世論 What Japan Thinks

[part 1] [part 2]

Last weekend goo Research, in conjunction with Yomiuri Weekly, released the results of a survey into what people thought the coming year may bring. For a week spanning the end of November and the start of December 11,648 members of goo’s online monitor group successfully completed a private internet-based questionnaire. 53.2% of the respondents were male, 5.9% in their teens, 18.9% in their twenties, 29.9% in their thirties, 21.5% in their forties, 11.9% in their fifties and 11.8% aged sixty or older.

Q7 is interesting in that the more negative effects of the flood of retiring baby boomers seem to be more in people’s mind than the positive benefits.

Note that there was an extra question in the survey regarding people’s favourite female “announcers” (Japanese uses that English word, but their role is more like an MC or an MC’s assistant, or even just a TV personality), but I find the obsession slightly – I can’t really think of a suitable word, but their role seems to be to smile prettily, be demure, then get married off to a sports personality once they approach their television sell-by date. Therefore, I’ll skip that question.
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A quick note that I’ve just hacked up a plugin that you may like to use in response to this news.

[All other text moved to the above permanent page to avoid duplicate content issues!]

[part 1] [part 2]

Last weekend goo Research, in conjunction with Yomiuri Weekly, released the results of a survey into what people thought the coming year may bring. For a week spanning the end of November and the start of December 11,648 members of goo’s online monitor group successfully completed a private internet-based questionnaire. 53.2% of the respondents were male, 5.9% in their teens, 18.9% in their twenties, 29.9% in their thirties, 21.5% in their forties, 11.9% in their fifties and 11.8% aged sixty or older.

The economic outlook in Q4 seem very bleak, but remember this is the viewpoint of the average person in the street, not the pronoucements of politicians, as there seems to be a lot of pundits suggesting that the recent economic growth in Japan has not trickled down to the workers, but instead has been used for investment or passing on to shareholders.
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Over one week in the middle of December infoPLANT gathered responses to a survey on baseball. 5,272 people, 57.4% female, successfully completed a self-selecting survey through DoCoMo’s mobile phone iMode menuing system.

In Q2, almost a quarter of all men and a sixth of all women questioned said they attended a professional baseball match at a stadium last year, a figure I find a little hard to believe, quite frankly, making me suspect there might have been a lot of self-selecting bias going on. I shall have to investigate other surveys to see how the numbers compare.

In Q3, not surprisingly the team most people saw was the season’s champions, Nippon Ham Fighters, but perhaps surprisingly they were the only team with more female than male viewers, no doubt helped in part by the biggest Ham of them all.
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In order to get a bit more of a community and interaction going on here with my fellow Japan bloggers, I have decided to hold a Japan Blog Matsuri (outline and guidelines described there), basically a chance for everyone to recommend their best, or favourite, or most under-appreciated blog post for the month, based around a different theme every month.

The theme for this month, closing date midnight Japan time on the 31st, is rather appropriately “matsuri”. Take it any way you want, not just as the obvious report from a festival, but apparently it can also mean tangle or jasmine the plant, not the tea. Posting on 政, “matsurigoto”, politics, is however perhaps stretching it a bit. Visit this page to submit your posts, or just email me directly.

To get the ball rolling, if you are keen to contribute to this month’s Matsuri or even host in future, please post a comment! It would also be nice to get a logo designed, if anyone has any artistic ability.

Why contribute or host?

From a purely altuistic point of view, think of all the good you’re doing the community! From a pragmatic point of view, submitters will be getting an extra link (perhaps keyword-rich?) and the associated traffic, and perhaps might pick up an extra regular reader or two in the process. For the host, they’ll hopefully be links back from the blogs you collate, with associated traffic, plus of course going down on the record of hosts on the Japan Blog Matsuri home page.

Finally, if you fancy doing some domain name speculation, if someone purchases a jbmatsuri-based site URL and designs some sort of landing page, I would be open to discussing setting the primary URL for the Japan Blog Matsuri to that web site – this would be a free transaction, naturally, but I’d have to feel happy about who I was entrusting the Matsuri to. Having it as an unofficial home page would be no problem to me, and of course easily doable without my consent.
jbmatsuri

UPDATE: marxy beat me to the punch!

Just a day after my posting of the top 100 natto-related searches, I see that Hakkutsu! Aruaru Daijiten’s producers have admitted to making up the whole story!

Some of the lies and distortions of the truth made by the program included:

1. Some people in the USA did lose weight on a diet program based around boosting DHEA levels, but the before and after photos the program used to illustrate weight loss were of totally different people!

2. A foreign professor from Temple University in Japan was interviewed in English and he did actually make the translated comments attributed to him, but thanks to selective editing, some of his caveats or qualifications of his statements were omitted.

3. They said that two of the eight people they tried the natto diet out on saw drops in their cholesterol levels, but in fact their levels were never measured.

4. They claimed that people eating just one pack of natto per day had lower isoflavone levels than those eating two packs, but they in fact just invented these numbers.

