世論 What Japan Thinks

This is a genuine survey that is not really quite silly enough for a Sunday, but since it’s a Sunday I can have more fun playing with the results, as can be seen in the graph above, generated from the results of a recent survey conducted by iShare into using mobiles in the loo.

Demographics

Between the 30th of May and the 2nd of June 2008 743 members of the CLUB BBQ free email forwarding service completed a members-only internet-based questionnaire. 56.1% of the sample were male, 25.8% in their twenties, 35.0% in their thirties, and 39.2% in their forties. All of them were pre-screened as users of personal mobile phones.

I occassionally write email in the toilet cubicles at work, and judging from the rattlings of mobile phone straps, so do quite a few of my colleagues. I’ve never quite gone as far as sneaking off explicitly to email, though. I’ve once seen someone at a urinal talking on the telephone, which I thought was just a bit much.

If you want to celebrate your furtive phone use, or protect your phone against falling down the pan (or perhaps not), the people at Strapya do a lovely line in golden poo-shaped mascots and straps.
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With both mobile phones and still cameras coming with video recording facilities, is there still a market for stand-alone video cameras? This recent survey from MyVoice looked at the usage of video cameras to try to find out. Video cameras covers all stand-alone primarily video-recording devices, including those with tape, memory card or hard disk media.

Demographics

Over the first five days of May 2008 14,326 members of the MyVoice internet community completed a private online questionnaire. 54% of the sample were female, 2% in their teens, 15% in their twenties, 37% in their thirties, 29% in their forties, and 17% in their fifties.

My video camera only gets dragged out for foreign holidays, and actually I haven’t copied the tapes to video for the last three years… With the new DiGa, though, there is a digital in from cameras, so perhaps I can get the dubbing done quicker?

With the new AdSense for YouTube features, perhaps I should dust it off and start shooting cat videos?
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If you want to see people using public WiFi in central Osaka, don’t head towards the nearest Starbucks, but instead choose the Pokemon Center where you’ll see big groups of kids huddled around the gaming access point there. This recent survey from Marsh and reported on by japan.internet.com into public wireless LAN (WiFi) suggests that games machines are beating PDAs at least.

Demographics

Between the 5th and 8th of June 2008 300 members of the Marsh internet monitor group completed a private internet-based questionnaire. 50.0% of the sample was male, 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’ve posted this before, but I’ll post again; if you want to find a public wireless access point in Japan, this site in English aids your search. However, the one at Yodobashi Camera was WAP-protected when I tried, although their electricity sockets do work. The iPhone is going to suffer in Japan from this lack of availability.

Thanks to running NetStumbler on my way home, although I pass through about 22 railway stations, including changing trains at the largest station in Osaka, the only open WiFi I pick up are misconfigured domestic routers. Many of the stations seem to have locked-up tight corporate WiFi points only.
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I use a built-in water purifier for drinking water at home, so consumption of mineral water is limited to the occasional half-litre bottle at the weekends when going out. To see how the Japanese use it, DIMSDRIVE Research conducted a survey into this topic of mineral water.

Demographics

Between the 19th and 27th of March 2008 8,383 members of the DIMSDRIVE Monitor group completed a private internet-based questionnaire. 52.9% of the sample were female, 1.3% in their teens, 14.9% in their twenties, 33.3% in their thirties, 29.9% in their forties, 14.7% in their fifties, and 5.9% aged sixty or older. 51.7% lived in a house, 47.0% in a flat (apartment), and 1.3% other. By family size, 13.0% lived alone, 23.8% with one other, 25.1% with two others, 24.1% with three others, and 14.0% with four or more other people.

The pictured bottle sounds even less appealing than the Engrish standbys of Pocari Sweat and Calpis, but it’s actually mineral water for your four-legged friend, not Dogpis!

Getting back on track, my purchased brand is determined by seeing which one is 110 yen in the convenience store, although I can’t remember the brand right now, but it is a Japanese one. I’ve tried the oxygenised water a couple of times, but I didn’t really notice any difference.

