世論 What Japan Thinks

japan.internet.com, in conjunction with JR Tokai Express Research, carried out an internet-based survey of 330 people employed by national and local government, and by private enterprises to find out how well they knew various English computer-related buzzwords and acronyms. The sample was 72.7% male, with 23.0% in their twenties, 42.7% in their thirties, 24.8% in their forties, 9.1% in their fifties, and just 0.3% aged sixty or over. Note that those interviewed are not necessarily IT specialists, or even IT users, in their workplace.

Note that the questions are testing to see how confident the respondents are in their knowledge, not if they are correct or not. I do remember one incident at work regarding the GPL (actually, I remember lots of incidents with lots of technical terms) where one senior person was holding forth at length and with great confidence about a certain aspect of it but was, in fact, talking utter cobblers.

I’m rather surprised at FTTH scoring almost double of RSS and SNS, though. As far as I am aware, FTTH is rarely used in advertising for high-speed home internet access; it is usually just fibre-optic (光ファイバー, hikari faiba-) or NTT’s trademark B-FLET’S (B for Broadband, F for “flat rates, friendly Internet access, and a flexible environment”, and “Let’s” for “Let’s IP Service”).

How well do you do in knowing these terms?
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japan.internet.com, in conjunction with goo Research, carried out another of their short surveys, this time regarding what first sprung to mind when thinking about web services. They interviewed 1,036 people, 57.9% female, by means of an internet questionnaire. 2.7% of the respondents were teenagers, 23.0% were in their twenties, 42.3% in their thirties, 22.7% in their forties, 7.3% in their fifties, and 2.0% in their sixties.

Whereas an earlier survey looked at primarily how brand image is conveyed via advertising, these web services are perhaps not sold as heavily through conventional advertising channels, but instead make their mark by some combination of word of mouth, familiarity and accessibility.

The mere one percent naming Gmail as the first mail provider to come to mind seems very surprising to me, although I wonder if Google has been targetting that service towards the English-speaking demographic at the expensive of foreign language speakers? How does the Gmail brand image rank in other countries, including at home in the USA? Does anyone know?

One nice thing, however, about Gmail being below the Japanese radar is that our office’s firewall does not block it (yet…), unlike Hotmail, Yahoo! web mail (Japan but not the UK) and the other big providers. Not that I check personal mail at work; no no no, not me at all.

In addition, Gmail is still invitation-only, but that hasn’t stopped SNS services spreading widely amongst the Japanese. By the way, if anyone out there would like a Gmail invitation, I have lots to give away!
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japan.internet.com, in conjuction with JR Tokai Express Research, conducted a survey to find out where businesspeople obtained their information from. 331 people from all over the country were questioned, with 73.4% of the sample male. 21.5% were in their twenties, 42.3% in their thirties, 27.2% in their forties and 9.1% in their fifties. The survey was most likely conducted via a private internet poll, although this is not clearly mentioned.

I’m surprised that almost nine in ten regularly visit a portal, yet not even half visit a search engine, just scarcely beating the number who visit route-finding web sites, although I suppose it means that a good number of people do their searching directly from the portal.
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At the start of February MyVoice performed a survey of their internet monitor group to find out what people thought about learning English. 16,057 people, 46% male, completed an internet-based questionnaire. 3% of the respondents were teenagers, 23% were in their twenties, 37% in their thirties, 25% in their forties, and 12% in their fifties.

Teaching English is a huge business in Japan. Actually, I would argue that it is not learning English, it’s being seen to be learning, or just the buzz of hanging around foreigners that is popular here. One of my wife’s pals, for instance, has been going to various classes and homestays for at least ten years, yet her English is still barely useable; she just seems to be feeding her fantasy of getting a gaijin boyfriend.

I’m also a bit surprised that amongst three in four reckon that English lessons should start before the end of primary education. Although the earlier one starts learning a language the better, on the whole, there are more foreign languages than just English!
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iSHARE recently surveyed the memberrs of CLUB BBQ to see what their opinions on various issues surrounding mobile phones were, but the only results they posted in this news release were regarding electronic money and phone features. 718 people, 72% male replied to the private internet questionnaire carried out, according to the article, over two days at the end of February this year, but I presume this is a typo for January.

Note that CLUB BBQ is a free mail service that in return for free usage the members must regularly fill out surveys. It’s interesting that for this survey, and many others that iSHARE have performed, the men outnumber women two to one, whereas most other internet monitor-based surveys are around 60% female, perhaps indicating the CLUB BBQ is a more male-oriented site; judging by the various anime characters around the iSHARE web site I would say that this would seem to be true. This might suggest that the average CLUB BBQ user may very well be a heavier user of technology.
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Looking at my server logs, I see one of the search phrases I got a hit from on Valentine’s Day was “when wife does not love you”. Fair put a damper on my day, that did.

