Recently, the Cabinet Office Japan performed a survey looking at the topic of general legal support, and the operations of the Hou (Legal) Terrace legal assistance system in particular.
Demographics
3,000 members of the general public aged 20 or older were randomly selected from all over the country, and between the 22nd of January and 1st of February 2009 attempts were made to interview them face to face. 1,684, or 56.1%, were available and agreed to take part in the survey. 52.3% of the sample were female, 9.6% in their twenties, 14.6% in their thirties, 16.1% in their forties, 19.3% in their fifties, 23.9% in their sixties, 13.2% in their seventies, and 3.2% aged eighty or older.
I don’t know if I really like the sound of the legal education described below, as it seems a bit of a mish-mash of contract law and civics; the Constitution is not a set of laws, and one’s responsibilities as a citizen are similarly not usually legal edicts. Read the rest of this entry »
Recently, the Cabinet Office Japan performed a survey looking at the topic of general legal support, and the operations of the Hou (Legal) Terrace legal assistance system in particular.
Demographics
3,000 members of the general public aged 20 or older were randomly selected from all over the country, and between the 22nd of January and 1st of February 2009 attempts were made to interview them face to face. 1,684, or 56.1%, were available and agreed to take part in the survey. 52.3% of the sample were female, 9.6% in their twenties, 14.6% in their thirties, 16.1% in their forties, 19.3% in their fifties, 23.9% in their sixties, 13.2% in their seventies, and 3.2% aged eighty or older.
I’ve not had any legal troubles in Japan myself, but my parents-in-law have had certain trouble that I really don’t want to go into, but it basically involved bankrupcy, pensions and semi-dodgy lenders, or more likely the public face of the fully-dodgy lenders. Read the rest of this entry »
With KDDI running the au design project that is producing a number of interesting phones, this look by Marsh Inc, reported on by japan.internet.com, into cellphone design found that simple, if not just downright boring, was best.
Demographics
Over the 9th and 10th of April 2009 300 members of the Marsh monitor group completed a private internet-based questionnaire. 50.0% of the sample were female, 20.0% 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.
I’m a bit surprised that they didn’t include a suitable category for the iPhone to fall under in Q1. The straight type implies more the standard candybar rather than the… how would you describe the iPhone’s form factor?
Nick posted a reminder about the upcoming deadline, Wednesday the 22th, for April’s Blog Matsuri, so I thought I’d add my own reminder too. As he points out, I have over 2,500 subscribers and about 800 to 1,000 daily readers through my RSS feed, so if you want some free publicity, get your stories in soon! Thanks for the number of interesting submissions so far, and I’m looking forward to many more.
Also, just to toot my own horn and to leave a trackback with them, as mentioned last weekend I applied to attend the blogger tasting session for the Kobe Sweets Festa 2009 and fortunately I got selected, or I’ll be writing up about my own Slow Time there on Nihon Sun.
This survey from MyVoice, their second look at department stores, had a surprising to me set of results, with Japanese much less frequent users of these stores than I might have imagined.
Demographics
Over the first five days of March 2009 15,606 members of the MyVoice internet community successfully completed a private online questionnaire. 54% of the sample were female, 2% in their teens, 14% in their twenties, 36% in their thirties, 29% in their forties, and 19% aged fifty or older.
I recommend to every visitor to Japan that they go to department stores to at least just look; the basement floor is usually full of lots of speciality food stores that will be more than happy to hand out free samples at off-peak times. The best one I know for this is Hanshin Umeda – there’s always lots of free mouthfuls of wine, sake, fruit vinegar and tea to be had.
I quite often use these food areas, in particular RF1, which although a little on the expensive side has a wonderful range of salads. My favourites are their baked veggies – lots of potato, asparagus and carrot – and their Hokkaido Danshaku potato croquette, which are wonderfully soft and creamy. Read the rest of this entry »
A new gadget that is generating quite a bit of buzz around the Japanese English-language blogs is the Poken, with various events having giveaways of the wee beasties, with now JapanSoc also getting in on the act.
