世論 What Japan Thinks

In addition to the the question posed in the headline, I’d like to ask my Tokyo-based readers if your Japanese friends have tried taking you there, and what did they want to take you to there?

I discovered today another new-to-me web site, but this time it’s of a rather prominent research company, Macromill Inc. They’ve got some interesting opinion poll results on their site, but one that caught my eye was this one on the image of the towns within Tokyo. Over one day at the end of September last year they interviewed 1,032 people from their online monitor group, evenly split 516 male and 516 female, and each sex also evenly split with 129 people in each age band from between 20 and 29, 30 to 39, 40 to 49, and 50 years or older.

This is a slightly old survey, and since I am not a Tokyo expert by any long shot, I’ll skip a full translation (although give me a shout if you would like to see more!) and instead focus on the most relevant portion for my readers, a couple of images related to foreigners. Note that although the Japanese word 外国人, gaikokujin, means anyone from overseas, it is usually taken as referring to non-Asian foreigners. (Is it? I and many other English-speaking foreigners often assert this, but is there any evidence to support or disprove this supposition?)

Also note that Q1 specifically mentions foreigner friends, so it is presumably not just where they would recommend the average tourist should go. On the other hand, the respondent may be thinking of a friend from abroad coming to Tokyo for the first time, so perhaps it is the tourist spots that they are thinking of?
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He sent me a trackback on teeth, but due to something a bit funny at my end, Chase the Gaijin’s trackback ended up in a totally wrong post so I had to delete it, so to make up for it I thought I’d make this post.

DIMSDRIVE Research recently looked at a hot topic in Japan, the recent drastic reduction in tuna quotas. Between the 13th and 18th of December they interviewed 7,149 people from their monitor group by means of an internet-based private survey. 43.5% of the sample was male, 1.0% in their teens, 15.8% in their twenties, 35.3% in their thirties, 27.9% in their forties, 14.4% in their fifties, and 5.6% aged sixty or older.

When I translated an earlier opinion poll by DIMSDRIVE Research on tofu, I postulated that that was the nation’s favourite food, and this survey doesn’t disprove my guess.

Perhaps connected with this survey is my recent examination of a press release by the Institute Of Cetacean Research on whaling. It might be interesting to perform a survey see if people would switch from tuna to whale if the quotas for the former were cut and the latter increased.
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NOTE: The results of the 2008 New Year Postcard lottery are now available.

If you haven’t thrown away all your New Year postcards from this year, dig them out and check the serial number on the bottom right of the cards.

If the six digits are 157788 or 457190, then you’ve won top prize, and can choose from a holiday in Hawai’i, a holiday within Japan, notebook personal computer, DVD recorder and home theatre kit, or a digital SLR camera.

If the last four digits are 5161, 7093, 7485, or 9614, then you’ve won second prize, a choice of local delicacies.

If the last two digits are either 64 or 79, you’ve won the third prize, two inoshishi (wild boar)-themed stamps, which can be picked up by presenting your winning postcards at any post office.

I seem to have won nothing.

japan.internet.com recently reported on a survey conducted towards the end of December by Cross Marketing Inc into the topic of online avatars. They interviewed 300 prescreened people from their monitor pool who were either very or a little familiar with, or had just heard of avatars. The sample was the usual for Cross Marketing equal split of males and females, and a fifth in each age category, from teens to those in their fifties.

Avatars are these wee icons or animated characters that represent one’s person in online spaces; I plan to set up a MyBlogLog community for my site so my visitors can see each other, or at least an idealised representation of themselves. I did plan to try out one or more of the services listed below in order to try to design a little electronic me, but they all seem to choke on Opera. At least that saves you from having to witness my hamfisted art skills…
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goo Rankings (forgive me publishing yet another goo Ranking!) published a summary of the top-linked sites from their blog service.

Since this is not a survey, there’s obviously no demographic information, instead it had been generated from looking at all the outgoing links from all the blog entries posted during the month of December.
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I must apologise for the terrible performance of my web site this week; I’ve had trouble posting stories, so no doubt a lot of you have also had issues connecting, as the noticable drop in my visitor count seems to suggest. Unfortunately it seems to be a hopefully passing problem with my provider, so please bear with me whilst they fix the issues.

This is also a good opportunity for me to remind you that you can get all the latest postings through my RSS feed, and also keep up to date with the comments, avoiding most of the problems surrounding site slowness.

You may also have noticed on the right-hand column that I’ve added a new advertising block for Text Link Ads, which hopefully will add some small advertising text links. If you’re interested in their service from the advertiser side, note that you can also get a bonus $100 in FREE links by spending $25 on advertising. Note that both the links are affiliate links – I get $25 if you sign up. Although currently there is no advertisement category for Japan (as far as I can see) on their web site, if a few of my fellow Japan bloggers sign up, perhaps we can get Japan added as a top-level category.

Finally, to tie the two subjects together, I’ve noticed that a few sites now have small text ads in their RSS feeds. What are your views on them? Would you mind them in my feed? Of the ones I’ve seen, I don’t find them offensive but I do find them not terribly worthwhile.

I noticed via Japan Probe, via Scoop NZ, that there was a press release issued by the Institute Of Cetacean Research, which, if Wikipedia’s article is to be trusted, is basically not much more than a front for the Japanese government for justifying whaling. In the press release there is much statistical jiggery-pokery that I shall try to get to the bottom of.
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japan.internet.com finally got out of holiday mode and published their first summary of a survey for the new Year, one conducted by JR Tokai Express Research on the 28th of December on the prospect of domestic robots. 330 members of their research monitor group successfully completed the internet-based questionnaire. 46.7% of the sample was male, 13.3% in their twenties, 51.2% in their thirties, 27.0% in their forties, 6.4% in their fifties, and 2.1% in their sixties.

This is a subject that I have previously reported on, but in the year or so since I did that translation there seems to have been a bit of a shift in favour of robots.

Note that in Q2, the “robo-partner” answer does seem to mean seeing the robot as a spouse!
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DIMSDRIVE Ranking recently published as part of their 106th ranking survey what award people would like to win. 5,086 people were asked what they thought over five days at the start of December 2006. Note that some of the awards are made-up.

For some reason Japan sticks “-ist” on the end of many of these awards, such as the Best Jeanist mentioned in the headline. Perhaps if Alfred Nobel had been born Japanese, rather than lend his name to those prizes, he might very well have named them “Best Brainist”. Or perhaps not.

In sort-of related news, Tokyo Times covers the recent Best Pearl Dresser award in its own inimitable style.
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