世論 What Japan Thinks

Mari’s Diary covered a survey by ranking Japan on men’s bad habits that put women right off them. I must admit to being a big girl’s blouse with cockroaches, my desktop is covered in figurines, my parking is rather so-so although my excuse is that I don’t drive regularly, I sometimes play mobile phone games in the train, my wallet’s stuffed with point cards, I use lots of emoticons in my mobile phone mail, my writing is terrible even in English, and sometimes my keypressing gets a bit loud. Sigh, 9 out of 19!

I read a report today of a Chinese student who got deported from Japan for gold-farming in an online game, that is, collecting in-game items and selling them off for cash, making at least 6 million yen in the process, and possibly up to 150 million. According to the terms of not just the student visa, but most other types of visas, only if you apply for “Permission to engage in an activity other than that permitted by the status of residence previously granted” can you work for up to 28 hours per week on a side job. Now, many of my fellow bloggers have AdSense, JList or other affiliate programs on their sites that must be making them a wee bit on the side, and some of the harder-working bloggers are perhaps putting more than 4 hours a day into their blogs. One might even argue that being a JList affiliate classes you as engaging in a prohibited “visual-transmitting-type adult entertainment business”.

So, if you are getting the click-throughs rolling in, my advice to you would be to either spend your profits locally or get your cash paid into a foreign bank! Except that would still be potentially illegal so I couldn’t condone such activity, and other suitable CYA wording.

Let’s spend a romantic moment or two together looking at a survey from goo Ranking conducted back towards the end of September into what pair of items unmarried couples would want to go shopping for with their lover, for both women and men. You hopefully know all about the lack of demographics and how the scoring works already.

As for me, maybe I’m just a tight-fisted git, but I always enjoy buying mobile straps together. Currently my phone features the following pair items: one 50th anniversary Miffy (actually, her brown dog), three Tottoros in a chain, one Hello Kitty Kobe Airport opening memorial Jumbo Kitty, and one Hello Kitty Kobe Weather-Cock House Weather Kitty Cock.
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japan.internet.com published the results of a survey conducted on the 11th of November amongst 330 members of JR Tokai Express Research’s internet monitor group on the topic of printers. 67.3% of the 330 people who completed the private questionnaire were male, 21.8% were in their twenties, 43.0% in their thirties, 26.1% in their forties, 6.7% in their fifties, and 2.4% in their sixties.

Q1 is confusing as how does someone not know if they have a printer at home or not! I like my home Canon, mostly because the separate ink cartridges for each colour works out cheaper in the long run. However, I’ve heard (but not quite calculated the exact costs myself) that it is cheaper to order digital camera photo prints rather than running them off yourself, although the convenience aspect perhaps outweighs the cost saving.

In Q3, I’m not really sure why people would have a printer connected to their PC by more than one means, but apparently up to 6 people do.
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japan.internet.com recently published the results of an opinion poll conducted by JR Tokai Express Research into the subject of online stocks and shares trading. They interviewed 330 people employed in public or private enterprises; 82.4% of the sample was male, 10.9% in their twenties, 49.1% in their thirties, 32.7% in their forties, 6.7% in their fifties, and 0.6% in their sixties.

I know there’s a few people in my office who do online trading, but I don’t know what sort of portfolio they have outside of the company’s own employee share system, or how active they are. I used to have a few shares from privatisations back home, and come to think of it, I might even have some hiding somewhere that I’ve lost touch with. Didn’t Standard Life go private recently and give away many free shares to the policy holders?
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japan.internet.com recently published extracted highlights from goo Research’s 28th regular blogging survey. This time, one of the reported statistics was on why people quit. At the start of November 1,041 members of goo Research’s monitor pool replied to the online questionnaire. 53.5% of the sample was female, 2.3% in their teens, 24.0% in their twenties, 38.7% in their thirties, 21.7% in their forties, 10.1% in their fifties, and 3.2% aged sixty or older.

I felt the answers to the quitting reason were a bit difficult to interpret (from a logical point of view, not from a translation one!), especially the top reason, given by over two-thirds, of updating being just too much of a pain – 「更新が面倒になったから」, “henshin ga mendouni nattakara”. I’ve not used the Japanese blogging services so I don’t know how user-friendly they are, but was it formatting the content that was awkward, or maintaining the design, pruning spam, replying to comments, or other housekeeping tasks?

For me personally, I’ve thought about quitting for time reasons and a lack of search engine positioning; I don’t try any particular SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) techniques, but with nearly 500 distinct articles in Google and friends, I get a disappointingly low number of visits – I just recently got through 200 per day excluding one dodgy pr0n keyword that gives me just a bit too much traffic.
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Recently, infoPLANT, in conjunction with C-NEWS, released the results of a closed internet survey into the consumption of supplements. Over two days at the very end of October they interviewed 1,500 people, 750 male and 750 female, and 300 in each of the age groups from the twenties to the sixties and older. This 50:50 sex split was present in each of the age groups too.

A little anecdote – a friend of mine had his blood lipid (cholesterol) level recorded as just over the safe limits (although Japanese safe levels are lower than Western levels, apparently) and all he did way take two Nature Made fish oil capsules a day, still maintaining the same diet otherwise, and after six months his levels had dropped 10% back into the safe zone.
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japan.internet.com recently reported on a survey conducted by JR Tokai Express Research into the topic of mobile phone design. 330 members of their monitor pool chose to reply to the private internet-based survey. 64.2% of the sample were male, 18.5% in their twenties, 44.2% in their thirties, 27.0% in their forties, 8.2% in their fifties, and 2.1% in their sixties.

My current mobile is a matt black adult elegance (not quite designer-ish enough to be an art phone) P702iD, but my current favourite design-wise is NEC’s credit card N702iD, especially in the bold red colour. The black “magnetic strip” actually operates as a ticker for mail preview or news headlines, etc.
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Since my favourite delivery food survey translation seems to have gone down quite well (unlike some of the mayonnaise combinations), let’s look at goo Ranking’s survey to find out what are people’s favourite topping on their delivery favourite, pizza. Towards the end of October they collected the votes from a public poll. The top vote getter gets 100 points, and all the rest pro-rated relative to the number one.

My favourite, which features nowhere on this list, is artichokes.
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Here’s one of these goo Ranking surveys that leaves me scratching my head rather a lot. This time it’s on fire prevention, a pertinent question as this month is fire prevention month – apparently this is the driest month of the year. As usual, no demographics, just a ranking for the relative votes in each category. Note that many people in Japan use either paraffin or gas heaters with naked flames.

If I were asked about this, the top answers I would give would be perhaps ensuring smoke detector batteries were fresh, or not smoking in bed if I were a smoker, but here in Japan, the second-top answer is not putting out rubbish the night before so as not to tempt arsonists. I can’t say I’ve ever given a thought to the subject,and in Japan is there really a significant amount of it or is it the result of the media focusing on the topic? There are posters everywhere about being aware of it, and the news often has reports of serial arsonists, but… I must check out the relevant statistics some time.
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