世論 What Japan Thinks

ITmedia News recently reported on some research by Video Research Interactive into where F1 women (F1 just seems to be the marketing code-word for the women between the ages of 20 to 34) spend their time on the internet. There were two sets of figures recorded; one on which sites had the biggest percentage of F1 women, and which sites had the largest absolute numbers of F1 visitors. The data was collected over an unstated period, but I suspect it was for all of 2006.

It’s perhaps interesting to note that mixi has a significantly high number of young women users. I’m also rather surprised to see Geocities as the seventh overall most popular site in Japan. I thought the US version, at least, was basically dead.
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As you may have noticed in the right sidebar, I have a new featured link, this time the potentially rather useful Piqniq.jp, a Social Networking Service/blog/forum targeted towards gaijins in Japan, it seems, although I must admit to not having used it! I hope you’ll pay them a visit or two, and I hope they’ll stick around for a bit, as it’s always nice to get relevant advertisers for a change.

If you’d like to be a featured link too, please visit my advertising options page for details.

infoPLANT recently took a look at one of the first things that strikes many visitors to these shores, the interest in and habits surrounding high-class brand-name clothes, accessories and jewelry. Although this research was conducted by infoPLANT’s usual method of a self-selecting call for participants sent out through NTT DoCoMo’s iMode menuing system, the self-selecting nature should not have too averse an effect on the replies, I believe.

Demographics

Over a week between the 20th and 27th of February, 4,989 mobile phone users successfully completed the survey. 34.9% of the group was male, 2.8% were in their teens, 32.8% in their twenties, 43.1% in their thirties, 18.3% in their forties, and 2.9% aged fifty or older.

I don’t think I’ve actually ever bought a posh brand item myself, and the only interest I have in them is ensuring I drag wifey away as quickly as possible whenever she sets her eyes upon them! She used to be quite a bit of a brand freak, but she’s mostly recovered now! As I’ve got small wrists, I can’t even wear the average posh watch without it looking far too chunky, not that I’d want to anyway, as Rolex wearers always gives me the impression of being dodgy second-hand car salesmen.
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Over the first five days at the start of February, MyVoice asked their online monitor group about exercise.

Demographics

13,158 people successfully completed the online questionnaire. 54% of the sample was female, 2% in their teens, 19% in their twenties, 40% in their thirties, 26% in their forties, and 13% in their fifties.

Note that walking in Q1 implies walking for the sake of exercise, not just walking through the station or on the way to work, unless it is deliberately for exercise, although the exact dividing line is unclear and up to the individual to choose. I must admit to being in the couch potato class; indeed recently due to changing the line I commute by, I’ve eliminated a 10 minute walk between home and the station. Plans to join a gym last Autumn were never realised.
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Bill over at Rising Sun of Nihon has picked the short straw and has graciously volunteered to host the third Japan Blog Matsuri, this time on the subject of Uniquely Japanese. I think that’s a subject with a lot of potential for collecting together some interesting posts, so either create a new post or dust off your favourite recent post on that subject, and send it in either through the widget below or directly to Rising Sun of Nihon by the end of March, please.
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japan.internet.com recently reported on a survey conducted by JR Tokai Express Research into server operating systems in small and medium-sized businesses. On the 10th of March 330 people employed in companies with less than 100 people, working in management, board-level, sales, technical or other specialist positions completed the survey. It may be worth comparing the results here with a previous survey on desktop operating systems.

Demographics

86.4% of the sample was male, 5.2% in their twenties, 39.1% in their thirties, 41.8% in their forties, 8.8% in their fifties, and 5.2% in their sixties.

Being in a large company, I don’t count for this survey, although our intranet seems to be powered by some sort of Linux-based system, I suspect. Within each team, however, file servers tend to be Windows; no-one is terribly interested in setting up anything more advanced, and in fact… ahh, perhaps I might get into company confidential information, so I’d better stop now.
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Perhaps you’ve already noticed one or two messages appearing at the top of this site’s pages; initially I had the What Would Seth Godin Do plugin installed, but I fancied taking it further, so by using functionality from the WordPress Browser Detection plugin, I came up with a small plugin called Recommend Google Pack that recommends Google Pack to new visitors running Explorer on Windows (in addition to the existing WWSGD part), to see if people would help support What Japan Thinks by downloading the packs. Sadly, I’ve no customers yet!
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japan.internet.com recently reported on a survey with a slightly odd topic conducted by goo Research regarding receiving mail from MAILER-DAEMON. Just in case you are wondering what this is, legitimate replies from the legitimate MAILER-DEMON means that mail counldn’t be delivered, but often spam or viruses use fake MAILER-DEMON messages to try to get past filters.

Demographics

Between the 9th and 11th of March, 1,072 members of the goo Research monitor group successfully completed a private internet-based questionnaire. 51.8% of the sample were male, 25.3% in their twenties, 23.0% in their thirties, 22.4% in their forties, 21.4% in their fifties, and 8.0% in their sixties.

In Q1SQ3 about three in five read MAILER-DAEMON messages at least some of the time, yet it is one of the vectors of spam and viruses. Note that for some reason most Japanese MAILER-DAEMONs speak in English, and only very rarely does Japanese feature, even in my employer’s internal system, even though it seems like all you need to do is to provide a simple template file for the new error message, in the case of Postfix at least. Does it incorrectly handle Japanese and other double-byte characters, I wonder?
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Just in case you missed their podcast, I’d just like to remind you of another great post by the guys at TPR. This one looks at the facts and myths regarding suicide in Japan, and reveals, to my surprise, that Japan is not an outlier in the worldwide figures. I strongly recommend you pay them a visit, and if you haven’t already, please listen to the content in the archives; I’m not a podcast fan at all, in fact these guys are the only people I listen to, and I always try to catch every episode they do.

Watching my favourite television program tonight, Bakushou Mondai’s Hiraku Oota “If I were Prime Minister”, they did a quick street poll amongst 100 typical Shibuya high school schoolgirls to see how well they recognised the faces of the current and the previous Prime Ministers of Japan. only 44 out of 100 could get Abe san’s first and last names correct, yet 94 out of 100 remembered Jun chan.