世論 What Japan Thinks

In January, DIMSDRIVE Research interviewed by means of an internet-based questionnaire 1,454 people, 59.2% male, to find out what people do to get rid of a hangover. The Japanese for hangover is 二日酔い, futsukayoi, “two days drunk”, which I think is a wonderfully descriptive term!

I find the whole subject of Japan and drink fascinating, and whilst I’m still to find the one survey that confirms my suspicion that whilst overall alcohol consumption in Japan may be lower than in the West, there are comparable, if not higher, figures for regular drinkers, and more worryingly, regular heavy drinkers. Alcohol abuse is still not recognised here as a societal problem; I’m not some sort of Puritan calling for prohibition, of course, just someone who wishes booze was taken seriously.

As a small anecdote, in one of our company magazines we got a depression checklist, and one of the signs was not wishing to join in with office drinking sessions; for me, these events cause me stress, and paying 4,000 to 5,000 yen to sit in a usually very smokey pub for two hours as people continute to talk shop all around whilst making do with a veggie option that is a poor excuse for a meal is not really my idea of fun; I’d rather be snuggling up with wifey under the kotatsu watching the telly at home!
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japan.internet.com, in conjunction with goo Research, recently carried out their eighth regular survey on internet tool usage. They interviewed by means of an internet-based questionnaire 1,071 (the text says 1,071, but later calculations suggest that the sample size is actually 1,037; 1,071 seems to have been the sample size for the previous survey!) people from all over Japan towards the end of March. The sample consisted of 56.0% female, and the age breakdown was 2.7% in their teens, 23.8% in their twenties, 39.3% in their thirties, 22.6% in their forties, 9.2% in their fifties, and 2.3% sixty or older.

I have previously translated their fifth survey on tools, and in these four months the percentage of RSS reader users has climbed just 1.5 percentage points, or an increase of around 10% in four months. Although this seems like a significant relative increase, looking at the reasons why people do not use them the top answer was that people see little need for them. I also saw little need to begin with, but once I started using one I wondered why I hadn’t begun earlier. I subscribe mostly to blogs that update once every day or so; higher-frequency news sites give too much information, I feel, and using filtering might cause me to miss stuff, so I just use bookmarks for my news requirements.
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japan.internet.com, in conjunction with Cross Marketing, conducted an internet-based survey amongst 300 internet users, 50.3% female, to see what internet habits they had. 16.7% of the sample was aged 18 or 19, and 16.6% were from each of the other decades of life from the twenties to the sixties. I’m not sure how exactly work computers are suppposed to figure in this survey.

I think the results on SNS usage are particularly interesting – I’ve felt to some degree that SNSs are basically a more private form of blogging, so I’d love to see a more detailed survey on why people participate in SNS, or write blogs for that matter!

Personally, on the whole I switch on my home PC in the late evening (say past 9pm or so), and with this blog requiring rather a lot of work, I have little time for other activities bar mail.
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japan.internet.com, in conjuction with goo Research, carried out an online poll amongst the goo Research Monitors to find out what they thought about Wikipedia. They surveyed 1,060 people, 55.6% female, over a few days at the start of April. The age demographics were 24.6% in their twenties, 43.7% in their thirties, 23.7% in their forties, and 8.0% in their fifties.

I personally only trust Wikipedia to a small degree; to be honest, I can only fully trust articles I know myself to be correct, I trust items on non-controversial subjects to a lesser degree, so I suppose that makes me one of those who doesn’t really trust it. I edited the Takarazuka Theatre article, for instance, but I have seen some of my information removed, and now the article is descending into trivia, bad writing, and inconsistent information – I can see at least two mistakes in a quick scan. Controversial subjects are the least trustworthy, as the alleged “neutral point of view” ends up as being given to either the side who shouted first or loudest, or has the most friends in high places. As with a lot of Open Source, everyone wants to stamp their mark, but few want to just fix other’s stuff, and even if they do, they often unwittingly trample on the ego of those who want their information preserved.

A good example of the above is Japanese Name. This needs a complete rewrite, as the same information is repeated twice or even thrice, there is trivia galore, showing off (some valid, some invalid), falsehoods and slack wording.
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DIMSDRIVE Research recently carried out a detailed survey on what people thought regarding electronic dictionaries. They are referring to single-purpose portable dictionaries, not PDAs, mobile phones or other general-purpose portable devices with dictionary software present. They surveyed 7,327 members of their monitor group, 56.9% female, by means of an internet-based questionnaire. The sample consisted of 1.1% in their teens, 17.4% in their twenties, 34.8% in their thirties, 28.2% in their forties, 13.4% in their fifties, and 5.1% aged 60 or older.

A word of advice for any would-be dictionary purchasers – first note that this survey is of Japanese people, so the ones they find popular, even though they may use the English lookup features often, does not necessarily mean they are best for foreigners. In fact, I personally would not recommend an electronic dictionary as the primary source for new learners of Japanese; they require a decent level of Japanese to get the best out of them, and they tend to be rather terse, especially for example sentences. When I was learning, I found the Kodansha’s Furigana Japanese Dictionary excellent, as did most of the Amazon reviewers, by the looks of things! I’ve got a slightly old Canon WordTank 3000 which I find very good and easy-to-use, but perhaps newer models will have more expansive dictionaries?
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japan.internet.com, in conjunction with Cross Marketing, conducted an internet-based survey amongst 300 internet users, 50.3% female, to see what internet habits they had. 16.7% of the sample was aged 18 or 19, and 16.6% were from each of the other decades of life from the twenties to the sixties. I’m not sure how exactly work computers are suppposed to figure in this survey.