I’ve also decided that I’m not too proud to put out the begging bowl, so I’ve added a wee donations button from PayPal up in the top-right, should you ever have the urge to slip me a few quid; my favoured currency is UK pounds sterling, but of course I’ll accept anything! Anyone contributing will be doing so as a donation, expecting nothing in return (so don’t come complaining if you don’t get anything), but depending on how much you might decide to push my way and how I am feeling I will endeavour to return a small token or favour that may vary from just a @whatjapanthinks.com mail address to a trinket; perhaps just a used railway pass card (not the one pictured, however!) for small contributions to something like a mobile phone strap or other small souvenir item for larger givers. In addition, a back-link to any donors may also be added for some unspecified length of time, subject to arbitrary selection criteria such as no links to spam, splogs, pr0n or other categories of web page that I might not care to link to. I reserve the right to withhold any or all of the above offers, and even the right to return any money that I judge to have been offered in bad faith or outwith the accepted meaning of a donation.

Sorry for the rather harsh-sounding words at the end there, but I suppose I should cover all bases up front as spammers are rather resourceful these days. I’ve also added this text to my “About” page.

Oh, and a question to you the reader – has my web site been unreachable at times over this weekend? Traffic has dropped off quite a bit, and I’ve had problems logging onto the site myself.

Finally, I had an email from the author of MKT’s diary and life in Japan, asking for a link, so here we go. I’ve not had time to read his blog on Japan by a Japanese, but please feel free to visit.

goo Research recently carried out some research on the fallout from the “Livedoor Shock”, as it is being called in Japan, and Horie’s arrest. The research was carried out in conjunction with the Yomiuri Shimbun.

Just as background, when the story broke on the 16th of January, The Tokyo Stock Market Mothers Index in particular, within which many new IT firms are listed, fell around 22.4% over the following two days.

For this survey, 1,092 people (I believe they all owned shares) were questioned to see how they had felt the effects of the Livedoor Shock. Note that the survey was conducted on the 1st and 2nd of February, by which time the main TOPIX index had recovered all its losses, but as can be seen later, the personal investors were still hurting, suggesting that they were holding IT-heavy portfolios or other high-risk investments.
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japan.internet.com, in conjunction with JR Tokai Express Research, carried out a rather short survey on the use of SNS, or Social Networking Services. The survey was carried out by means of an internet-based questionnaire amongst 442 members from all over the country belonging to their private research monitor group. 58.1% of the sample was male, 33.3% were in their twenties, 37.6% were in their thirties, 24.4% were in their forties, and 4.8% were in their fifties.

According to figures gathered at the end of September of last year, there were almost four million users registered across all the SNSes in Japan; the big ones being mixi and GREE. Note that this would include some degree of duplication, both from people registering in more than one service and from people registering twice. Note also that I have previously translated another survey on the usage of SNSes. However, this survey suffers from a small sample size, in particular Q1SQ2 had only 13 respondents so not much can be drawn from the results.

Personally, I barely have enough time to conduct a real-life social life, let alone a second virtual one!
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At the start of this month japan.internet.com in conjunction with goo Research got 1,089 replies to an internet-based questionnaire about the use of Question and Answer sites in particular, and looking up things in general. The user demographics were 23.0% in their twenties, 41.0% in their thirties, 25.9% in their forties, 7.2% in their fifties, and 2.8% in their sixties. 53.3% of the sample were female.

From the English language point of view, I’ve only ever questioned and answered on Experts Exchange in the dim and distant past, and glanced at Google Answers once or twice recently. I’m much more of a BBS and Usenet person myself.

One question not addressed by this survey (or perhaps only addressed if you pay money to get the full survey results) is how much people trust the answers they get. However, even a seemingly simple question like that may not have a simple answer. Thinking of Wikipedia, for instance (which isn’t a Q&A site, admittedly), depending on the information I am searching, my trust level varies. In fact, I have recently stopped linking to it as I feel that because the pointed-to page can change, I may no longer be referring to the same information that I was pointing to in the past; in addition for controversial subjects the page can get frozen, or at least adopted as a base line, at a non-neutral point of view, despite the protestations of neutrality from the ‘pedia-philes.
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As a change for today, I’ll have a look at the recent report (note: Microsoft Word document) released by the UN’s Special Rapporteur on contemporary forms of racism, racial discrimination, xenophobia and related intolerance, Doudou Diène, on his mission to Japan, casting my eye in particular over some of the statistics that appear in this report. This seems to be a draft, so hopefully it gets rewritten before the official release.

Note that of course I am in favour of Japanese legislation against most forms of racial discrimination, but I am a bit sceptical of some of the methods employed by some of the activists, and I can see in this document hints of these tactics that I dislike.

Note also that I am a white guy with a full-time 正社員, seishain post at a major Japanese firm and a Permenant Residency permit, so feel free to take that into account when reading my position.

Finally note that calling into doubt the exact scale or shape of various forms of discrimination does not mean I am denying that it exists at all or that it is a problem. In particular, the description of the Koreans’ living conditions in Utoro is shocking!
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