世論 What Japan Thinks

I saw on CrissCross News (ex Japan Today) an article on a survey regarding Japanese and April Fools. Basically, it doesn’t seem very popular, with just 20% expressing a positive view of it. Almost two fifth of those who expressed a negative opinion said that their reason for disliking it was because “this kind of thing is difficult to understand in Japan” versus, for example, less a fifth taking the “bah, humbug” option. This “ware ware nihonjin” attitude (see section 9) is one of my pet annoyances in Japan! However, the main anecdote in the story:

“The driver of the bus I was riding announced there was a bomb on board. After everybody disembarked in a big panic, he exclaimed, ‘April Fool! Now wasn’t that fun?’ And all of the other passengers laughed!”

smells a bit fishy to me, and not of the Poisson D’Avril type.

In addition, Mari’s Diary also covered a few April Fools (and non-Fool) news items.

Dentsu Inc recently carried out a survey (their “Trendbox Research”, to use the brand name) to find out what people thought about their brains. At the start of January they interviewed 400 people from up and down the country. Exactly half and half of the respondents were male and female, and 100 people were in each decade of life from the twenties to the fifties.

Brain training is rather a hot topic in Japan today; products on sale range from books of simple arithmetic or simple kanji to read out loud, to the Nintendo DS Brain Training game series, to which I actually contributed a very, very small part!

Oh, and here’s a bit of brain training I learnt about on TV a couple of weekends ago for getting rid of some chronic fatigue. The idea is that you need to stimulate your frontal lobes before going to bed, as increased activity there results in more cortisone and serotonin, which gets your body recharged quicker, or something like that. So, in addition to taking in sufficient B complex vitamins and calcium, before you go to sleep press your temples as you slowely breath out, then release as you breath in. Repeat ten times, then just before you sleep picture someone’s face – it works best if it is someone you dislike, apparently, but make sure you don’t dislike them too much and stress yourself out!
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japan.internet.com, in conjection with JR Tokai Express Research, conducted a survey on the awareness of the Google brand in Japan. They interviewed by means of an internet-based survey 331 people, 70.4% male, all of whom worked in either the public or the private sector. 39.3% were in their twenties, 36.0% in their thirties, 23.9% in their forties, no-one in their fifties, and just 0.9% aged sixty or older. The sample was drawn from all over the country.

I’m not surprised at Blogger’s usage being so low, since I do not believe it has a Japanese interface, and anyway a previous survey has shown a preference for Japan-based blogging services. However, the large number of Google earth users really surprised me! Whether the respondents were confusing it with Google Maps, or if people just used it once or twice to find their house, I do not know.
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MyVoice surveyed the members of its MyVoice community at the start of March to find out what they thought regarding bath time. 15,895 people responded to the internet-based questionnaire. 54% of the sample was female, with 4% in their teens, 23% in their twenties, 38% in their thirties, 23% in their forties, and 12% aged fifty or over.

Modern Japanese bathrooms are very automated these days – the standard for most new developments is to have a tap-free automaticaly filling bath, with temperature maintenance and fitted air conditioner. My dwelling, for instance, has one push to start the tub going, then it will maintain the temperature until we are ready to enter. The bathroom itself has a four-way air conditioner – heat, cool, dehumidify, and heat plus dehumidifying for drying clothes.

Note also that many homes have the bathroom as a separate room from the toilet or wash hand basin, so there is no need for a shower curtain as the whole room is waterproof.
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You may notice that I’ve added a Related Posts option that hopefully can point you towards related stories. The whole thing works automatically, so if you get diverted to a seemingly unrelated post, don’t blame me!

As I mentioned before, I’ve got the Performancing Metrics up and running, and finally my public stats are available. No laughing at the back please! Clicking the Performancing button at the bottom left achieves the same effect.

No April Fools from me this year, as I had a complete lack of inspiration! Did anyone find some interesting ones?

MyVoice surveyed 16,108 members of its monitor community, 54% female, by means of an internet-based survey to find out what they thought about credit cards. The sample consisted of 4% in their teens, 23% in their twenties, 38% in their thirties, 24% in their forties, and 11% in their fifties.

As well as the bog-standard corporate coloured card, most credit cards you get in Japan also have a cartoon character option. My main card (Asahi-branded (the ex-bank, not the beer) Sumitomo Mitsui Visa) features Miffy, which always gets funny looks when I use it abroad. At Schiphol Airport, Amsterdam, I once asked for a discount when buying a Miffy cuddly toy with it. My other main card is a boring old gold one, though. I once had an idea for a money-making scheme – sign up for credit cards and bank accounts, get all the character goods, cancel the account and sell the stuff on eBay.
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Trivia no Izumi has a silly wee survey they conducted with 100 kids aged around 6 or 7 I think. The idea was that their mothers gave them 10 yen to buy a sweetie from a shop, but the owner of the shop fumbled the coin dropping it into a box only to pull out a 100 yen and 500 yen coin, asking the kid to choose which one of the two he or she dropped. Apparently this is based on a famous children’s tale. Of course, all the children who lied were later being told off by their mother and went back to the shop to fix everything up.