I think the results on SNS usage are particularly interesting – I’ve felt to some degree that SNSs are basically a more private form of blogging, so I’d love to see a more detailed survey on why people participate in SNS, or write blogs for that matter!

Personally, on the whole I switch on my home PC in the late evening (say past 9pm or so), and with this blog requiring rather a lot of work, I have little time for other activities bar mail.
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Continuing my recent alcohol theme, and to get all seasonal, this time MyVoice looked at what people thought about 梅酒, umeshu, or Plum Wine. 15,579 members of their MyVoice Community, 54% female, completed their internet-based questionnaire at the start of March. In the sample there were 23% in their twenties, 40% in their thirties, 25% in their forties, and 12% in their fifties.

For me, umeshu is just too sweet and has an artificial flavour, even in those brands that are 100% natural ingredients. Although the adverts for it are almost exclusively female-oriented, I am surprised that less than a quarter identified it as a feminine drink. Almost two in five chose it as a health drink, which is not really surprising as a lot of people hear a snippet of health news (or even quackery) and take it to heart; for instance, one famous actor recently admitted to drinking over two bottles of red wine a day, and another model quaffed about 18 cups of coffee, both convinced that since both these substances in moderation have certain benefits, one cannot take too much of them.
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Continuing their recent series of interesting habits that people have around technology, japan.internet.com, in conjunction with Cross Marketing Inc, carried out an internet-based survey to see what email habits people had. They interviewed 300 people from up and down Japan, exactly fifty-fifty male and female, with 16.6% of the sample aged either 18 or 19, and a similar 16.6% aged in each of decades of life from the twenties to the sixties.

Just about all Japanese mobile phones come with graphic smilies (Vodafone even has animated ones, I believe), pre-registered set phrases that include smilies, and smilies in their input conversion dictionaries. For instance, if you type in かお, kao, face, then select the covert to kanji option, as well as the expected kanji 顔, most mobile phones will also present a list of smilies to choose from. Note that this option is also available in Windows – if you have the Japanese IME, select the properties page for the Japanese input method, go to the “Dictionary” tab, and activate the “Microsoft IME Spoken Language/Emoticon Dictionary”.

I do use smilies, or 顔文字, kaomoji, literally “face characters”, a lot in mail, although I usually use the built-in graphics rather than choosing ASCII (and non-ASCII, as is often the case) art. However, as a signature I occasionally do use the Greek characters κεπ.
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Following on from a recent survey regarding phone email handedness and voice earedness, japan.internet.com in conjunction with JR Tokai Express Research carried out a survey on which hand people usually use with their mouse. They surveyed 330 working people by means of an internet questionnaire. 76.7% of the sample was male, with 15.8% in their twenties, 45.8% in their thirties, 30.3% in their forties, 7.6% in their fifties, and just 0.6% (two people) over the age of sixty.

In the first question you may notice a rather high percentage of lefties who got converted to right-handedness. This treatment of sinister characters is not unique to Japan, but it does perhaps appear to be rather strong within schools, looking at the figures here. Also, since most of the survey here is in their thirties, we are only seeing a snapshot of schooling 20 years ago or so; searching the web reveals that there is an oft-quoted survey that says only 0.7% of Japanese schoolchildren are left-handed, but I could not discover details of what the original survey was or when it was conducted.

Q1: Are you left-handed or right-handed? (Sample size=330)

Originally left-handed, but school or parents “corrected” me	4.8%
Ambidextrous (to Q2)	2.1%
Always right-handed	87.0%
Always left-handed	6.1%

Q2: Currently, with which hand do you use your mouse? (Sample size=43, ambidextrous users)

Left hand	7%
Right hand	84%
Both hands (to Q3)	9%
Use other pointing device	0%

Q3: Do you know that by using the control panel or other software you can change a mouse to left-handed use? (Sample size=36, ambidextrous right-hand mousers)

Yes	39%
No	61%

infoPLANT recently released a survey, performed using their usual method of a menu option within the DoCoMo iMode service, to find out what people thought about beer, happoshu and third-sector beer. Note that this survey was self-selecting, but since it has nothing to do with mobile phones, there should not be too major a problem with the survey population this time. 7,668 people, 61.0% female, responded to the survey, conducted over one week at the end of February.

Beer almost always means lager in Japan, happoshu is a low-malt beer-like drink(can’t stand the stuff myself), and third-sector beer is wheat and malt free, and instead is made from pea and other vegetable proteins and the one time I drunk it it tasted suprisingly nice and smooth.

I think I have found one statistic I’ve been seeking for a long time – here we have 13.8% of men in their twenties reporting daily beer consumption. Looking at a table from my homeland of Scotland, we can see that in 1998 only 7% of males aged 25 to 34 drunk any alcohol daily. However, looking at those men who drink at least once a week, the Scots have a significantly higher figure, although remember that includes all alcohol types. Similarly, but even more markedly, a mere 3% of young Scotswomen drink any alcohol daily, whereas over three times as many, 10.1% of Japanese women in their twenties consume beer daily. These differences are repeated across all the age groups.

Contrasting the daily figures with the weekly ones, I think it is a fair conclusion to draw that whilst the Japanese may overall have a lower frequency of alcohol consumption than the Scots, there are a higher number of regular drinkers amongst the Japanese population.

Note that neither survey addresses the volume of consumption, but with the recommended maximum weekly intake of 21 units for men and 14 for women, two large half-litre cans for men or two small 330 ml cans for women of beer-like drinks will most likely put the daily drinkers over the safe limit, and that ignores any other alcohol the Japanese may be consuming. Taking the adult population of Japan to be about 103 million and taking 18.6% of that figure we get the tabloid headline figure above, which does make certain assumptions, of course, some that might make the figure lower and others that make it higher.
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