世論 What Japan Thinks

Just in time for the start of the real summer season (two months or more of 30°C and more days and nights), at the start of July MyVoice looked at the use of deodorants. They got 12,473 valid responses from their private internet-based questionnaire to their monitor group. 54% of the responses were from women, 3% were in their teens, 21% in their twenties, 39% in their thirties, 25% in their forties, and 12% in their fifties.

If anyone asks me what to buy before they come to Japan, my first recommendation is always anti-perspirant; it is, in fact, the only product I get shipped from abroad. Other foreigners suggest that Japanese brands are not so strong, but I suspect it might just be a combination of unfamiliarity with brands ,and that stick or gel type deodorants are almost non-existant here. I have personally only seen tiny almost lipstick-sized tubes that I presume would be pretty useless for any serious application; most of the sales here are, as you can see, of sprays.

There is a belief (or is it a meme? Or nihonjinron) that the Japanese don’t sweat much; whilst I can’t point you to any international surveys or literature to confirm or dismiss that idea, my personal experience is that they do sweat, and often profusely, as on the rush hour train I will often see people with huge beads of sweat even though they have done nothing more than a light stroll to the station. I suspect one contributor to this is the stupidly over-cooled trains (and buildings, etc), as the constant changing from cold to hot to cold mustn’t be kind to the body’s internal temperature regulators. The headline figure indicates that regardless of quantity of sweat produced, the smell of it is a concern to most. Of course, all Japanese could smell but a quarter just don’t care…
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As part of their 85th round of Ranking Research carried out over the end of June and start of July, DIMSDRIVE Research asked 5,367 people from their monitor group what they would want to be if they change into something else for just one day.
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DIMSDRIVE Research recently published the results of their 84th Rankings survey. This time one of the questions was on what mobile phone features are really not needed at all. They questioned 5,950 people from their monitor group at the end of June by means of a closed internet questionnaire.

With most newer phones being loaded with more and more features, with a corresponding increase in development costs (you’d scarcely believe me if I told you how much one of the recent DoCoMo 90x series cost in person-months!), this is perhaps a timely survey that may give the phone companies pause for thought.

Note that SMS features on the list – almost every phone has a far more advanced mail client, so the SMS is just there for legacy support. Another strange answer is the wireless LAN; as far as I am aware, it is not a feature that is widely available apart from one or two specialised SmartPhones. Perhaps people were just lumping BlueTooth and infra-red support together under this category?

This poll also raises more questions than it answers. Why is BlueTooth right up there? Does it indicate consumer ignorance of what it does? Why do more men want rid of games rather than music playback?
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japan.internet.com reported on goo Research’s 26th monthly survey on blogging. 1,075 people from goo’s internet monitor group successfully completed a private questionnaire at the start of July. The demographics were 58.4% female, 3.3% in their teens, 25.6% in their twenties, 39.4% in their thirties, 22.0% in their forties, 7.8% in their fifties, and 2.0% aged sixty or over.

Looking at the headline, if you discount the “don’t knows” as having too little traffic to bother counting, on a good day I’m in the top 2% percent of Japanese blogs traffic-wise! Of course, another explanation is that the bloggers with more traffic are too busy keeping their sites ticking over to bother answering questionnaires.

It also may be instructive to cross-reference these results with over 90% of bloggers being anonymous and most bloggers earning peanuts in affiliate schemes.
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japan.internet.com recently published a survey conducted by Cross Marketing Inc into telecommunication karaoke. That’s a bit of an ugly term, but it’s the translation my dictionary offers for 通信カラオケ, tsuushin karaoke, or karaoke machines that can connect to a server to download the latest music. Over three days in the middle of July 300 members of Cross Marketing’s monitor team who go to karaoke at least once a year replied to a closed internet questionnaire. As usual for Cross Marketing, there was a 50:50 male-female split, and 20% in each of the five age groups; 18 to 19 years old, twenties, thirties, forties and fifties.

I’ve not been to karaoke for ages and ages; when I was dating, we went quite a few times, but love is deaf as well as blind, so since we got married my wife’s told me that my singing voice is horrible; yes, I knew already that I was tone-deaf (音痴, onchi, or tone-stupid in Japanese), but I lost all confidence after being told that! A fellow foreigner friend of mine also often frequents a karaoke room, partially for the inclusive all-you-can-drink deals and partially to satisfy his love of 演歌, enka, Japanese folk-songs (sort-of anyway; read the link).
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Today I will present three ranking surveys for the price of one, all on the theme of water usage at home, all carried out by DIMSDRIVE Research as part of their 85th Ranking Survey over the period of about a week at the end of June and start of July. First is using water for drinking at home, next is water for tea and coffee at home, and finally water for cooking at home.