5. Similarly, DHEA levels in the blood of their eight volunteers were also invented!

japan.internet.com reported on a survey conducted by JR Tokai Express Research into the use of public wireless LAN connections. On the 7th of January they interviewed 330 people employed in public or private enterprise. 80.3% of the sample was male, 15.8% in their twenties, 41.5% in their thirties, 30.3% in their forties, 10.0% in their fifties, and 2.4% in their sixties.

Note that in another survey last year, almost half of all interviewed used a wireless connection at home, so it isn’t a lack of awareness holding back people, although it could of course be a lack of portable machines, although since JR Tokai Express Research’s monitor base is heavily business-person oriented (it mainly advertises though, and awards points for discounts on, shinkansen bullet trains) one might expect there to be a high percentage of people with portable devices capable of accessing WiFi access points. Perhaps the full survey results analyse this aspect, and why almost three in five want to use public WiFi but haven’t yet.

I’m writing this whilst sitting in the biggest Freds Cafe (lovely bread, well worth a visit!) in Hankyuu Umeda station in Osaka, but there is absolutely no WiFi signal present according to NetStumbler. Anyone know about the availability of free (and legal!) WiFi in central Osaka? Apart from Starbucks, who I refuse to patronise, where else is there?
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UPDATE: This diet does not work!

I’m sadly unable to find any surveys related to the biggest buzz on the English-language internet last week, the release of Apple’s iPhone, so instead I’ll report on goo Ranking’s look at the biggest buzz on Japanese web sites, namely what keywords people are using in goo’s search engine to look for natto. The data was collected between the 7th and 16th of January 2007, or Heisei 19 in the Japanese calendar, thus the title.

Natto is fermented soya beans, and if you search YouTube for natto you can see rather a lot of foreigners (and one cat) trying to eat it. (link flood coming up!) The shortage of natto has been widely blogged about, and was sparked by Aruaru Daijiten, a popular health (and quackery) show, who in their first show of the New Year introduced the natto diet, which is basically one pack of natto before breakfast and evening meals, then eat just as much as you normally do, assuming the natto hasn’t put you off your food altogether! The most beneficial way to eat natto is to stir it at least 50 times then leave it to stand at room temperature for 15 minutes. It’s something to do with assisting the production of DHEA to increase your metabolic rate, apparently.

In other related news, World Net Daily (I can’t believe I’m linking to that rag!) reported how soy beans turn you gay; natto may be one of the most potent soy bean products, if this video is to be believed! (Note – not really recommended for viewing at work, and probably highly offensive to the typical World Net Daily reader)
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japan.internet.com reported on an interesting survey recently conducted by Cross Marketing Inc into news consumption. Between the 10th and 12th of January they interviewed 300 mobile phone users from their monitor group; the sample was split 50:50 male and female, and 20.0% aged 18 or 19, 20.0% in their twenties, 20.0% in their thirties, 20.0% in their forties, and 20.0% in their fifties. Note that the full survey (available at a fee) covers many genres of news other than just the politics and technology groups featured in this article.

In particular regarding political news coverage, the results presented here have data points that are reassuring and others that are a bit depressing. The good news is that a relatively small one in five uses the internet as their primary politics news source. Whilst there are exceptions, like my favourite, Trans-Pacific Radio’s Seijigiri, certainly in the English-language world the perception I have is that many people gravitate towards the http://www.MyViewIsCorrectAndYouAreWrongWrongWrong.com sort of site. The bad news is that television is the most popular medium. Although I am in no way an expert on Japanese television news, not even a regular follower, I do get the impression that mainstream bulletins have little or no analysis, and there are few in-depth current-affairs programmes to rival, for instance, Newsnight in the UK, although I do hear that that’s gone downhill recently.

Personally, about the only current affairs program I enjoy (even though it is a little celebrity-heavy at times they at least give the lightweights little air-time, but that Kevin guy makes me want to throw stuff at the telly!) is “Bakusho Mondai’s Hikari Ota’s If I Were Prime Minister…”. That’s a login-free New York Times story, and it describes the show far better than I could. It’s worth catching every Friday 8pm to 9pm on NTV.
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japan.internet.com today reported on the results of an opinion poll conducted by goo Research on the subject of search engines and advertising keywords. They interviewed 1,099 ordinary members of their monitor group by means of a private internet-based questionnaire. 52.8% of the sample was male, 24.9% in their twenties, 21.6% in their thirties, 22.2% in their forties, 20.6% in their fifties, and 10.7% in their sixties. This article is only a excerpt from their full report, which seems to have lots more relevant statistics regarding this subject.

I’m very curious to know whether search keywords are used as heavily in other countries. The majority of television adverts seem to have keywords, often with no URL, greatly outnumbering those with only URLs. I also wonder if any of these Japanese advertising search terms have been usurped by googlebombing, as they do seem ripe for targeting.

Interestingly enough, the page on “Google bombing” in Wikipedia is translated into 17 other languages, but Japanese is conspicuous by its absence. Googlebombing (Google 爆撃, bakugeki) only appears once in Japanese Wikipedia in the middle of another page discussing SEO techniques. Surely there must be some well-known Japanese Googlebombs, or even Yahoobombs, since that engine is the winner in Q1?
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