世論 What Japan Thinks

With horizontal rain hammering on the window right now, it may seem rather unseasonal to look at a recent survey published by infoPLANT on the subject of ice cream, but the market even in the off season for ice cream seems rather strong. Over a week in the middle of January 8,653 people, 66.6% female, self-selected themselves to complete a survey available through the menuing system of NTT DoCoMo’s iMode.

I eat ice cream perhaps two or three times a month, but most of that is either as a fixed dessert item on a dinner menu, or as a small scoop accompanying a slice of cake. During the summer, once every few weeks we’ll buy a cone, and when we go to the theatre we usually buy a single-serving cup during the interval, but that’s about it.

And what is the correct English term for a single-serving cup/mini-pot of ice cream? Cup ice cream sounds awfully like a Japanese-invented term. You know you’ve been in Japan too long when you forget British-English and can only remember Japanese-English!
Read the rest of this entry »

Recently, Macromill Inc. published the results of a survey into Saint Valentine’s Day. They interviewed 515 female company employees aged between 20 and 39 from their internet monitor group over two days towards the end of January this year. In the sample 57 women or 11.1% were aged between 20 and 24, 169 or 32.8% between 25 and 30, 182 or 35.3% between 30 and 34, and 107 or 20.8% between 35 and 39.

In Japan, Saint Valentine’s Day actually incorporates two different celebrations. Before I mention them, note that this day is just for women to give stuff to men; we get our chance next month, on White Day, the 14th of March. One celebration is, of course, the one we all know in the west, giving a present to your object of affection. The second is “male appreciation day”, where 義理チョコ, giri chocolates, are given to men, usually work colleagues, in theory given freely as an expression of thanks, but the word “giri” can be translated as “obligatory”, indicating that most female employees have to pay for chocolates for all the men in the office. Mari Kanazawa covers this issue today in her own inimitable style, as does Shari at My So-Called Japanese Life.

At work there’s quite a fair haul of goodies – there is the standard chocolates (Royce, from our company shop), then some Zunda beans Pretz (I think they are a Valentine gift anyway!), and a huge selection of hand-made cakes by one of my colleague’s wife, whose hobby is making cakes for us. I had a lovely cherry sponge, done to the quality (including the obligatory double-wrapping) of commercial cakes.
Read the rest of this entry »

Please let me know if you notice anything funny – I see last month’s top 10 has disappeared from the left-hand side, but not the right.

It was remarkably painless, but I have a funny feeling something serious must be wrong…

japan.internet.com published the results of a survey conducted by goo Research into what brands people associate with internet services. Over three days at the start of February 1,083 people from their monitor group successfully completed a private online questionnaire. The male-female split was half-and-half to three significant digits; there was one more male than female respondent. 13.5% were in their teens, 11.5% in their twenties, 14.9% in their thirties, 18.2% in their forties, 20.0% in their fifties, and 22.0% in their sixties.

On a statistical note, recently goo Research’s samples seem to be more balanced both sex and age-wise; they used to be around 55:45 male to female and biased towards the thirties age group, but this is the second time recently I’ve noticed a more balanced age spread.

I reported on a similar survey conducted this time last year, so it may be instructive to cross-reference. Google has surpassed Yahoo! for search; this trend is also visible, but not so strongly, in actual search engine use. Regarding shopping, Rakuten Marketplace retains their huge lead over Amazon, perhaps due in part to their bordering-on-spam use (abuse!) that they make of your mail address, one reason I will never shop there. They do not have a one-click unsubscribe option, and they freely share your mail address between all the shops there. Even if you just use the Y-Not! free email greeting card service that they bought out last year, they automatically subscribe you to their system and pass the address on to their shops. You have been warned!
Read the rest of this entry »

According to the Center for Multicultural Information and Assistance (多文化共生センター) and reported on in the Kobe Shimbun, the easiest places in Japan for foreigners to live in were the prefectures Kanagawa and Hyogo (my home), and the cities of Kawasaki, Yokohama, and Osaka (my previous home city and the location of my employer).

Doing poorly were the perfectures of Ibaraki, Hiroshima, Kochi, Fukuoka, Oita and Kagoshima on twenty to twenty-nine points, and right at the bottom with nineteen or less points each were Aomori, Aichi, Saga, Nagasaki and Okinawa. It is significant to note, I think, that Aichi has many, many foreigners residing there working for Toyota and related companies, Nagasaki is rather international, and Okinawa of course has lots of USA military bases.

