世論 What Japan Thinks

mixi is Japan’s answer to MySpace or Facebook, owning a huge percentage of the Japanese SNS market. This recent survey from goo Ranking looked at what both women and men found great about the service.

Demographics

Between the 23rd and 26th of October 2009 1,162 members of the goo Research monitor group completed a private internet-based questionnaire. 62.9% of the sample were female, 10.5% in their teens, 20.7% in their twenties, 30.8% in their thirties, 21.9% in their forties, 9.0% in their fifties, and 7.0% aged sixty or older.

I’m not a member of mixi, and not really active in any other social media, so I cannot talk about the charms myself.
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The first of today’s goo Rankings is on what prideful talk from your friends turns you off completely, for both men getting bored and women getting bored.

Demographics

Between the 23rd and 26th of October 2009 1,162 members of the goo Research monitor group completed a private internet-based questionnaire. 62.9% of the sample were female, 10.5% in their teens, 20.7% in their twenties, 30.8% in their thirties, 21.9% in their forties, 9.0% in their fifties, and 7.0% aged sixty or older.

Looking at the lists below, one must suspect that there more than a hint of a tinge of jealousy in the things people are saying they are bored by!
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With most mobile phones these days coming in at over 50,000 yen – interestingly, for docomo at least, most of their smartphone range is well under half the price of the feature phones – it surely must be scaring a lot of people off upgrading. This recent survey from Marsh Inc and reported on by japan.internet.com into mobile phone price and usage fees revealed such a trend.

Demographics

Between the 26th and 29th of November 2009 300 members of the Marsh monitor group completed a private internet-based questionnaire. The sample was 50:50 male and female, 2.7% in their teens, 17.3% in their twenties, 20.0% in their thirties, 20.0% in their forties, 20.0% in their fifties, and 20.0% aged sixty or older.

Looking at docomo’s range (I am a docomo user), it seems to be anything that supports docomo’s walled garden iMode service gets a price tag of around 60,000 yen, but the smartphones which don’t are between 15,000 and 30,000 yen. The only exception seems to be LG devices; they have recently been trying to break into the Japanese market and are embracing the Japanese standards of decomail and emoji feature phones, but in order to get over the psychological hurdle of not being Japanese, they are using price as a weapon.

In addition, I work for a mobile phone manufacturer, and even though the company sells their own products in the on-site shops, even with staff discounts we are still being asked to pay 45,000 yen for even the year-old phones, and for that womderful discount are expected to migrate our address books from one device to another all by ourselves.
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With tickets having gone on sale last week, with the usual flock of idiots punters buying tickets by the metre, let’s have a look with Macromill Inc at the 2009 Year-end Jumbo Lottery.

Demographics

Over the 10th and 11th of November 2009 1,000 members of the Macromill monitor group completed a private internet-based questionnaire. The sample was exactly 50:50 male and female, and 25.0% in their twenties, 25.0% in their thirties, 25.0% in their forties, and 25.0% aged fifty or older.

Having a superstition for buying the tickets at a shop that sells a lot of them is utterly pointless, as they sell a lot of winners because a lot of people buy! I’d love to see official statistics showing that the ratio of winners to sales is similar regardless of volume, rather than that star signs nonsense from the link above.

In Q7SQ5, I’m sure I heard somewhere why people put tickets in the fridge, but I cannot for the life of me remember what it was! Can anyone help me out?
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[part 1][part 2]

With tickets having gone on sale last week, with the usual flock of idiots punters buying tickets by the metre, let’s have a look with Macromill Inc at the 2009 Year-end Jumbo Lottery.

Demographics

Over the 10th and 11th of November 2009 1,000 members of the Macromill monitor group completed a private internet-based questionnaire. The sample was exactly 50:50 male and female, and 25.0% in their twenties, 25.0% in their thirties, 25.0% in their forties, and 25.0% aged fifty or older.

Note that the Japanese Year-end Jumbo Lottery, and all the other major lotteries would be more accurately called raffles. There are a limited number of tickets on sale, and the draw ensures that only a certain number of winners come out, and for whatever reason they have decided that making 210 jackpots between 100 and 300 million yen is better than twenty or so yen billionaires.

In Q6, buying on average 22 tickets per person is quite stunning!
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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.

Probably my favourite data provider, MyVoice, have recently changed their web site to require free registration for access to the full data from their monthly reports. My requirements for selecting what to translate for What Japan Thinks is to only choose freely-viewable pages, so sadly I have to drop them off my roster. By requiring registration to read the full results they are obviously wishing to expand their email lists, so by translating the whole thing on my site I could be judged to be interfering with their business practices. I hope you understand.

Talking of MyVoice, one survey from last month that I wanted to translate on biscuits and cookies was previously summarised by Mari of Watashi to Tokyo.

Oh, and you may have noticed that I have recently upped the translation pace to basically two per day – my new netbook is just right for a quick translation on the train home. I’d welcome comments on that, and on the new comments format with Gravatars and nesting.

With the busiest season for home printers coming up, namely the creation of New Year cards, it is quite timely that goo Research, as reported on by japan.internet.com, looked at printers at home.

Demographics

Between the 18th and 20th of November 2009 1,093 members of the goo Research online monitor group completed a private internet-based questionnaire. 52.9% of the sample were male, 16.6% in their teens, 18.3% in their twenties, 21.6% in their thirties, 16.1% in their forties, 15.4% in their fifties, and 12.1% aged sixty or older.

I’ve read stories than in the US ink jets are so cheap yet cartridges are quite expensive, people just throw away the whole printer when they run out.

I post all my empty cartridges into Yodobashi Camera’s recycle box. Checking my local rubbish collection rules, I see that the cartridges are burnables, so in Q3 are about one in five incorrectly disposing of their items? It also mentions in the notes column that if possible, one should use a recycle box at the shops.
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And small pricks were hated by three in four Japanese women, according to this survey from iShare on injections, a perhaps disappointingly entitled topic, but predictably disappointing given my prediliction for such spicy headlines.

Demographics

Between the 6th and 11th of November 2009 538 members of the CLUB BBQ free email forwarding service completed a private internet-based questionnaire. 53.2% of the sample were male, 32.9% in their twenties, 29.7% in their thirties, and 37.4% in their forties.

I hate injections, and look away, pull a face and clench my fist whenever I need to give a blood sample or whatever. It’s not the pain (although that’s not much fun), just the idea of the whole thing. Now I think about it, I don’t have a problem getting an injection at the dentist, probably because all the rest of the implements scare me so a wee bit of anesthesia can only help.
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iBridge Research Plus recently did one of their demographically narrow surveys, this time looking at Gmail. The survey was reported on as usual by japan.internet.com.

Demographics

On the 24th of November 2009 300 young women members of the iBridge research monitor group completed a private internet-based questionnaire. All of the sample were women, 22.3% of them in their twenties, 42.0% in their thirties, and 35.7% in their forties.

In October of this year, a survey of web mail usage amongst the same demographic found Yahoo! mail first, Hotmail second, local providers goo and infoseek third and fourth, then Gmail fifth.

The text suggests that the reason prize draws and online shopping are popular is the strength of Gmail’s spam filters, although I’ve never tried them out with Japanese spam myself.

I use Gmail for none of the below reasons – one is to manage blog email, the second is for a travel address, and the third is that it became necessary to register one in order to access other Google services.
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