世論 What Japan Thinks

[part 1] [part 2]

With almost three-quarters of Japanese reckoning that they themselves need to lose a few kilos, and with Billy’s Boot Camp flying off the shelves, not least because for men metabolic syndrome is the in cause of concern, and for women the summer and the associated revealing fashions are fast approaching. This recent survey by DIMSDRIVE Research on weight-loss dieting offered me so many possible headline opportunities, and I succumbed to the temptation to stuff in as many sweet keywords as I could.

Demographics

Between the 23rd and 31st of May 2007 DIMSDRIVE Research interviewed 8,408 members of its online monitor panel by means of a private internet-based questionnaire. 43.1% of the sample was male, 0.8% in their teens, 15.0% in their twenties, 35.9% in their thirties, 28.8% in their forties, 13.9% in their fifties, and 5.6% aged sixty or older.

Television still remains the most popular source for information on dieting, despite the infamous natto diet scandal at the start of the year. Not terribly suprisingly, I think, Norkia chan is the body shape women most desire, while Hiromi Go, an aging-but-not-really-showing-it singer is tops for men, and not a person I would have considered.
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[part 1] [part 2]

With almost three-quarters of Japanese reckoning that they themselves need to lose a few kilos, and with Billy’s Boot Camp flying off the shelves, not least because for men metabolic syndrome is the in cause of concern, and for women the summer and the associated revealing fashions are fast approaching. This recent survey by DIMSDRIVE Research on weight-loss dieting offered me so many possible headline opportunities, and I succumbed to the temptation to stuff in as many sweet keywords as I could.

Demographics

Between the 23rd and 31st of May 2007 DIMSDRIVE Research interviewed 8,408 members of its online monitor panel by means of a private internet-based questionnaire. 43.1% of the sample was male, 0.8% in their teens, 15.0% in their twenties, 35.9% in their thirties, 28.8% in their forties, 13.9% in their fifties, and 5.6% aged sixty or older.

Note that Billy and Norika don’t make an appearance in this survey until tomorrow’s part 2 post, so you’ll just have to wait!

I too, despite being underweight for my height, could do with losing (or moving elsewhere) a couple of kilos of spare tyre. Actually taking more exercise in addition to just walking between stations would help, but just cutting down on snacks is my lazy way out, I suppose.
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First, a big hello to a new Featured Link, Goddess Carlie’s jDrama reviews, where she leads us through the Japanese TV drama world, teaching us some Japanese along the way. Nice and clean site design, good writing, and if you spend a lot of time in front of Japanese telly, this looks like a good place to help you get more out of it! Pop over and see if it is your cup of green tea.

Talking of learning Japanese, Bill at Rising Sun of Nihon informs me of a new manga comic strip he is running called Ello Bello and written by Kan Shinoy, an aspiring artist, it seems.

If you’ve signed up for dodgy mailing lists or are getting too many calls from your ex on your mobile phone, fortunately almost all Japanese cell phone models have features enabling you to blacklist other phone numbers, email addresses and even complete domains. Personally, all bar one mailing list that I’ve joined has honoured my unsubscribe requests, but whenever I get a dodgy ワンギリ, wan-giri, call, that is a call that just rings once so when you call back they apply assorted high pressure sales or extortion tactics to you, it goes into the banned list on my phone. Recently, NEPRO JAPAN looked at how the average person used mobile phone blacklisting features.DemographicsBetween 10 am on the 7th of June and 3 am on the 8th of June 2007 NEPRO JAPAN made a survey available to the general mobile-phone using public through the menuing systems of NTT DoCoMo’s iMode.
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Despite Japan Probe suggesting that all that is needed for the iPhone to succeed here in Japan is the ability to play back Gundam anime, I suspect there are perhaps a number of features missing that people expect as standard. To find out if there is any truth behind this suspicion, iShare performed a survey on views regarding the iPhone.

Demographics

Between the 26th of June and the 2nd of July 2007, iShare interviewed by means of a private internet-based questionnaire 1,341 members of its CLUB BBQ free mail forwarding service. Men outweighed females 7:3, 18.3% were in their twenties, 48.2% in their thirties, 24.9% in their forties, and the remaining 8.6% were either fifty or older or in their teens. This group is quite geek/otaku oriented, so there is perhaps a higher level of knowledge of technical matters on display here than in similar surveys with other groups. Note also that sample sizes for each question were not explicitly mentioned so my figures might be wrong.

