From kimono to keitai; research Japanese facts and figures through translated opinion polls and surveys.
Just a short bit of news about the Recommend Google Pack WordPress plugin I developed recently: it has been selected by a German web site Flash Boutique SEO as one of eight “Die besten WordPress Plugins“
Read more on: plugin,wordpressThis month’s volunteer host is Deas at Rocking in Hakata. To fit in with the season, this month’s topic is tourism. As usual, there is a lot of scope to be creative with this one, so we are awaiting your entries.
Also note that since we are right in the middle of Golden Week, entries will be accepted until the 7th of May, so you have may time to post all about your Golden Week fun!
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Between the 1st and 5th of April 2007 MyVoice looked at all-you-can-eat restaurants. This is perhaps a subject dear to many foreigners’ hearts as they can find the portions in Japan a little small. This survey does not, however, cover all-you-can-drink offers.
17,261 members of the MyVoice internet community completed a private internet-based survey. 54% were female, 2% in their teens, 18% in their twenties, 39% in their thirties, 26% in their forties, and 15% in their fifties.
I’ve got a few favourite all-you-can-eat restaurants in the Kansai area, and we tend to visit about twice a month. Rather than just listing them, let’s try a Google Map of the locations.
Click here to visit my custom Google Maps map.
My number one top spot is Solviva atop of the Hankyu Terminal Building in Umeda. It’s 1,890 yen for a varied selection of Japanese farm cooking, with some organic veggies here and there. There’s about forty dishes to choose from, then another ten or so desserts, organic coffee and tea, and a wonderful view from the counter seats looking north over Osaka. There’s also an alcohol menu with interesting shochu, from boring old wheat or potato base to milk via corn and sesame.
I also discovered this interesting page of reviews of other all-you-can-eat locations in Osaka.
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japan.internet.com recently reported on a survey conducted by JR Tokai Express Research into mobile phone web browser awareness issues. The article reported on here focused mainly on mobile search.
Between the 20th and 23rd of April 2007 330 PC using members of JR Tokai Express Research’s monitor panel completed a private internet-based questionnaire. 54.8% of the sample was female, 18.2% in their twenties, 40.9% in their thirties, 27.0% in their forties, 10.3% in their fifties, and 3.6% in their sixties.
I’ve only used mobile search once or twice just to see how it worked, and I used Google’s mobile portal to do the search. It was relatively successful, and it also offered a railway timetable look-up service specifically for Japan, but even though I was using a new Japanese mobile phone, the encoding was all wrong and I just for question marks instead of kanji. Since that experiment, however, I’ve never had the urge to search again.
Note that the “full browser” mentioned in Q1 refers to using a browser that attempts to render standard web pages completely. I’m not sure what the exact qualifications for a full browser is, but I would expect CSS, Javascript and frames at least to be supported. Note that this site can render in some of the newer non-full standard mobile phone browsers, and commenting even works, but all my CSS and Javascript elements are not rendered. Also note that some mobile phones come with full browsers as standard, but for other phones a separate browser needs to be downloaded. In addition, NTT DoCoMo call their service “Full Browser”, au’s is “PC Site Viewer”, and SoftBank’s is “PC Site Browser”.
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Between the 1st and 5th of April 2007 MyVoice looked at the use of mobile phone address books.
17,310 members of the MyVoice internet community completed a private internet-based survey. 54% were female, 2% in their teens, 19% in their twenties, 39% in their thirties, 26% in their forties, and 14% in their fifties.
Note that almost all Japanese mobile phones come with phone book facilities, with the latest models providing facilities such as multiple phone numbers and email addresses per name, photographs, physical addresses, web addresses, and additional notes.
When I last upgraded it was a cheap upgrade through work, so I didn’t get my address book copied, and although I borrowed the latest version of a mobile phone backup package that claimed to support my phone, it failed miserably to copy due to the cable not working correctly, so instead I had to resort to using my miniSD to backup and restore, but still it couldn’t keep group information intact over the transfer even though I was changing from DoCoMo mova to DoCoMo FOMA. My wife had similar mail group issues at an official DoCoMo shop. Because groups are such a basic feature, it really it pretty disappointing that shops can’t copy that information, as I’m sure that perhaps puts people off upgrading, knowing that they have to tweak all their address book settings.
