世論 What Japan Thinks

So you go, and you stand on your own
And you leave on your own
And you go home, and you cry
And you want to die

So sung The Smiths, in what was voted the second-best lyric of all time in Britain a few years back. Interestingly enough, that which caused so much Morrissey-inflicted student angst was voted in a recent survey conducted by goo Ranking as the thing Japanese find most unexpectedly enjoyable for one. Well, almost; a concert could be at a club, but let’s not nit-pick!

Demographics

Between the 21st and 24th of December 2007 1,094 members of the goo Research monitor panel completed a private online questionnaire. 45.6% of the sample was male, 8.8% were in their teens, 15.6% in their twenties, 29.1% in their thirties, 26.8% in their forties, 10.7% in their fifties, and 9.0% 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.

Don’t ask me why cat’s cradle comes in at number 18 as I only know it as a solo activity. At 19 is “The Game of Life”, which is I believe the most popular or recognisable board game in Japan, much like Monopoly is the representative game in the UK and the USA.
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With the source of the gyoza poisoning still to be determined, here’s a timely survey from goo Research in conjunction with the Yomiuri Shimbun into food safety.

Demographics

Towards the end of January 2008, but before the poisoned gyoza scandal broke, 1,089 members of the goo Reseach monitor group completed a private online questionnaire. The age or sex breakdown was not reported.

The full survey would have been interesting to see, but goo Research sadly only reported three questions. An earlier survey from MyVoice on Chinese products provides a useful cross-reference.
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Following on from the recent survey on dirty Japanese DVDs (which for some reason got great click-through rates from Japan Probe and News on Japan), this time let’s look at a survey reported on by japan.internet.com and conducted by goo Research into the matter of faults with devices with internal hard disk drives. Note that despite the headline, this survey covers any problem with devices with hard disks, not just the disk drives themselves.

Demographics

Between the 5th and 8th of February 2008 1,092 members of the goo Research monitor panel completed a private internet-based questionnaire. 53.9% of the sample was male, 17.8% in their teens, 19.4% in their twenties, 15.8% in their thirties, 16.9% in their forties, 18.3% in their fifties, and 11.8% aged sixty or older.

I’ve had a hard disk in my PC die once, but luckily I managed to salvage about 90% of the critical information, and since then I’ve been slightly better at performing backups, although with a mere CD-R, backing up a one gigabyte SD card’s-worth of photos is a bit of a pain.
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I hope you had, or are having, or are about to have as nice a St Valentine’s Day as I have had, but just in case you didn’t, in the hope of cheering you up by showing you some people who had a worse day than you, here are a couple of surveys from goo Ranking on first why friends can’t be lovers (with separate male and female results), and second on women’s and men’s miserable Valentine memories.

Demographics

Between the 21st and 24th of December 2007 1,094 members of the goo Research monitor panel completed a private online questionnaire. 45.6% of the sample was male, 8.8% were in their teens, 15.6% in their twenties, 29.1% in their thirties, 26.8% in their forties, 10.7% in their fifties, and 9.0% 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’m not sure how many “no answers” there were for Q1, or if married people were asked to recall when they were single, etc.

Just in case the idea of obligatory chocolates is unfamiliar to you, last year Mari’s Diary covered how she feels about having to give chocolates to colleagues.

Photo taken by Kluv32.
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One popular survey from last year was a survey into what Japan thinks of OpenCourseWare, freely available university material. Recently, goo Research released the results of their second annual survey into these matters, namely making university lectures publicly available.

Demographics

The fieldwork for this survey was conducted between the 13th and 19th of December 2007, with 1,000 members of the goo Research monitor group completing a private internet-based questionnaire. The sample was split 50:50 male and female, with 20.0% in their teens, 20.0% in their twenties, 20.0% in their thirties, 20.0% in their forties, and 20.0% aged fifty or older. By educational history, 7.1% had only completed middle school (although given that 20.0% were in their teens, some may still be in high school), 27.5% high school, 10.8% vocational or other types of secondary schooling, 9.5% junior two-year college, 25.6% university arts course, 12.8% university science, 1.2% university medical or pharmacutical, 3.4% post-graduate or business school, 0.4% overseas university or post-graduate, and 1.2% other.

OpenCourseWare is the term coined to describe this phemonenom, pioneered in the USA by MIT’s OpenCourseWare project. In Japan there is the Japan OpenCourseWare Consortium, JOCW, based at Keio University.

