世論 What Japan Thinks

With お歳暮, oseibo, the end of year gift-giving season upon us, perhaps you need to send a present to someone and don’t know what is best? Not to worry, goo Rankings recently published the top 30 edible Oseibo gifts people would be happy to receive. As usual, we just have a ranking as a relative number of votes for each gift.
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japan.internet.com recently reported on goo Research’s fourth regular Social Networking Service (SNS) survey, conducted at the start of December amongst 1,093 members of their internet monitor pool. 54.2% of the respondents were female, 2.4% in their teens, 21.7% in their twenties, 38.5% in their thirties, 24.2% in their forties, 9.8% in their fifties, and 3.5% aged sixty or older.

It’s interesting to notice the distinct (but predictable) split in the sexes in Q1SQ2 – women use SNSs primarily to communicate, men use it for finding others who share their hobbies.

Oh, and I’m still to use the invitation to mixi I got sent by one of my readers perhaps over six months ago…
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With the New Year soon to be upon us, infoPLANT took a look at the subject of drinking during the end of the year holidays. The data provided below is part of a 15 question survey available for purchase from their web site. For the survey, 800 internet users completed a web-based survey over the first two days in December. The sample was equally split 50:50 male and female, and 25:25:25:25 in each age group from the twenties to the fifties and older.

This promised to be an interesting survey, but turned out to be rather dull once I started translating it. Might as well post it, however, but aplogies in advance!
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As part of their 104th Ranking Research, DIMSDRIVE Research asked 5,003 members of its monitor group why it was good that they were born Japanese. This poll was conducted towards the end of November.

When I first read this I laughed out loud at the item ranked second, and I think everyone else who has lived in Japan will raise at least a wry smile when they see probably the most groan-worthy stereotypical nihonjinron-like answer.

If I had to choose the top reasons why I’m happy that I was born Scottish, I’d probably choose the Scottish socialistic (with a small ‘s’) character, the great outdoors, our football team that can inspire both laughter and tears, something to do with our culture and heritage, and, of course, that I wasn’t born English.
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[part 1] [part 2]

With the Christmas present season upon us and New Year sales soon to come, DIMSDRIVE Research took a timely look at ownership of portable games machine. Over a week in the middle of November 7,508 people from their monitor group successfully completed an internet-based questionnaire. 44.8% of the sample was male, 64.9% married, and 51.7% had children. By age, 1.1% were in their teens, 16.6% in their twenties, 37.1% in their thirties, 27.7% in their forties, 12.7% in their forties, and 4.8% aged sixty or older.

Talking of wireless, when I visited the Pokemon Centre in central Osaka recently there was an awful lot of people sitting around outside playing on their Nintendo DSes, presumably with whoever was around.

Note that the survey was conducted before the release of either the PS3 or the Wii, so for the last question, no-one already owns either of the machines.
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[part 1] [part 2]

With the Christmas present season upon us and New Year sales soon to come, DIMSDRIVE Research took a timely look at ownership of portable games machine. Over a week in the middle of November 7,508 people from their monitor group successfully completed an internet-based questionnaire. 44.8% of the sample was male, 64.9% married, and 51.7% had children. By age, 1.1% were in their teens, 16.6% in their twenties, 37.1% in their thirties, 27.7% in their forties, 12.7% in their forties, and 4.8% aged sixty or older.

The fad for brain training amongst the elderly is still apparent in this survey, although one must remember that since this poll is conducted amongst people who are internet users, and since internet use is presumably lower amongst the elderly, it would be foolish to draw too many conclusions about the whole over-fifty age group from the results presented here.

Looking at Q4A, there is perhaps the suggestion that people are using the PSP as not just a games machine, but also as a music or video player when they are out and about.
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Watching Aru Aru Daijiten (“Encyclopedia of Living” is the official translation) on television last night, they were talking about diagnosing problems with internal organs via acupressure, that is acupuncture pressure points, but just pressing them instead of sticking needles in. Whether on not you accept the medical validity or not (I personally do not), the program did, and presented some rather dubious statistics to back up their thesis, and to top it all off, accompanied it with some extremely poor, almost dangerous, advice.

One of the figures that stuck in my mind was that from their 40 guinea pigs, ordinary members of the public aged from 30 to 50 or so, 18 had pain when pressing either or both of the pressure points associated with kidney problems. These 18 were then given blood tests and six were found to actually have unusually high figures for protein in the urine or other kidney problems. Whilst everyone in the studio was amazed, to me that was just one in three who was correctly diagnosed, and there was not even the simple comparative figure of checking the other 22 to see if more or less than seven had similar kidney problems.

Next, when they did liver problems, they claimed (with no evidence to back up this statement) that with a simple one-minute massage of three pressure points one could metabolise alcohol faster and avoid hangovers!

With the people from the sample above where they had detected kidney or liver problems, after just one week of thrice-daily massage of the pressure points, they showed that on average these people had lowered their cholesterol or other indicators by about 5% to 10%, but failed to mention if these people had in addition changed their diet or started taking medicine.

Finally, my pet hate as a holier-than-thou ex-moderately-heavy drinker, was that when two of the regulars confessed to starting drinking before lunchtime and continuing until late at night on a regular basis, they were treated almost with respect for being so strong, and rather than being advised to cut down, massage of said pressure points was the recommended and sufficient activity. There was also no mention of the most basic disclaimer like “if symptoms persist, please see a doctor.”

For the benefit of all readers residents of Japan, just in case you’ve failed to notice it, the norovirus is currently doing the rounds; not a computer-borne one, but a real life food poisoning-related disease. Japundit has some advice on preventative methods, and although I’ve got no hard statistics on it, I remember hearing that at the start of the month cases were at roughly four times the usual rate, and since then there seems to have been many, many more cases. It’s possibly fatal to children and aged people, and with no current vaccine, please take care out there! One of the tabloids was suggesting that up to 10 million in Japan, or almost one in ten, could succumb over the winter.

japan.internet.com today published the results of a survey conducted by JR Tokai Express Research into the trendy buzzwords of 2006. 330 members of their monitor pool employed in public or private enterprises completed a private internet-based questionnaire. 79.1% were male, 17.9% in their twenties, 44.5% in their thirties, 26.7% in their forties, 9.7% in their fifties, and 1.2% in their sixties.

I read today on Gen Kanai’s blog that Joi Ito has just been appointed chairman of Creative Commons, so with Creative Commons being the most confusing of the words for the Japanese, this survey suggests one issue he may need to approach.

Note that most of the words have come into Japanese either using the English spelling or transliterated into katakana, so that makes it harder for the average person to figure out the meaning. The only one meriting a translation is 集合知, shuugouchi, Wisdom of Crowds, the term that describes Web Two-Point-Zero sites like for instance digg, where the theory goes that the masses will ensure that the most interesting stories will naturally get promoted up to the top of the pile. As one could probably predict, however, the stories that make the front page tend to be those promoted by the top users, and those that attract their attention more often than not are “Top [Ten/Twenty/100] [Tips/Tools/Downloads] for [Linux/Photoshop/iPod]“.
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Another word of the year list for your entertainment, this time as selected by the editors of (or contributors to?) the annual magazine 知恵蔵, chiezou, Store of Wisdom, a publication that covers the theme of current language matters.
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