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With the analogue switch-off only three years away, this recent survey from goo Research and reported on by japan.internet.com into television finds that there are still a awful lot of old televisions still in circulation.

Demographics

Between the 5th and 9th of June 2008 1,001 members of the goo Research online monitor group successfully completed an internet-based questionnaire. 53.0% of the sample were male, 9.0% in their teens, 23.0% in their twenties, 24.2% in their thirties, 16.2% in their forties, and 27.7% aged fifty or older.

The Japanese for CRT is ブラウン管, buraun kan, which I thought referred to the colour of initial devices, so it meant a “brown tube”, but just last weekend I learnt that it’s so named from the German inventor Braun; in Germany also the CRT is usually called a Braun tube (or whatever the German for tube is).
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Strategies for coping with stress, and mental health care in general, are sadly lacking in Japan. This recent survey from goo Research, conducted in association with All About Japan, into lifestyle, concentrating in particular on work and stress therein, highlights a few of these issues.

Demographics

Between the 28th of April and the 1st of May 2008 1,057 members of the goo Research online monitor panel aged between 20 and 49 and currently in employement completed a private internet-based questionnaire. 50.1% of the sample was male, 33.5% in their twenties, 33.8% in their thirties, and 32.7% in their forties.

Notice that in Q10, for means of managing stress, men are much less likely to do anything about it bar exercise, and four times as likely to do nothing at all.

I can get my commute to work in just under an hour, although the return usually takes one hour and ten minutes as I need to wait for one connection and sometimes choose the local train due to the ease of getting a seat.
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Executive summary: 5.7% more expensive than DoCoMo’s latest models over one year.

With the recent confirmation of the rumours regarding the release of the iPhone in Japan via SoftBank, and with Steve Jobs promising that no-one will pay more than $199 dollars for the 8GB device, let us look at what this will actually cost, once one adds a service contract into the deal. For the sake of simplicity, I’ll assume one US dollar equals one hundred yen, so the price Steve Jobs is promising is 19,900 yen. As a point of comparison, the cheapest price I see offered for the 8GB iPod touch is 32,448 yen, so for the handset alone it is over a third cheaper. However, this figure ignores the contract that must be purchased to go along with the handset. By working from the information provided on the SoftBank web site, one can determine the expected total cost of ownership.

• Basic package free minutes:
  8,190 yen (L Plan Value, 300 free minutes, 10.5 yen per 30 seconds afterwards)
• Voice mail service:
  315 yen (extra for visual voice mail?)
• Email, web access fee:
  315 yen
• Unlimited data packets:
  9,800 yen (X Series smartphone price)
• Total monthly charge:
  18,602 yen
• Total one-year cost:
  223,440 yen

Note that if you use less than 6 MB per month the data packet cost will be lower. So, adding in the 19,900 yen for the handset, that’s 243,340 yen for a year, or about $2,433 or £1,160 in the UK. Note that actual costs might be cheaper if you add family discount plans, loyalty discounts for existing customers, and so on. Actual costs may also be more expensive if you go over your minutes, and also adding in an extra 980 yen per month for free calls to all other SoftBank phones from 1 am to 9 pm, and free calls all the time to family members.

Another plan, the Gold Plan, has a basic package charge of 9,600 yen per month with 200 minutes, but free to other SoftBank phones from 1 am to 9 pm, and 21 yen per 30 seconds outside these hours or to other carriers, but with discounts from 37% to 70% for long-term customers, and loyalty bonuses can be carried over from other carriers. Then there’s the Super Bonus, which has even more complicated trade-offs, but we’ll not go into that here…

By comparison, looking at the just-released range of phones from DoCoMo, the 906i series, a handset costs around 50,000 yen, then monthly costs for a similar service to the above is 8,400 yen for L Value plan with 240 minutes then 10.5 yen per thirty seconds, 5,985 yen for unlimited data packets on full browser, 315 yen for voice mail, and 315 yen for iMode access, giving a total monthly cost of 15,015 yen, and a yearly cost of 230,180 yen including handset, or $2,302, or £1,101 in the UK. This makes the iPhone 5.7% more expensive than DoCoMo‘s offerings, although with a myriad of discount schemes available the real price difference is much, much harder to directly quantify.