UPDATE: Scott and Durf have provided information (see comments below) on how the points were awarded. I’ll translate the list of questions tonight, if possible.

Recently, japan.internet.com reported on a survey performed by JR Tokai Express Research looking at what people were drinking when they were on the net. 46.1% of the respondents were female, 23.9% in their twenties, 41.2% in their thirties, 26.7% in their forties, 4.8% in their fifties, and 3.3% in their sixties.

In Q1, in the “Other” category, two people admitted to boozing at work… I drink black tea and mineral water at work, and filtered tap water at home.

I’ve had an idea for ages that a wonderful device for home PCs would be a “surf-a-lizer”, basically a breathaliser for your PC. You set it up (when sober, of course) to require you to breath into the bag before opening certain programs or accessing certain sites, stopping you sending embarrassing emails, mad online shopping sprees, or logging onto an online game only to get your character savaged by monsters in an attack of beer-fuddled bravado.
Read the rest of this entry »

Over two days back in October last year, goo Research interviewed 2,215 members of its business monitor community regarding office design issues. The particular aspect of office design that they were interested in is what might be called “functional design”, namely design with the aim of improving employee motivation or communication, or other such positive effects. The sample consisted of 14.5% in their twenties, 40.5% in their thirties, 32.5% in their forties, 10.7% in their fifties, 1.6% in their sixties, and 0.1% aged seventy or older.

Regarding employment status, 8.9% were at board level, 77.3% were regular full-time employees, 2.3% contract full-time employees, 1.5% were short-term contractors, and 10.0% had other status. 8.2% were in real estate, 23.9% in manufacture, 4.7% in finance and insurance, 6.1% in distribution, 1.3% in utilities, 5.3% in import/export, 22.8% in the service sector, 8.6% in the public sector, and 19.0% in other industries. 18.6% worked in companies or between 1 and 9 employees, 13.5% in those between 10 and 49 employees, 8.1% with 50 to 99 employees, 19.4% with 100 to 499 employees, 8.0% with 500 to 999 employees, and 32.4% in companies with 1,000 or more employees. The sex breakdown is not given, however.

My office is a pretty typical Japanese office; open plan with token partitions that barely hide you from other members, although looking around other parts of the building we have it lucky in having even just these token walls. I find that the offices are exceptionally noisy, as people just shout across the place, and sadly I dislike headphones of ear buds, so cannot get much respite from the din.
Read the rest of this entry »

japan.internet.com reported on goo Research’s 13th monthly RSS usage survey. Over four days at the end of January and start of February they interviewed 1,078 members of their internet monitor group. The demographics were 52.9% male, 15.7% in their teens, 19.8% in their twenties, 18.2% in their thirties, 17.4% in their forties, 16.8% in their fifties, and 11.2% in their sixties.

Although the number of people who have used RSS readers has increased slightly since the last survey, the actual numbers of active users has actually decreased by about 1.6 percentage points. The reasons for this change are not discussed within the presented results, although this could just be an insignificant statistical fluctuation.

As for visiting sites that are in my reader, as most of them are blogs I do tend to often visit, as I may want to follow the comments. I do in fact subscribe to the comment RSS feeds of my most favourite site, but will always click through when I see an interesting comment just so I can see it in context.
Read the rest of this entry »

Just in case you’d thought I’d forgotton about it, here are the posts for the inaugural Japan Blog Matsuri, on the theme of matsuri, or festivals.

First up is James at Japan Probe, who, sort-of getting into my recent theme of organ transplants, submitted Videos of the Hounen Matsuri: An amazing fertility festival, which as you might suspect from the title, features none-too-work-safe videos of a massive willie. If you’re impressed, you still have time to get to this year’s event on the 15th of March in Komaki, Aichi (north of Nagoya).

Next is John from Fried Chicken Arcade, who covers the Dontosai Matsuri at Osaki Hachiman Shrine in Sendai, where people burn their New Year decorations for good fortune in the coming year.
Read the rest of this entry »

With my recent post on mobile phone upgrades being picked up by Mobile Opportunity, I thought it would be interesting to look at a similar topic reported by japan.internet.com, this time a look by Cross Marketing Inc at the Spring 2007 mobile phone models. On the 31st of January and 1st of February 300 people from their internet monitor group successfully completed a private internet questionnaire. As usual for Cross Marketing, sex and age groups were evenly divided; 50:50 male and female, and 20.0% in each of the age groups from teenage to those in their fifties.
Read the rest of this entry »