What is a Poken? Perhaps this video explains:
It’s basically a portable cache of your social network accounts (actually, pointers to an online cache) so when two pokens meet, they exchange identifiers so back at home you can quickly find out where you can meet all your real-life contacts. Quicker and more accurate than scribbling a phone number or email address on a bit of paper, and for anti-social gits such as myself it saves the business of asking, just a quick high-four and Bob’s your uncle.
The Poken shop shows a few designs, but printing your own would be a fabulous extra feature…
This was quite a surprising result for me, to see how newcomers into the digital camera market, Panasonic and Sony, were becoming forces to be reckoned with, according to the results of this survey from goo Research and reported on by japan.internet.com.
Demographics
Between the 3rd and 7th of April 2009 1,085 members of the goo Research online monitor group completed a private internet-based questionnaire. 52.6% of the sample were male, 15.6% in their teens, 18.2% in their twenties, 21.5% in their thirties, 16.4% in their forties, 15.8% in their fifties, and 12.6% aged sixty or older.
There’s a lot of good photography in Japan blogs appearing now – two of my favourites are Tokyo Times and i, cjw.
This look with MyVoice at DVD (and other media) recorder usage, their fifth survey on the topic, revealed a few interesting statistics such as the one in the headline and that the now defunct-for-over-a-year HD DVD format still outranks Blu-Ray recorders, although as noted last time I reported such a number, one wonders if there is a degree of misidentification by users. I wonder if HD DVD suggested Hard Disk plus DVD to some respondents?
Demographics
Over the first five days or March 2009 15,482 members of the MyVoice internet community completed a private online questionnaire. 54% of the sample were female, 1% in their teens, 14% in their twenties, 37% in their thirties, 29% in their forties, and 19% aged fifty or older.
I got hit by a rather irritating feature between my cable box and my DVD recorder. Despite both being made by the same company, you cannot get a digital out into the DVD recorder that will allow me to record two channels at once. The support line said the only option was to rent their high-end set-top box that has a built-in hard disk recorder, but that seemed rather unsatisfactory, especially as we only took their cheapest package of converting our existing analog service to digital but no high vision, so we’ve ended up paying them an extra 300 yen plus we get a thinner paper program guide for the privilege. Read the rest of this entry »
Continuing the ecology theme, let’s look at how well the corporate eco slogans are getting through to the public in Japan. This was the topic of a recent ranking survey from goo Ranking.
Demographics
Between the 18th and 2nd of February 2009 1,076 members of the goo Research monitor group completed a private online questionnaire. 51.1% of the sample were male, 7.2% in their teens, 15.8% in their twenties, 29.4% in their thirties, 25.2% in their forties, 11.1% in their fifties, and 11.3% 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.
If I can’t find an official translation of the slogan I will translate it as best I can. These unofficial English versions are indicated by italicised text and probably sound really rather awful, but often even the official translations suffer from that kind of problem.
I must admit to a high degree of ignorance of the slogans; for instance, even though I get bombarded with Toyota advertisements I cannot recall seeing that particular slogan. The recognisable slogan for Mitsubishi mostly sticks in my mind for the pronunciation of Drive@earth:
A recent topic that has cropped up here and there under the heading of “eco” in Japan (“eco” these days is just no more than a catch-all for money-saving in general) has been taking your left-over food home from restaurants, a subject looked at recently by iShare.
Demographics
Between the 24th and 27th of March 2009 339 members of the CLUB BBQ free email forwarding service completed a private internet-based questionnaire. 52.5% of the sample were male, 39.2% in their twenties, 28.9% in their thirties, and 31.9% in their forties.
I’ve never taken home a doggy bag in Japan, as I’ve always finished the food put in front of me, unless it was too digusting to eat. Conversely, I dislike the way it gets forced upon you in the USA, especially as when I’m staying in a hotel there’s no way to reheat it even if I wanted to finish it off the next day. I wonder what is the proper etiquette for this?
Here’s two recent stories on doggy bags in Japan, one from the Japan Times (see the last few paragraphs) and one from Tokyofoodcast, looking at a doggy bag campaign in Meguro, Tokyo. Read the rest of this entry »
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With KDDI running the 
This survey from MyVoice, their second look at 
This look with MyVoice at 
A recent topic that has cropped up here and there under the heading of “eco” in Japan (“eco” these days is just no more than a catch-all for money-saving in general) has been 
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