Of course, without emoji icon support, both display and writing, it will not make much headway amongst the influential youth set (yes, that will be a deal-breaker), and with Flash definitely not supported, despite being a standard feature on most new phones, the SoftBank iPhone will be hard to sell. However, as I predicted over a year ago, and I am yet to see any data to make me want to change my mind, the lack of One Seg television and FeliCa-based electronic cash will not affect the desirability of the SoftBank iPhone.

With Patch Tuesday tomorrow promising (threatening?) three critical updates, let’s look at this survey from JR Tokai Express Research Inc and reported on by japan.internet.com into comnputer maintainance at home.

Demographics
Over the 3rd and 4th of June 2008 330 members of the JR Tokai Express Research monitor panel completed a private internet-based questionnaire. 50.9% of the sample were male, 3.3% in their teens, 16.4% in their twenties, 40.3% in their thirties, 21.8% in their forties, 10.0% in their fifties, 5.8% in their sixties, and 2.4% aged seventy or older.

I’m not 100% which camp I fall into, as I have Windows set up to automatically download, but to notify me before install. In addition, I visit Windows Update once a month or so just to see if there is any extra optional components. As for defragmenting, I’ve never done that on my home PC, mostly as it’s too slow, although I’ll do it at work just to make me look busy. I might just do it tonight just to see what happens.
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No, that’s not the titles of the last two videos I rented, but instead they are the subjects of perhaps the dodgiest survey I’ve seen for a long while from goo Ranking into what actions by female staff set male hearts aflutter, and vice versa, what actions by male staff set female hearts aflutter.

Demographics

Between the 22nd and 24th of April 2008 1,048 members of the goo Research online monitor group completed a private internet-based questionnaire. 51.7% of the sample was female, 7.1% in their teens, 14.7% in their twenties, 29.0% in their thirties, 27.4% in their forties, 11.6% in their fifties, and 10.2% 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.

I presume that the more obviously perverted fetishes were eliminated from the initial answers, but still, some of them are bordering on the obsessive! Indeed, for the top female answer, the original results talked about Sharon Stone in Basic Instinct! As for me, I’ll be honest but boring and say that I never saw women around the office that way.
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Following on from some news from the Yomiuri about religious belief, this time it is BlogCh and iShare looking at two types of fraudulent nonsense, blood typing and fortune telling.

Demographics

Both surveys were conducted between the 22nd and 24th of May 2008. For the blood type survey, 506 people completed the online survey, including 30 people who didn’t know their blood type. 55.7% of the sample were male, 12.3% in their twenties, 48.2% in their thirties, 28.7% in their forties, and 10.9% of other ages. For the astrology survey, 504 people completed the online survey. 55.3% of the sample were male, 12.3% in their twenties, 48.2% in their thirties, 28.6% in their forties, and 10.9% of other ages. All respondents were members of the free mail forwarding service CLUB BBQ.

It should be rather obvious where I stand on the issue, but I must admit to watching and enjoying the blood type race every weekday morning at about 9:50 at the end of Toku Da Ne. It’s quite fun to watch just to see if my wife or I win, and the advice is usually quite silly, although I always suspect she takes it rather more seriously than me.

Regarding Q2, my wife was convinced that I was type B, and she knew she was an A, as they both fitted her image of our personalities, but when we had a health check a few years ago, the results came back with different blood types for both of us.

Oh, I nearly forgot my two contributions to the world of divination, My Buddhist Name and brainscannr.
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