世論 What Japan Thinks

A topic that has recently come to the fore is buses and/or trains running around the clock in Tokyo. It was covered on last night’s news as one of the ideas being floated to increase Japan’s attractiveness to foreign investors. However, one major negative issue is that currently the last train home is often the only excuse employees have for leaving work (labour protection laws are poorly enforced, and the pressure from societal norms means a lot of unpaid overtime is worked) or indeed obligatory after-work drinkies, so removing the final escape route could make the average employees lot much worse.

So, with that in mind, Yahoo! conducted an open news poll asking is 24 hour city buses and underground necessary? At the time of writing, seven days into an ten-day poll, 41,587 people have voted. 22% say both are needed, 5% say buses only, and 17% underground only. However, these three are outweighed by the noes to both, with 58% saying that both forms of round-the-clock public transport are not necessary.

Mobile Marketing Data Labo recently performed a survey into true feelings about one’s mobile carrier’s network, and found SoftBank’s reputation for being a poor network is ill-deserved.

Demographics

Between the 1st and 4th of April 2013 1,200 smartphone-owning members of the MMD monitor panel completed a private internet-based questionniare. Each of the three major carriers, docomo, au and SoftBank, were represented by 400 people. No further demographics information was given.

Note that one reason for the high degree of satisfaction amongst SoftBank users is that the iPhone is their main smartphone, and we all know that Apple users always rank themselves the most satisfied when it comes to these sorts of stories. I wonder how much this Apple love rubs off on the user’s impression of the ease snd speed of connection questions?
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goo Ranking took a look at what guys can’t understand about female friendships and what girls can’t understand about male friendships.

Demographics

Over the 6th and 7th of March 2013 1,083 members of the goo Research online monitor group completed a private internet-based questionnaire. 56.7% of the sample were female, 11.6% in their teens, 15.0% in their twenties, 24.9% in their thirties, 24.7% in their forties, 12.7% in their fifties, and 11.1% 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.

My wife does most of the things in Q1, and I don’t understand them at all either, so I’m glad to see it’s not just a cultural gap that I’m experiencing!
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Today’s quickie from Research Panel’s Day Research is a look at what luxury items, if they were banned, would be a problem, a bit of an odd question, and an odder selection of possible answers…

136,639 members of the Research Panel monitor group answered (it must have been a hot question!), and the results were (multiple answer allowed) 47.8% and 47.7% answered coffee and tea respectively, 30.7% chose alcohol (lower than I would have thought), and 13.4% tobacco. Furthermore, 5.2% said some other luxury (chocolate seemed a popular answer!) and 8.5% would not be put out by any luxury being banned.

goo Research conducted a detailed survey into Fairtrade products. For reference, similar questions were asked by goo Research two and a half years ago.

Demographics

Between the 28th and 31st of January 2013 2,350 members of the goo Research online monitor group completed a private internet-based questionnaire. The sample was exactly 50:50 male and female, and similarly the age groups were evenly split with 20.0% in each of the age bands from twenties to the over-sixties.

I’d like to buy more Fairtrade, but there is a definite lack of shops here selling it. The obvious product is coffee, but although I don’t drink it at home, if there is a choice when I go to a coffee shop I will take the Fairtrade one, although again it is very rare to find such a cafe.
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If you’ve been following the Japanese news you may have heard that a Japanese court ordered Google to remove a libellous auto-complete, a ruling that it may or may not follow. So, to see what the average member of their monitor group thought of the ruling, Research Panel conducted a quick poll. 17,905 people responded to the question “In the light of the recent defamation case, do you think Google should withdraw their auto-complete feature?” 25.4% thought Google should, 22.3% thought they shouldn’t, and perhaps reflecting the large amount of Yahoo! search users, 52.2% didn’t know about Google’s auto-complete.

As seen above, I think I’ll sue Google for associating my site with MLP, or My Little Pony…

Here’s a curious little quicky poll taken by Research Panel. It is tagged as their Day Research, where they get as many members of the monitor panel to vote on a question of the day for a couple of points. They asked their panel which of the following ways of writing out fifty million yen was easiest to understand. Note that in Japanese, the equivalent of our thousand is ten thousand, so instead of in English one thousand, one million, one billion, etc, Japanese goes ten thousand, hundred million, one trillion, etc. So, with that in mind, 3 ten thousands and 2549 people voted this way on the easiest-to-understand form.

Top by a long way was 84.9% choosing 5千万円, 5-thousand-ten thousand yen. Next, 10.8% chose the longhand 50,000,000 yen, the easiest form for me. 2.6% said 50,000千円, 5,000-ten thousand yen, then 1.8% 50百万円, 50-hundred-ten thousand yen.

By the way, the pictured money is fake!

goo Research recently conducted their seventh regular survey into electronic books, which was reported on by japan.internet.com.

Demographics

Over the 25th and 26th of March 2013 1,089 members of the goo Research online monitor group completed a private internet-based questionnaire. 53.9% of the sample were male, 13.4% in their teens, 15.9% in their twenties, 21.6% in their thirties, 17.4% in their forties, 19.4% in their fifties, and 12.4% aged sixty or older. Furthermore, the sixth regular survey was conducted between the 10th and 13th of December 2012 and had 1,076 participants with roughly similar demographics.

This post is quite timely as Kobo just announced a retina display-like spec on their new e-ink reader.
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For my first example of a quick chatty survey report, I found that Yahoo! Japan asked if restrictions on using smartphones while walking are needed in a poll published on their news pages, and from the 37,252 people who replied at the time of writing, 77% said that such a restriction was necessary.

Given that now just about all of the underground system in Tokyo, Osaka and elsewhere is now fully connected, and the sheer number of people commuting, and that smartphones, unlike traditional phones with physical keys, need much more attention to use, the scope for bumping into others will only increase.

This topic was apparently kicked off by a columnist who might be of some repute, Takashi Odajima, who said recently that walking more than 10 paces whilst looking at the screen should draw a fine of 2,000 yen.

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.