The final result, as you can see from the graph to the right, is that 63 out of the 100 children were honest enough to admit that it was neither of these coins that they dropped; 29 said it was the 100 yen, 7 chose the 500 yen, and one kid with a promising career ahead as a yakuza (or a politician, I suppose) said both were his.

The hidden cameras captured the kids mulling over their thievery, with the most enterprising soul claiming the 100 yen first, going out to the Kinder Egg-like toy vending machine (what do you call them?) only to find it required 200 yen, so he returned inside and said it was actually the 500 yen coin he had dropped…

With stories about the dangers of Winny flying around, japan.internet.com jumped on the bandwagon (see my previous stories on Winny usage and the greatest security threats of 2005), publishing a survey carried out in conjuction with goo Research to find out about people’s use of file sharing software. They interviewed 1,071 people from their internet monitor group. 41.6% of the respondents were male, 23.2% in their twenties, 44.1% in their thirties, 25.2% in their forties, and 7.5% in their fifties.

This survey talks about confidential data leakage due to Winny viruses, but I have not seen any information that confirms it is due to viruses, and not just down to people sharing their whole hard disk or the like.

I did once or twice use Winny, but gave up as first the download rate was unbelievably slow, second the selection of material was pretty poor (or my understanding of Japanese was), and third it was, as is much Japanese user interface design, incredibly cluttered and unintuitive for me to use.
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NTT DoCoMo recently published an interesting survey they performed to find out what people thought about mobile phone credit cards. They interviewed 1,800 people from all over Japan in February by means of a web-based questionnaire. The sample was exactly 50:50 male and female, and 150 people of each sex from each decade of life, from the teens to the sixties, responded. Note that the teens consisted only of 18 and 19 year olds, though.

First, mobile phone credit cards are just what the term implies – they are mobile phones with a credit card’s contactless RFID chip embedded within them, so instead of your traditional bit of plastic, your mobile phone now becomes the device with which you Chip and Pin.

Note that currently credit cards are not as widely used in Japan as they might be in Europe and the USA. In addition, most shops and restaurants that are part of a chain will accept credit cards (although one of my local supermarkets doesn’t), but independent shops on the whole do not accept them. Note the answers to Q5, where over four in five use their credit card once a week or less, and the perhaps slightly loaded answers in Q7 (there is no indication if the question allowed a free answer or just a selection from a list, with perhaps lower-scoring answers omitted from the results) suggesting that plastic is preferred for luxuries or large purchases.

Overall, I think that this survey suggests that people will see mobile credit cards as an extension of the current mobile wallets, so they will treat them as something to use everyday for even the smallest transactions. From the provider’s point of view, small transactions still have a fixed basic fee associated with them, so charging a bottle of cold tea to your phone’s credit card could cost the retailer up half the retail price in transaction fees. How shop owners can cope with this new threat to their profit margins remains to be seen, and would in fact make a good theme for a future survey.
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japan.internet.com, in conjunction with JR Tokai Express Research, at the start of March performed a study to find out what people thought regarding their Internet Service Provider (ISP). They interviewed by means of an internet-based questionnaire 330 people, 54.2% male, resident in the Kanto area. 26.4% of the respondents were in their twenties, 46.1% in their thirties, 20.0% in their forties, 5.8% in their fifties, and just 1.8% in their sixties.

I find the results here a little difficult to believe, although the respondents all lived in Kanto (Tokyo and surrounding areas), so there would tend to be a distinct bias towards fatter pipes since most, if not all, of the Tokyo exchanges are wired for ADSL, and ADSL prices these days are barely much more than that of a phone line. In addition, perhaps the people who sign up to be survey monitors do tend to have better internet connections than the average person. I am not convinced of the accurancy at all.

Broadband is one of the few things in Japan that is actually cheap – for instance I pay around 2500 yen for up to 10 megabits; we have 100 megabits Fibre To The Home (FTTH) connection to our block of flats, and I share the line with the 32 other homes (although apparently only a handful use it), with the price is slightly subsidised out of the general flat management fees.

With regards to Q2. for me personally my ISP experience has been PRESTEL (1200/75!) -> CompuServe (dialup, first taste of the internet) -> CIX (dialup) -> Demon (dialup) -> GOL (ISDN) -> Jens SpinNet (ADSL) -> Hi-Ho (ADSL) -> Plala (FFTH).
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