世論 What Japan Thinks

On the first of December Japan’s biggest correspondence course company, U-CAN, and Jiyu Kokumin Sha (a book publishing company) released the results of a survey into the top words or expressions to come into vogue this year. The voting was conducted, I believe, by means of a public web poll though both of their web sites, but no demographic information is available. On the web site linked above you can find all sixty candidate words that the winners were selected from.

The handkerchief prince meme became one of the most irritating ones for me; it seemed that almost ever comedian picked up on it, and the merest dab of their foreheads with a blue hanky was enough to send the studio audience into paroxisms of mirth.

Regarding Metabolic Syndrome or middle-age spread, and to stray rather far away from the topic, I had an intersting discussion at work this afternoon regarding the best way to tackle this issue. This year’s winter bonus seems to have been spent in one of two ways; first, on the Panasonic Joba, a decidedly non-bucking bronco for your living room. One colleague recounted a story how one of the old guys in her English class is a cowboy freak, so at home indulges in cosplay by dressing up in a cowboy outfit, saddling up and watching John Wayne movies. As a result, his English is rather advanced but contains many expressions that died in the Wild West. Second, the Wii. Quite a lot of people old enough to know better queued overnight for the release and spent the weekend working out to Wii Sports.
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UPDATE: I have now translated the results of the Kanji of the Year 2006 survey.

Continuing with the words of the year theme, I’ve had a couple of people searching for this, so I had a quick look up on the web, and I found this page (in Japanese, of course) that describes how to enter – the deadline is the 13th of December. Note that as there is a prize draw, and to prevent multiple entries, you need to register for an account before voting for your character for this year. My bets for this year are either 美, the kanji from 美しい, utsukushii, beautiful, from Prime Minister Abe’s catch-phrase, “Towards a beautiful Japan”, or 格, kaku, which means status or character, and features in popular phrases such as 品格 and 格差, hinkaku and kakusa, dignity and disparity. As for my actual vote, I haven’t decided yet.

The results are announced sometime around the New Year at Kiyomizu Temple in Kyoto.

japan.internet.com recently published the results of a survey conducted at the start of November by goo Research into the use of scheduling tools. 1,089 people from their monitor group, 43.2% male, successfully completed a private internet-based questionnaire. 21.2% of the survey group was in their twenties, 44.4% in their thirties, 24.4% in their forties, and 10.0% in their fifties.

We have groupware at work which has quite a nice reminder feature, but the rest of the time perhaps 10% of my private schedule is recorded in my mobile phone, with the other 90% delegated to my wife! She uses both a tabletop calendar (this year is a free Hello Kitty one we got as a present from a print shop when we ordered death in the family postcards; a rather incongruous gift, I thought) and her mobile phone for that.
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Following my recent 100 top goo Japan search keywords of the year translation(with the top 10 covered in detail over at Recognize Design), we now have the top 50 words looked up in goo’s English to Japanese dictionary in the first 10 months of the year. As with the search terms, one suspects that the four-letter words have been filtered out. This time there is no score for each of the keywords to reflect their frequency.

I don’t know why vomit sneaked in at the bottom, and redundance seems a bit odd, but redundancy also maps to the same definition when looked up.

I also thought it was quite funny seeing bear in 30th place as I do get an occasional search like “how to say bear in Japanese”. Oh, it’s 熊, くま, kuma, just in case you are here actually searching for bear in Japanese. That’s the Japanese for the animal kind of bear, anyway.
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infoPLANT recently performed a survey into the consumption of news. Over a week at the end of October 5,973 people, 62.1% female, chose to complete the public survey available through iMode.

Although infoPLANT used its usual method of collecting self-selecting respondents through NTT DoCoMo’s iMode mobile phone menu system, thus resulting in a bias towards those who are heavy users of mobile phone, the data forms an interesting point of comparision to a recent translation of a more balanced survey of the news consumption habits of the average person. We cqan immediately see from the pie charts that there are a quarter less daily paper reader amongst the mobile phoners, but even though there are presumably a lot of heavy users in this sample, newspapers still outdo all internet-based web services put together.

The survey also looks at iChannel, a new non-free but low cost service from DoCoMo that pushes headlines to mobile phones. I tried out a free preview of it but it seemed rather ordinary, and being a stingey git, paying a couple of hundred yen per month was just a bit too much for me!
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Since I’m in a backlinking sort of mood, here’s a quick heads-up for a fun weekly series that Japan Probe is running on polling Japanese middle school students. Totally unscientific, of course, but interesting none the less.

Here’s a silly wee survey from goo Ranking on ___-only carriages on trains. The fieldwork was carried out over four days towards the end of October by means of a public poll, so no demographics are available. The scores in the survey represent the percentage of the top vote-getter that each option got.

Note that the Japanese term, ○○専門, maru-maru senmon, perhaps translates better as “specifically for whatever“, even though the most familiar form, 女性専門, josei senmon, is usually translated as “women only”. I’ll stick with “only” in the table, even though some may make more sense as “specifically for”.

I suspect that many of the votes were for enforcing segregation, such as for keeping the drunks or overly-perfumed (or even screaming kids…) away from the normal people. My vindictive vote would be for a bad breath-only car, but given the vapours in the average morning rush train, perhaps three-quarters of the carriages would need to be dedicated to those whose oral health was lacking.

In position number 7, strong heating or cooling, is perhaps in response to many lines having in summer a “cool” car, with the air conditioning set a couple of degrees higher. However, in my experience the default temperatures are far too strong, so I can only imagine that people are wanting a sauna or ice blocks!

I have previously translated a more serious look at women-only trains.
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MutantFrog Travelogue has another great story, this time on how advertising agency Dentsu set up the whole Town Meeting business (allegedly). I”ve just added them to my Blog Roll – I should have done it ages ago as they’ve been publishing some pretty good and juicy news from Japan that usually doesn’t get aired in the English language.

goo Ranking recently published the results of the top 100 search keywords used through their search engine for the first 10 months of this year from January 1st to October 31st. The top word, either individually or extracted from multi-word searches, got 100 points, and the rest of the words got a percentage rating for their frequency. I presume that the adult keywords have been filtered out.

There’s perhaps some interesting analysis that can be done of this data, but I’ll leave that for someone else to tackle! Links have been added to some of the search terms.
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DIMSDRIVE recently published the results of a survey into what people get up to in the bathroom. They interviewed 6,436 people from their internet monitor group by means of a private internet-based poll. 41.3% of the sample was male and by age 1.0% were in their teens, 17.2% in their twenties, 37.1% in their thirties, 27.4% in their forties, 12.7% in their fifties, and 4.6% aged sixty or older. This is a subject where I’ve previously translated another survey, so it might be useful as a cross-reference.

There are lots of interesting figures here that back up various preconceptions that I think many of us have about the Japanese love of bathing. I used to just have a quick shower or bath once or twice a week before I married, but I’ve been coerced into washing every day, and now quite miss a bath if for some reason I can’t have one, such as when on holiday. However, I only usually just jump into the tub for a minute or less to warm myself up just before bed time, with the majority of the bathroom time spent under the shower.
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