Japan’s tap water is basically safe, but in the big cities it tends to smell a bit due to the various treatments it undergoes. Most restaurants, for example, serve water that at least has been through some sort of treatment, but what exactly they use in their tea is anyone’s guess. At home, we have a built-in water purifier that we use for drinking and tea and coffee, except for when making a large pot of tea (usually 麦茶, mugicha, barley tea) for refrigerating, when we use plain old tap water. The exact reason for this is beyond me. Our previous flat had some nasty black spots (tar or pitch, perhaps) that occasionally flaked off making filtration absolutely necessary.
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japan.internet.com, in conjunction with goo Research, recently published the results of a survey into what people think when blogs crash and burn. They interviewed by means of a private internet questionnaire 1,084 people from their monitor group, 57.1% female, 22.9% in their twenties, 43.4% in their thirties, 24.4% in their forties, and 9.2% in their fifties.

I must admit to quite enjoying a flame war on the whole, as long as the level of abuse remains relatively intelligent. However, this being the internet, things usually deteriorate to either mindless flaming or argument by Google, where people quote the first URL they find that agrees with their position.

Now I think about it, I do dislike a real flare-up; intelligent abuse is usually not serious, I feel, and will soon blow over.
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Last month japan.internet.com reported the results of a survey conducted by JR Tokai Express Research regarding the use of support call centres. They interviewed 330 people employed in both the public and private sectors; 83.0% were male, 10.0% in their twenties, 41.8% in their thirties, 32.7% in their forties, 14.5% in their fifties, and 0.9% in their sixties.

I’ve once phoned a support line in Japanese for a problem with my ISP’s free router and the ADSL performance. The ISP was another division of the company I work for, and the notebook PC I was trying to connect with was a company-issue machine with the standard company installed software, but still they started the script from “Are you sure you’re plugged in?” The problem was something to do with performance being dreadful – I’d changed providers but the throughtput dropped from a few megs a second to barely dial-up speeds, and uploading even the shortest mail would time out. I finally convinced them it was their fault, not mine, that the line was slow, but it still took them another week or so to do whatever they needed to do at their end to restore the speed.
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japan.internet.com recently published the results of a survey conducted on the 5th of July by JR Tokai Express Research into viruses and spam. They interviewed 330 members of their monitor panel who used a PC or Mac at home. 70.0% were male, 0.9% were in their teens, 11.2% in their twenties, 34.5% in their thirties, 33.3% in their forties, 16.1% in their fifties, and 3.9% in their sixties.

This looked at people with PCs or Macs, where I presume that PCs implies a Windows OS. One might think that Linux users would distort the virus figures, but as a previous survey on home operating systems showed, just one person in 300 was running Linux as a primary home operating system. In Q1, I presume virus covers trojans and rootkits and prehaps even spyware, and in Q1SQ, catching one from a LAN includes the internet.

In Q2, if you add up the number of people reporting using spam filtering, you have at maximum just a small majority using anti-spam methods. However, this figure may be affected by first, people being unaware of their ISP’s spam filtering, and second, if you’re relatively careful, you can get almost no spam. My wife, for instance, just gets one a day even though she has given her email address out to quite a few mail magazines and other web sites.
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japan.internet.com recently published the results of research by goo Research into how well IT buzzwords are understood. At the start of July they interviewed 1,033 members of their internet monitor group. 42.6% of the sample was male, 1.8% in their teens, 20.3% in their twenties, 41.9% in their thirties, 23.2% in their forties, 10.4% in their fifties, and 2.2% in their sixties.

Most of the buzzwords seem to get imported straight into Japanese as the English term, be it a complete word or an abbreviation. The rest perhaps just end up as katakana renditions of the term, like, for example, Social Network[ing] Service/Site, which ends up in Japanese as just SNS or Social Network Service or Site spelt out in katakana, which doesn’t really help many Japanese as the word “social”. Actually, there’s already a slang term in Japanese for SNS, 出会い系サイト, deai-kei saito, but perhaps it is loaded with overtones of seedy (or downright fraudulent) dating sites, whereas SNS suggests a different, more Western-style location?
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