, which means they are not eligible…

First prize: 975424

Choose any one from a 32 inch Sharp Aquos LCD televison, a JTB holiday, either three nights in Hawaii or Hong Kong, 2 nights in Korea, or one night in one of 58 domestic hot springs resorts, Toshiba dynabook EX notebook plus Casio EXILIM EX-Z450GD digital camera plus Canon PIXUS MP560 printer, Canon iVIS HF21 video camera, or 200,000 yen’s worth of office furniture from an ASKUL catalogue.

Second prize: 630838, 446722, or 259668

Choose any one from a Nintendo Wii plus Wii Sports Resort, Canon XY DIGITAL 220 IS digital camera, Toshia portable DVD player SD-P73DTW, Sharp Plamsa Cluster air purifier KC-Y45-W, or 30 kilogrammes of rice.

Third prize: last four digits 0977

Choose any one food item from 38 different ones on offer, from a tea blend for the Imperial Hotel to canned crab soup.

Fourth prize: last two digits 52 or 00

Otoshidama stamp set - a fifty yen and an eighty yen stamp, pictured above.

C Gumi Special prize: 27520

50,000 yen’s worth of JTB holiday vouchers. The “C Gumi” is apparently something to do with carbon offest New Year Postcards.

If you have matched any of these, go to your nearest post office before the 26th of July 2010 and either collect the stamps while you wait, or apply for any of the bigger prizes. The full prize line-up can be seen here. I’ve just checked mine and I’ve won two sheets of the stamps above.

If you’ve got a heap of New Year postcards, don’t throw them away - there’s not just the lottery with the results due to be announced on the 24th of January, but if you go to a nearby Toho Cinema with a New Year postcard with the last digit of the six-digit number in the bottom-right corner equal to either “1″ or “4″, you can see almost any movie for 1,000 yen, but there is an extra 300 yen surcharge for 3D. The campaign starts on Saturday the 9th of January and ends on the 28th of February. They’ll stamp your postcard then return it to you to prevent you using it twice.

Oh, and I love Toho’s manners video:

With the busiest season for home printers upon us, this survey from goo Research and reported on by japan.internet.com into home printers has some interesting figures about what people are doing with their printers.

Demographics

Between the 2nd and 7th of December 2009 1,052 members of the goo Research monitor group completed a private internet-based questionnaire. 52.9% of the sample were male, 16.5% in their teens, 18.2% in their twenties, 21.1% in their thirties, 16.3% in their forties, 15.6% in their fifties, and 12.3% aged sixty or older.

I’ve set this translation up in my publishing queue as instead of working on my blog tonight I too am printing out my nengajo New Year postcard addresses for the coming Year of the Tiger on my five year old Canon.
Read the rest of this entry »

It’s that time of year for the annual grab bag of cellphone straps and charms and other tat high-quality merchandise from Strapya:

Liven up your keitai life with a New Year gift or ten with a 78% saving on retail price, and help out What Japan Thinks at the same time, as I get a cut of every sale.

To the left you can see the Japanese National Anthem, Kimi Ga Yo, as you’ve never seen it before, and probably never want to see it again! I decided to translate in into emoji, using two English translations as the base.

Version 1 is:

May your reign
Continue for a thousand, eight thousand generations,
Until the pebbles
Grow into boulders
Lush with moss

Version 2 is:

May the reign of the Emperor
continue for a thousand, nay, eight thousand generations
and for the eternity that it takes
for small pebbles to grow into a great rock
and become covered with moss.

Note that I cheated slightly by using one standard character, and I used the docomo emoji set, displayed in Gmail. The boulders are a bit naff, and due to the lack of a chrysanthemum I chose Japan’s other national flower, a sakura (cherry) petal.

Why, you may ask. Well, because of the project below that I am in my own small way helping to fund, the translation of Moby Dick into iPhone emoji:

Hurry, there’s only a few days left and still a lot of money to raise to get this project going! Oh, and just in case I get any Japanese people looking for this, 絵文字君が代.

Here’s something quite strange and a bit off-topic, but given my love for emoji and Japanese emoticons in general, I thought I’d post about it.

There seems to be a project starting up to translate Moby Dick into Japanese email icons, or emoji.

I don’t really think I can say much more, except that I’ve pledged $10, and please visit the site yourself!

Following on from when I commented on my own experiences in yesterday’s survey into mobile phones versus alarm clocks, as promised (threatened?), I uploaded a look at my two alarm clocks:

Please take the time to vote below…

Although there are just 371 or so confirmed cases of the “new-type” flu, as it’s officially-labelled in Japan, a look by iBridge Research Plus at swine flu and other spam email and reported on by japan.internet.com found that within their sample swine flu-related electronic viruses were also infectious.

Demographics

On the 25th of May 2009 300 members of the iBridge monitor group completed a private internet-based questionnaire. 54.3% of the sample were male, 19.7% in their twenties, 36.7% in their thirties, 28.7% in their forties, 14.3% in their fifties, and 0.7% in their sixties.

I’m not sure why this survey used “swine flu” in all their questions whereas, as mentioned above, “new-type flu” is the almost universal name.

I’d love to know how 2% of the population managed to avoid hearing any news about swine flu!

I’ve not seen any swine flu virus spam, but in a couple of weeks I’ll be heading off to right by the Mexican border, so I might be able to experience it first-hand!

Read the rest of this entry »

Looking around the web, about a year ago there was an earlier version of the Buddha Phone released, but now it’s been powered up to be a portable shrine ready to accept your prayers 24 hours a day. At first sight the phone is rather unspectacular:

You might notice the lotus symbol at the top right of the keyboard, the first hint that things may not quite be what they seem.
Read the rest of this entry »