世論 What Japan Thinks

Not that this has anything to do with surveys, but I saw that the BBC is starting a monthly photo competition with the topic for this month being a good one for Japan, one’s journey to work. This might be a good excuse to get your mobile’s camera out and snap away inside or outside the train. Perhaps I can ride the Thomas the Tank Engine train again and take a snap of it?

japan.internet.com recently reported on a survey conducted by Cross Marketing Inc into New Year postcards. They got 300 valid responses to their private internet-based survey from their monitor pool; exactly half were male, and 20.0% in their teens, 20.0% in their twenties, and so on up to 20.0% in their fifties.

New Year postcards are even more required than Christmas cards were back home, so this good showing by PCs and mobiles is quite surprising for me. I will look out for another survey that might indicate to whom people plan to send the virtual and real greetings to see if there is any pigeon-holing of contacts.

It’s getting time to decide on our New Year postcards; although we usually do most communication by email, there’s something tangible about a real 年賀状はがき, nengajou hagaki, New Year postcard that electronics just can’t replace. We will order the front design from some internet site, most likely, and do the addressing by specialist New Year postcard software.

For your information, next year is the Year of the 亥, inoshishi, or wild boar.
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If you thought yesterday’s survey was a strange thing to ask about, here’s an even odder one – goo Ranking on one’s favourite cloud. As usual for goo Rankings, there is no demographic information, and the top-scoring costume gets 100 points and all the rest get rates as a percentage of the top rank. This survey was also conducted over a three day period towards the end of September.

Just in case you’re not familiar with the term contrails, it means the condensation trail left behind jet aircrafts, but is also the source of many chemtrail conspiracy theories (warning – secure tinfoil hat before clicking link).

In addition, the auspicious clouds answer includes, I believe, the popular Japanese folk belief that earthquakes are preceded by very red clouds at sunset.

Living in Japan, one would, however, get the impression that the favourite clouds are from the fog of cigarette smoke. My personal favourite is my tag cloud.
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goo Ranking published today the results of one of their ranking surveys into what costumes people would like to try on in private, for both men and women. As usual for goo Rankings, there is no demographic information, and the top-scoring costume gets 100 points and all the rest get rates as a percentage of the top rank. Both surveys were conducted over a three day period towards the end of September.

Note that for some of the costumes it does not specify if it is male or female, such as for the women selecting Harry Potter; whether it is Harry himself they want to dress up as or as Hermione is not clear. However, I feel it is safe to assume that cross-dressing in private is a popular desire.

I’ve also linked a few of the costumes to work-safe material, so don’t worry too much about clicking on the links.

Finally, despite evidence to the contrary, dressing up in a kilt (outside of schoolgirl uniforms, perhaps) was not popular.
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[part 1] [part 2]

goo Research recently published the results of a survey they conducted into internal electronic communications within businesses. Over three days at the start of August they interviewed 2,133 people in employment (full-time only, I believe) from their internet monitor group. The sex breakdown is not listed, but judging by other surveys’ demographics, a figure of over 80% male would not be unexpected at all.

Jumping on the recent mixi float bandwagon, this half of the survey looks in a bit more detail at the subject of Social Networking Services, or SNS. Whereas I can get behind the idea of corporate blogging, I don’t think that SNSs would work too well. Perhaps I am of the generation (or personality) that never really got into the whole Instant Messenging boom, of which I see SNSs being an offspring of. A mailing list where answers can be considered and replied to at leisure, or a blog with decent RSS support (or even wikis) would seem more productive than a more free-form free-for-all SNS.
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[part 1] [part 2]

goo Research recently published the results of a survey they conducted into internal electronic communications within businesses. Over three days at the start of August they interviewed 2,133 people in employment (full-time only, I believe) from their internet monitor group. The sex breakdown is not listed, but judging by other surveys’ demographics, a figure of over 80% male would not be unexpected at all.

