世論 What Japan Thinks

One thing I feel is very different since coming to Japan is that the insect population is totally different from at home; there we had bees, flies and bluebottles, caterpillars and midges; in our garden now we have praying mantises, crickets, cicidas, big dragonflies, stink bugs, asian tiger mosquitoes(vicious wee black things that bring me out in big allergic bumps) and of course the occasional cockroach, although those do not last long. To find out what the Japanese think of all these various creepie-crawlies, MyVoice conducted a survey on insects.

Demographics

Over the first five days of September 2007 13,734 members of the MyVoice internet community completed a private internet-based questionnaire. 54% of the sample was female, 2% in their teens, 18% in their twenties, 39% in their thirties, 27% in their forties, and 14% in their fifties.

In Q7, I wonder if most westerns are suprised that the Japanese see themselves as ants much more than as bees. Perhaps this is because the word for bee, hachi, covers (I thinks…) not just the honey bee, but wasps and hornets too.

I’ve never actually seen a firefly myself; the closest I come is passing through 蛍池, Hotaru Ga Ike, Firefly Pond, every day, but whatever water-based insect feature that may have been there in the past has, I suspect, long ago been concreted over.
Read the rest of this entry »

goo Ranking came up with another of their interesting ranking surveys; as always, the accuracy of the figures and the method for collecting the data is unclear, but hopefully the results make up for the potential lack of quality! Between the 28th and 30th of August 2007 goo Ranking performed a survey asking women about the basic preconditions for potential husbands and men about the basic preconditions for potential wives.
Read the rest of this entry »

One topic I often mention here is the apparent lack of sophistication amongst my Japanese colleagues when it comes to technical matters, despite working in a technical atmosphere. Our company recommends (but doesn’t enforce) Becky! and recommends that we avoid Outlook Express due to the many security weaknesses, although everyone should be running a virus scanner locally and our central server also has virus scanning. Despite these warnings, around a third of the engineers in my office still stick with Outlook Express, and most of the Becky! users don’t seem to have any automatic sorting to folders set up. There is one guy who runs emacs mail on Windows, which I think deserves some sort of award.

Ah yes, we had a survey to look at. japan.internet.com reported on one conducted by Cross Marketing Inc on the topic of electronic mail.

Demographics

On the 12th and 13th of September 2007 300 members of Cross Marketing Inc’s online monitor group completed a private internet-based questionnaire. The group was split 50:50 male and female, and 25.0% in their twenties, 25.0% in their thirties, 25.0% in their forties, and 25.0% in their fifties.

As I’ve said before, I’m a big Becky! fan, as it’s got a great set of features without being bloatware and is well worth trying out.
Read the rest of this entry »

I haven’t looked at video games for a while, so I was glad to find this survey from goo Research on video game usage by children. Video games cover handhelds, TV-connected games and even PC-based gaming.

Demographics

Between the 25th of June and 13th of July 2007 1,165 elementary school children (or people claiming to be children) responded to a public questionnaire available on the Kids goo web site. The sample was 60.0% girls, 3.4% in first year of elementary school (ages six or seven), 5.0% in second year, 9.9% in third year, 20.3% in forth year, 26.9% in fifth year, and 34.6% in sixth year (ages eleven or twelve). Note that since this is a public internet-based survey there will definite sampling bias.

There’s so much great data in this survey! Q4SQ is perhaps my favourite; based on my casual observations, not surprisingly the DS totally dominates everything else. However, the other new portable, the PSP, is played less than the ancient Famicon and Super Famicon. I’m surprised that these two machines did so well; is this due to parents being cheap, to them having less worries about graphic violence in the older titles, not wanting to spoil the kids on photo-realism, or do kids really choose themselves to play these machines?

Note that this survey was conducted before the new PSP Slim sold quarter of a million units in one week.
Read the rest of this entry »

Just a quick round-up of a few things happening here recently:

Excuse the strange code in the post title, but I’ve recently signed up for FeedM8, a mobile feed provider thingie, so the wierd string is an authorisation code.

I’ve noticed a new blog Nihon Hacks which has interesting money-saving tips for Japanese residents from a foreigner perspective.

I’ve also joined up with joblet.jp for displaying jobs available in Japan; both part-time and full-time positions are available, and it’s not just in Tokyo. You’ll find them in the left-hand column below the AdSense. What I should do is hack it so that for Japan visitors the ads appear above all the other adverts. Once I get time to do that, I’ll document it in my What Japan Thinks newsletter.

I’ve also signed up with BlogRush; the widget is hidden away down at the bottom of the right-hand column as I’m still not sure whether it is a good idea or not.

September’s been my best month for traffic so far, so I’d just like to say hello to any readers who have found their way here from my recent digg front page.

Oh, and on the 8th to 13th of October I’ll be heading to the Wilshire Hotel in Los Angeles for the Trusted Computing Group’s members meeting there. If on the off chance that you’re going to be going (I know I have a few readers from Nokia, for instance) drop me a line or buy me a drink in person!

The Cabinet Office Japan recently released the results of a survey they conducted into citizens’ lifestyles. I translated a survey on the same topic conducted two years ago, which may be useful as a cross-reference. See also part 3 of the survey from 2005.

