世論 What Japan Thinks

Over the first 5 days at the start of the New Year, MyVoice surveyed its monitor group to find out their views regarding foreign language learning. 10,504 people successfully completed the survey; 54% were female, 2% in their teens, 19% in their twenties, 40% in their thirties, 26% in their forties, and 13% in their fifties.

Note that putting Q1 and Q3 together we see that around half of the poplation would like to study English but currently aren’t doing anything about it. You may want to cross-reference the results here with a similar survey on English last year, also conducted by MyVoice.

I’m trying to find a way to tie this into the news today that 7 NOVA “English” “teachers” got busted for drugs, but I’m failing miserably.
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japan.internet.com recently reported on the results of a survey conducted by JR Tokai Express Search into company intranet accounts and security. They interviewed 330 people from their monitor group on the 24th of January employed in the public or private sector. 94.8% were male (very high for them – it’s usually 80% or so, so I wonder if this is a misprint?), 17.9% in their twenties, 41.5% in their thirties, 32.4% in their forties, 7.3% in their fifties, and 0.9% aged sixty or older.

I’d have to answer “don’t know” to Q2 and Q3 too. Rather timely considering this survey, we’ve just had email from the IS team to say that the minimum password length for the intranet is being increased, plus it must contain at least one alphabetic and one numeric or symbol character, and from next month the password must be changed once every 30 days. As a bonus, we can also put a space character into it.

We have now at least four or five passwords between the user and the corporate network: desktops have BIOS password, Windows log in password, router password, and intranet password. For notebook computers it’s BIOS password, disk encryptor password, Windows log in password, wireless LAN smart card password, and intranet password. All these passwords are on different lifetime schedules, and of course most of them cannot be automated. All I can forsee is that the number of PostIt Notes around monitors will increase!
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Just a quick pointer to an article they posted there on various statistics regarding marriage in Japan.

infoPLANT recently published the results of a survey they conducted into the consumption of soft drinks. Over a week towards the end of December last year 5,933 people chose to complete a survey promoted in the NTT DoCoMo iMode menuing system. The basic demographics were 37.5% male and 62.5% female.

It might be interesting to cross-reference these results with one earlier this month into water consumption and last year’s look at can coffee consumption. As well as the water mentioned previously, I’m a Diet Coke fan and also like soba tea and 爽建美茶, soukenbicha, a lovely blend of various grasses and teas. Although I’m a regular black tea drinker at home, I don’t touch bottled tea as it’s usually undrinkably sugar-laden, as is much of the canned coffee. Black coffees are straight, but I can’t cope with the bitterness, so I stick with the 微糖, bitou, slightly sugared, which are usually paletable. I don’t actually buy them myself, but we have a monthly workplace casual meeting where the company provides soft drinks and nibbles.
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Not having learnt their lesson from the recent natto scandal, another television station broadcast information about the newest wonder food tonight, with even my wife, who has had her confidence greatly shaken by the Aruaru Daijiten fiasco, immediately reached for her mobile phone to add it to our shopping list for tomorrow.

This miracle food is the humble enoki mushroom (can’t stand them myself, though!), and to enjoy the full benefits of its astonishing power, take one plastic pack of said fungus, rip it open, stick your nose in and inhale deeply, and in an instant you will be overwhelmed by…

…the smell of strawberries. Yes, Trivia no Izumi’s back, with other stunning revelations such as a top-class Yabusama – horseback archer – found a Kyotei speedboat the most pleasing modern ride to shoot arrows from, beating off competition from other modes of transport such as a roller coaster and an escalator.

goo Rankings published another one of their silly yet slightly unsettling polls recently, when they looked at what things are impossible to do now that they are an adult. The original Japanese version is phrased to have a suggestion of regret, I feel. The survey was conducted between the 18th and 20th of December last year.

I can’t really imagine the thought processes that are required to make hopping in the bath with their parents the second most notable thing that adults cannot do.
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japan.internet.com recently reported on the results of a survey conducted by JR Tokai Express Research into what bosses thought about their subordinates blogging (and other unreported topics related to business blogs). They interviewed 330 people managers in public and private companies; a mere 5.2% were female (see other surveys on this subject), 0.9% in their twenties, 20.0% in their thirties, 53.9% in their forties, 21.2% in their fifties, and 3.3% in their sixties. Just these demographics alone are fascinating!

My direct boss has read this blog on occassion, but I always have the concern that perhaps someone in the personel department may be monitoring it for any statement that I may make which are against some company policy or other. Therefore I try to avoid telling about how really horrid wonderful my job is. Here’s one bit of hopefully non-confidential information: I am from 5pm today the longest-serving foreigner in our division, as the guy ahead of me just quit. I don’t know whether to to be proud or depressed.

Have any of my readers in Japan got into trouble for blogging? Hopefully nothing as serious as an American resident in Korea who got sacked for blogging about how Korea’s view on one aspect of history may not be correct.
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Not that this has anything in particular to do with Japan, but since I wrote my Wikipedia NoFollow plugin for WordPress there’s been quite a bit of action.

First, Andy Beard was good enough to write it up and promote it around a few websites. In addition, he also pointed out I had a bug in my comment script, whcih I’ve hopefully now fixed.

Next, there’s a Drupal plugin written by greggles that does the same thing for that platform.

Paul Montgomery at Tinfinger makes a case for dropping Wikipedia from Google and Andy Beal at Marketing Pilgrim is whipping up support for cutting off Wikipedia. Google Blogoscoped describes how they prevent spam links and many others discuss the topic in many languages. Track the nofollow tag at del.icio.us for the latest news.

From this website’s perspective, looking at my top 10 search phrases there is just one that is in direct competition with Wikipedia, and if anything I stand to gain by the addition of rel=”nofollow” as the two above the Wikipedia entry, both linked from Wikipedia, seem to be more poorly linked to other sites, so I perhaps could very well stand to gain from them losing their Wikipedia links.

Over the first five days of 2007, MyVoice conducted a survey within their internet monitor group into the matter of mineral water. This is the third time they have conducted this survey, but the first time I have translated it! 10,732 people successfully completed the private online questionnaire. 54% were female, 2% in their teens, 19% in their twenties, 39% in their thirties, 27% in their forties, and 13% in their fifties.

My almost every day mineral water is the below mentioned Crystal geyser sparkling lemon (or sometimes lime), although Suntory’s Tennensui is also rather nice. However, all this talking about mineral water reminds me of a Penn and Teller show on the subject, which also reminds me that I am glad indeed that Penta Water does not feature on the list.
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With the recent kerfuffle in the news about the impending closure of 2 channel, or at least the threat of a forced seizure of the domain name, or perhaps just business as usual, japan.internet.com reported on goo Research’s survey into what people thought about the rumoured closing down. Between the 19th and 21st of January they interviewed 1,059 people from their monitor group. 51.9% were male, 26.9% in their twenties, 25.1% in their thirties, 24.6% in their forties, and 23.4% in their fifties.

Note that a previous survey showed that 56% of a sample of mainly business professionals have visited there, so I would have through that there might have been a stronger showing of people with definite opinions about the news, especially considering that over three quarters of the total population have visited the site, and just 4% have not heard anything about it. Also note that as far as I can see, neither my blog nor my name appears on that site, but I’m not sure if that’s a good or a bad sign!
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