This is a subject I’d love to talk about, but company confidentiality issues prevents me from feeling free to let rip. In addition, I still don’t fully understand Japanese working culture, so the exact reasons for some of the issues I experienced still escape me, although management control is one important factor.

One thing, though, that I thought would be good for many large companies would be something like the halfbakery, only with more serious ideas. I had an interesting idea last night regarding mobile phones but, as Q1SQ indicates, communication with other teams with more direct responsibility for phones is problematic, so the idea will just die.
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Over five days at the start of October MyVoice surveyed 12,563 members of their online monitor panel by means of a private internet-based questionnaire on the subject of video calling from mobile phones. The sample was 54% female, 3% in their teens, 21% in their twenties, 39% in their thirties, 25% in their forties, and 12% in their fifties.

My new phone has video calling facilities, but I think I’d be too shy to use it more than just once for the novelty value. I can think of perhaps times when I’m searching for something in the shops and if I phoned up my wife she could help steer me towards the required goods, but one problem in large shops is that there is often no signal, and anyway just sending a photograph may suffice.

Advertising seems to have dropped video calling as a selling point – it’s mostly music, One Seg, and the seemingly doomed Push To Talk that get most publicity time.
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It’s a wee while since I’ve done a news round-up, so here goes.

First, there’s a rather new site, Trans-Pacific Radio, that does mostly politics-related stories on Japan and East Asia, often covering the news that other services either don’t translate or just scratch the surface of. They’ve got both a blog and regular podcasts (or netcasts, if you prefer), which I must admit I’ve not listened to yet, so please pay them a visit.

Talking of netcasts, now my new phone has a built-in audio player, what I’d really love to find is an RSS feed to SD Audio converter utility, so I could automatically add the casts to my mini SD card for listening to on the way to work. Anyone know of such a beast? Also, does anyone recommend a good tool to downsample video to mobile phone size, or to strip off the audio track?

Talking of mobile phones, I managed to view this blog, including the graphs all nicely scaled down, on my Panasonic P702iD, but when I tried adding a comment, Spam Karma crashed (the only problem I’ve ever had with this essential comment spam elimination tool for all bloggers) when trying to do the Captcha. The comment was safely quarantined, however, and could have been recovered if necessary.

Finally, I think I’ve got a touch of the flu coming on, so if I miss a couple of days over the weekend, you know what’s wrong with me.

infoPLANT recently looked at the purchase and consumption of canned and other prepared coffee – this excluded take away coffee, I believe. They gathered their self-selecting survey by means on a menu option through the DoCoMo iMode menuing system. Over a week at the start of October 6,480 successfully completed the survey, with 65.7% of the respondents being female.

News of a new, heavily promoted can brand entitled Deepresso is doing the rounds of the blogs right now, but I personally prefer a hot and steamy Sixty-Nine in the mornings to get me going.

A bit of coffee trivia – apparently “morning service”, a discounted breakfast most coffee shops do consisting of a hot drink, perhaps toast, boiled egg, three lettuce leaves or a hot dog, was initially introduced in the ’50s or ’60s by a restaurant in Namba, Osaka, where it consisted of a cup of coffee and two cigarettes. Nowadays, although they no longer offer the cancer sticks along with the drink, the fug in the average joint allows one to secondhandedly inhale.

Talking of cancer, if you’re a non-smoker, may I suggest that you avoid Roots brand coffee, as that is made by Japan Tobacco.
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Back to one of my favourite subjects, Japanese teeth! This time, it was MyVoice who conducted the survey of 13,741 members of their internet monitor panel. The survey was conducted at the start of June this year, with 46% of the respondents male, 3% in their teens, 22% in their twenties, 39% in their thirties, 24% in their forties, and 12% in their fifties or older.

I’m just finished my regular dental check, although this time due to various reasons it was about seven months since the last one, so I needed one filling replaced due to some decay beneath it. All in all, including ultrasonic cleaning, the bill came to just over 3,000 yen with bog-standard Japanese national medical insurance.
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