Note that since the last survey it appears that Tokyo Geijutsu University and Hitotsubashi University have stopped offering OpenCourseWare, but Doshisha University, Ritsumeikan University, Kansai University, Kyoto Seika University, and Kagawa Education Institute of Nutrition have started.
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I just noticed a visitor coming via The Guardian (a UK daily broadsheet), and it seems that on their Japan page, down the left-hand column is a list of useful Japan-related links, where I find myself in the company of not just political parties and the serious press, but also fellow bloggers at Observing Japan and Digital World Tokyo, and even the Whale Marketing Council Institute of Cetacean Research.

Google rightfully beats Yahoo! hands down for English language search, but I never seem to have too much luck with Google and Japanese. I stay away from Yahoo! Japan as I find the design extremely ugly, but this doesn’t seem to be a factor with the natives according to a survey reported on by japan.internet.com and conducted by JR Tokai Express Research Inc into information gathering through search portal sites.

Demographics

Between the 31st of January and the 3rd of February 2008 330 members of the JR Tokai Express Research monitor group employed in either public or private industry completed an internet-based questionnaire. 80.9% were male, 10.0% in their twenties, 40.0% in their thirties, 37.3% in their forties, 11.2% in their fifties, and 1.5% in their sixties.

One thing I’m not sure if Yahoo! Japan does, but it is something that Google definitely doesn’t, is to search alternative verb forms, so that if you put in the infinitive it also searches past tense, progressive, passive, and so one. That would be nice, but top of my wish list would be alternative kanji and kana alternatives for a word; for example, skin clinic could appear as 皮膚科, 皮フ科, ひふ科 or even ヒフ科, so it would be nice if I typed in just one form and the search engine matched all the variants.
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With a story last week about cigarette smoke clogging up the laser on the Wii, this is a timely survey reported on by japan.internet.com and conducted by goo Research into faulty DVD playback devices.

Demographics

Between the 31st of January and 1st of February 2008 1,095 members of the goo Research online monitor panel completed a private internet-based questionnaire. 53.9% were male, 17.5% in their teens, 19.4% in their twenties, 15.9% in their thirties, 17.0% in their forties, 18.4% in their fifties, and 11.8% aged sixty or older.

As I only own less than half a dozen DVDs and haven’t watched any of them for months if not years, I can’t say I’ve ever had a problem with DVDs.

Oh, and if you’re coming here via a Google search for the keywords in the article title, sorry to disappoint you!
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This week too was a bit thin for silly surveys, so the best I can do for you today is a not really silly and not really very long, but quite interesting pair of surveys from DIMSDRIVE Research’s 133rd ranking survey on two Japanese teeth-related subjects, frequency of brushing and oral care other than brushing.

Demographics

Both surveys were conducted between the 16th and 24th of January 2008. The first had 12,020 respondents with 52.9% female, the second 11,963 with 53.0% female.

You’ll notice in the second question that regular check-ups feature really quite low, and flossing or inter-dental brushing (uggh, dislike both and don’t bother myself) feature nowhere, not even in the detailed run-down of the results by age group. Also, there are only about 5,000 votes in total, which means about half the population don’t take extra any oral care bar brushing. For those of you who have experienced oyaji breath you might be surprised to learn that it was young men rather than older ones who were more likely to brush less than once a day or not at all.

I also chew Xylitol gum after every meal at home; PLUS X Gum from Lotte is exceptionally nice.
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Voice chat fills me with dread, so it’s something I’ve never felt the desire to do, even though I have been invited to some meetings and have also found others with topics that interest me. However, a recent survey reported on by japan.internet.com and conducted by Cross Marketing Inc into this very topic of voice chat produced a slightly unexpectedly high number of user.

Demographics

Over the 23rd and 24th of January 2008 300 members of the Cross Marketing online panel completed a private internet-based questionnaire. As usual for Cross Marketing, 50.0% were male and 50.0% female, 20.0% in their teens, 20.0% in their twenties, 20.0% in their thirties, 20.0% in their forties, and 20.0% in their fifties.

I went looking for some voice chat pictures to illustrate this story, but instead I found some rather dodgy sites; there’s at least one place selling chat with dodgy-looking anime characters at 1,200 yen (around US$12) per hour, and another charming place that bans foreigners.
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