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japan.internet.com recently reported on the results of a survey conducted by goo Research into collecting and exchanging points online.
Between the 13th and 15th of April 2007 1,085 members of goo Research’s online monitor group successfully completed an online private questionnaire. 51.7% were male, 24.2% in their twenties, 22.2% in their thirties, 21.8% in their forties, 21.3% in their fifties, and 10.5% in their sixties.
I think this survey is focused not on using shopping points to obtain discounts when purchasing more items, but on points gathered not just from shopping but from other activities such as participating in surveys. Note that since goo Research monitors receive points for filling out surveys, I am not sure if the respondents were to asked to exclude their goo points from their answers.
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infoPLANT recently published a survey that looked into the usage of fee-charging mobile phone sites. The fieldwork for the self-selecting survey was conducted over a week from the 3rd to 10th of April 2007.
5,207 people chose to fill out a public questionnaire available through the NTT DoCoMo iMode menuing system. 39.4% of the sample was male, 3.2% in their teens, 31.0% in their twenties, 43.4% in their thirties, 19.0% in their forties, and 3.4% aged fifty or older.
This survey is notable for one figure I’d been hoping to find in regards to infoPLANT, namely how many of their respondents are on fixed-price data programs, or パケ放題, pakehoudai, plans as they are known in Japanese. This survey had five in six of the respondents on these deals. This higher than I expected figure should always be borne in mind when reading future or past infoPLANT self-selecting iMode surveys, as this class of user does not need to worry about, for instance, the rather horrendously large bill that can be run up downloading an audio track; nearly 9,000 yen on a standard plan for a 5 megabyte audio file, and still around 450 yen on DoCoMo’s best discounted packet deals. Investigating further, the percentage of customers who have unlimited packet plans was around 27% as of September 2006 (see page 27) and about 30% at the end of 3Q 2006 (31st December 2006) (see page 2), so one can see the bias inherent in this kind of open survey conducted by infoPLANT.
Also note, even if you are on an unlimited packet program, if you use your mobile phone as a modem, these data packets are not free; stories have been recently circulating about people not reading the fine print correctly and running up over a million yen in data transmission charges!
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Between the 1st and 5th of April 2007 MyVoice surveyed its online community regarding their feelings regarding global warming. New visitors may want to check out previous environmental-themed surveys.
17,500 people completed a private internet-based questionnaire. 54% were female, 2% in their teens, 18% in their twenties, 40% in their thirties, 26% in their forties, and 14% in their fifties.
I’ve not seen “An Inconveient Truth” myself, although my wife did go to see the Japanese subtitled version. She did find the message compelling, but she couldn’t recommend the movie itself as she felt the tone was too hectoring, although I don’t know if that was a fault with the original version or of the translation.
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With Japan’s Golden Week holidays almost upon us, and with the submission deadline for the April Japan Blog Matsuri just 10 days away, I would like to present my entry, another slightly strange from a Western point of view ranking survey from goo Ranking on what people would most like to eat after returning from a foreign holiday. The survey was conducted between the 20th and 22nd of March 2007.
One may note that a number of the entries in the list are actually recently-imported dishes: number 9, curry, is the first obvious one, but Japanese “curry” (stew with a hint of spice, usually) and sticky rice is quite a different experience from a real curry such as one might find in the UK.
This survey might also go some way to explaining why so many Japanese, even those going as far as the International Space Station, find they need to pack a few Cup Noodles in their suitcases.
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Spring is sprung and the sap is rising, and young thoughts turn to love, so let’s enjoy a recent survey from goo Research, conducted between the 27th and 29th of March 2007 amongst 555 single youths, most in their twenties, from all over Japan, on the matters of love and laughter. Note that the male-female split is not reported.
It does seem a rather disjoint pair of topics, but the answers are rather interesting. I do find it amusing that half as many women are in love than men, which perhaps prompts the question “what exactly does ‘love’ mean to you?” Alternatively, perhaps it is the unwillingness of men to commit themselves to a serious relationship, or just that women have stronger passions than men.
Note that the word used in the survey for being in love is 恋愛, ren’ai.
Let’s get a little personal, ack, no, let’s not get too personal, as I’ll sound far too soppy! I’ll just say it was common values that was the main spark for me, as well as that special magic, and it didn’t take too long (a month and a half?) for me to realise that we would marry. Oh, and we met through an “Other” method.
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