This is a great survey for me: in Q3, why do people expect SoftBank to carry it? Does it fit their image? Do they imagine they will outbid everyone in desperation? For me, au by KDDI seems a better fit, but I also feel SoftBank would pay anything to get the reseller rights. In Q5, the seemingly odd choice of One Seg (digital terrestrial) television support seems to be the feature most people want to see, and almost a third want the browser downgraded to standard mobile site support, both ahead of what I might have predicted, namely electronic cash support and ring tones. Finally, only Sony and Sharp are seen as being able to top the iPhone, whereas I think Nokia might be able to do something, but they don’t even feature in the list of companies!
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If you are looking for iPhone emoji information, here is a story on why no emoji is killing the iPhone.

Rather than text-based smilies that we’ve looked at in earlier surveys, this time we look at the emoji graphical icons that the three main Japanese mobile operators all support to varying degrees, called 絵文字, emoji, picture characters. Here is a full table of the set of emoji common across the three main carriers, NTT DoCoMo, SoftBank, and EzWeb (au and TU-KA from KDDI) so you can see for yourself how good or bad each provider’s art work is. Recently, MyVoice investigated this subject of mobile phone emoji graphical icon usage.

Demographics

Between the 1st and 5th of June 2007 13,158 members of the MyVoice internet community completed a web-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 or older.

Note that some of the newer DoCoMo phones, such as the Panasonic P703i come with an enormous library of pseudo-emoji, implemented as embedded images in HTML mail.
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Despite some mediocre reviews Apple’s new iPhone has been apparently flying off the shelves in the USA, and judging by this survey, many in Japan are hoping for an early release in this country too. This was revealed in a survey recently reported on by japan.internet.com and conducted by JR Tokai Express Research Inc on the topic of Apple’s iPhone

Demographics

On the 6th of July 2007 331 members of the JR Tokai Express Research online monitor panel employed in private industry or local or national government successfully completed a private internet-based questionnaire. 76.1% were male, 11.5% in their twenties, 44.4% in their thirties, 32.3% in their forties, 8.5% in their fifties, and 3.3% in their sixties.

I think personally that the iPhone would not do well in its current state in Japan. First and foremost, the lack of 3G speed would be a major issue for many mobile web users. Second, given that most people are used to the designed-to-fit experience of mobile-targeted sites, a full browser is perhaps not all that necessary. Third, Japanese on the whole do not use nor perhaps want SmartPhones; there is no significant Palm or Blackberry-using demographic that need the business-like features. Fourth, and perhaps the biggest deal-breaker, there is no hook to hang your dangly thingies off!
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Japan may be one of the top producers of the latest home electrical items, but is it a big consumer of what it produces? With the smallness of the average home being perhaps a factor, how many gadgets make their way to the consumer? Recently infoPLANT (who seem to be in the process of changing their name to Yahoo! Japan Value Insight) published the results of a short survey on home electricals ownership and purchasing plans. Note that this survey was conducted just a month before the summer bonus season started, so perhaps some of the respondents were thinking about what they wanted to buy.

Demographics

Over a week from the 29th of May to the 4th of June 2007 infoPLANT made the survey available through the menuing system of NTT DoCoMo’s iMode mobile phone system, where 6,606 people, 63.2% female, self-selected themselves and successfully completed the survey.

Personally, we manage just a big fridge, an air purifier and a video camera, and perhaps we would like sometime to buy a hard disk recorder.
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…of in the summer, just to finish off the dangling headline. I’m back from my holidays, and back to stupidly hot temperatures around double of what I left back in the UK and Germany, so to tie in with the hot and humid weather right now (and it’s going to get a lot hotter and more humid before it’s done) let’s look with goo Ranking at what summer smells people hate. As usual for these ranking surveys, demographic information is not available, just that on the 22nd and 23rd of May a number of members of the goo Research monitor group completed an online survey on this topic.

One may notice that the top pong, body odour, relates to one of these things that foreigners hear (perhaps only from other foreigners?) about how the Japanese don’t sweat.

Finally, the kanji used in the headline, 悪臭, akushuu, consists of two kanji for bad and smell, and means exactly that.
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I’ve never heard (as it were) of people surfing under voice control at work (excluding swearing at the browser for crashing or the internet for being slow, of course) but a recent survey reported on by japan.internet.com and conducted by JR Tokai Express Research on browsing at work showed that these sort of people do exist.

Demographics

On the 7th of June 2007 333 members of JR Tokai Express Research’s online monitor pool employed in private industry completed a private internet-based questionnaire. 70.9% of the sample were male, 10.5% in their twenties, 52.0% in their thirties, 29.1% in their forties, 6.0% in their fifties, and 2.4% in their sixties.

Sadly there was no question asked (or at least not reported) on how much of the time was spent on work-related versus private-related activities. Our workplace strictly forbids private surfing.

Q2 is a bit confusing to answer regarding feed reading – does using services like Google Reader or Bloglines count as using a feed reader? Therefore, I find the figures in that table a bit unreliable. I also wonder why so many people don’t know how they are surfing.
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