Demographics

Between the 5th and 22nd of July 2007 10,000 members of the public were randomly selected from presumably the electoral rolls. Of that number, 6,086 people actually took part in the survey, conducted by means of face-to-face interviews. The sample was 53.2% female, 9.1% in their twenties, 14.5% in their thirties, 15.4% in their forties, 21.0% in their fifties, 20.7% in their sixties, 15.2% in their seventies, and 4.5% aged eighty or older. In addition, 8.7% lived alone, 24.4% with a spouse, 48.9% in a nuclear household, 15.6% with grandparents or grandchildren, 0.7% in other types of family environment, and 1.7% in other non-family-based living arrangements. 73.7% were married, 12.1% divorced or widowed, 14.0% unmarried, and 0.2% did not answer. 80.2% lived in an owned house, 2.5% in an owned apartment, 3.9% in a rented home, 10.8% in a rented apartment, 0.3% in a company house, 1.6% in a company apartment, 0.4% in other arrangements, and 0.1% didn’t know where they lived. Finally, 27.2% were daily internet browsers at home or work, 16.5% were occasional browsers, 6.8% just used email, and 49.1% barely used it at all, with 0.4% don’t knows.

It’s been an interesting survey; almost all positive answers are up one or two percentage points on last time, although it isn’t clear as to why there has been this slight improvement. Perhaps the outlook for the economy doesn’t look quite as gloomy as it did two years ago?
Read the rest of this entry »

The Cabinet Office Japan recently released the results of a survey they conducted into citizens’ lifestyles. I translated a survey on the same topic conducted two years ago, which may be useful as a cross-reference. See also part 2 of the survey from 2005.

Demographics

Between the 5th and 22nd of July 2007 10,000 members of the public were randomly selected from presumably the electoral rolls. Of that number, 6,086 people actually took part in the survey, conducted by means of face-to-face interviews. The sample was 53.2% female, 9.1% in their twenties, 14.5% in their thirties, 15.4% in their forties, 21.0% in their fifties, 20.7% in their sixties, 15.2% in their seventies, and 4.5% aged eighty or older. In addition, 8.7% lived alone, 24.4% with a spouse, 48.9% in a nuclear household, 15.6% with grandparents or grandchildren, 0.7% in other types of family environment, and 1.7% in other non-family-based living arrangements. 73.7% were married, 12.1% divorced or widowed, 14.0% unmarried, and 0.2% did not answer. 80.2% lived in an owned house, 2.5% in an owned apartment, 3.9% in a rented home, 10.8% in a rented apartment, 0.3% in a company house, 1.6% in a company apartment, 0.4% in other arrangements, and 0.1% didn’t know where they lived. Finally, 27.2% were daily internet browsers at home or work, 16.5% were occasional browsers, 6.8% just used email, and 49.1% barely used it at all, with 0.4% don’t knows.

I decided to highlight the figures from Q6 that suggest one in five feel they have plenty of spare time and 44.2% have some; this compares to a recent survey from MyVoice where just 46% felt they had free time. This apparent disparity can be explained partially by the sample sizes; 40% of the sample here is past retirement age, so no doubt they have much more free time than the MyVoice community, which has a high percentage of young office workers and housewifes with school-age children.
Read the rest of this entry »

The Cabinet Office Japan recently released the results of a survey they conducted into citizens’ lifestyles. I translated a survey on the same topic conducted two years ago, which may be useful as a cross-reference. See also part 1 of the survey from 2005.

Demographics

Between the 5th and 22nd of July 2007 10,000 members of the public were randomly selected from presumably the electoral rolls. Of that number, 6,086 people actually took part in the survey, conducted by means of face-to-face interviews. The sample was 53.2% female, 9.1% in their twenties, 14.5% in their thirties, 15.4% in their forties, 21.0% in their fifties, 20.7% in their sixties, 15.2% in their seventies, and 4.5% aged eighty or older. In addition, 8.7% lived alone, 24.4% with a spouse, 48.9% in a nuclear household, 15.6% with grandparents or grandchildren, 0.7% in other types of family environment, and 1.7% in other non-family-based living arrangements. 73.7% were married, 12.1% divorced or widowed, 14.0% unmarried, and 0.2% did not answer. 80.2% lived in an owned house, 2.5% in an owned apartment, 3.9% in a rented home, 10.8% in a rented apartment, 0.3% in a company house, 1.6% in a company apartment, 0.4% in other arrangements, and 0.1% didn’t know where they lived. Finally, 27.2% were daily internet browsers at home or work, 16.5% were occasional browsers, 6.8% just used email, and 49.1% barely used it at all, with 0.4% don’t knows.

There seems a high level of general satisfaction with their current lifestyles, which goes against the typical foreigner’s (or perhaps I hang out in the wrong neighbourhood?) perception of the miserable wage slave slogging his life away on pointless work. Perhaps the true answer is a mix of the two images; or perhaps it is my bias, the average worker is accepting of his lot.
Read the rest of this entry »

This topic seemed a little dull when I first picked up this report to translate, but after a little web searching I found some rather interesting information related to a survey conducted by goo Research and reported on by japan.internet.com on the topic of mobile phones, and on non-standard designs in particular.

Demographics

Between the 10th and 14th of September 2007 1,092 members of goo Research’s online monitor group completed a private internet-based questionnaire. 53.8% of the group was male, 17.6% in their teens, 19.1% in their twenties, 15.8% in their thirties, 17.1% in their forties, 18.4% in their fifties, and 11.9% aged sixty or older.

Did you know that four years ago NTT DoCoMo launched the WRISTOMO, a wristwatch-styled mobile phone? Or even more interestingly, SMS Technology Australia have just released this month a real wristwatch-sized mobile phone, the rather uninspiringly-named M500 with MP3, video, BlueTooth and Java all stuffed into a 60 gramme package.
Read the rest of this entry »

I had one of these “you know you’ve been in Japan too long” moments reading this list, as for three or four of them I had to stop and think if they really were Japanese inventions, 和製英語, wasei eigo, Japanese-style English! How many of these expressions that the Japanese didn’t know were Japanese-English, as reported by goo Ranking, did you have to mentally double-check? The survey was conducted between the 28th and 30th of August 2007.
Read the rest of this entry »