世論 What Japan Thinks

I managed to get onto Radio Go Daddy’s show and PodCast in their Strange Domains segment, which was nice. Download the PodCast and wait until about 16 minutes in to find my thirty seconds of fame!

I’d like to say a big thanks to whoever submitted me to the show, but compared to the other sites featured, like the cross-dressing Abe Lincon, I feel so inadequate!

In addition, queued up in my translation files are reports on famous businessmen (with Horiemon making an appearance), flu and Tamiflu, and collectable toys. I’ll also be putting a page up that will offer some readers the ability to make a wee bit of money whilst practicing their Japanese.

infoPLANT recently carried out a survey to find out what people do with their mobiles (other than phone calls and mail, of course) and what they want their next mobile to do. By means of an option placed within the public iMode service menus for twelve days in the middle of December they got 7,905 respondents to their questions, 37% male. More detailed demographics were not available.

In my case, the calculator feature is about the only one I use with any degree of frequency, although I am rather controlled by my wife’s phone’s alarm and schedule! I do have a number of ring tones downloaded, but as my phone is in manner mode nearly all the time, that probably doesn’t count. For my next phone, the one feature I perhaps want most of all would be a smoother input method, but not voice-based, as that would be far too embarrassing on the train!

It would be interesting to see how these figures compared with a similar survey performed in Europe or the USA.
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Toppan, a large Japanese corporation, published a press release relating to a survey they performed regarding views on financial institution security and Smart Card-based services. They questioned just 416 adults from Tokyo and surrounding area by means of a private internet-based survey over a couple of days in mid-November. The detailed survey results were not published, but instead the data was presented as a report, so will be translated in that form.

Note that an IC Cash Card is the Japanese term for a SmartCard-based ATM card. This definition excludes, I believe, credit cards with Chip and Pin functionality, and is sometimes associated with extra biometrics information – a good number of the ATMs in Japan are fitted out with fingerprint or vein scanners.

The bank I am with has recently changed their rules so that when using ATMs with a standard magnetic strip-based card, only (only?) 2,000,000 yen (£10,000 or US$20,000) can be transferred to another account per day, down from 5,000,000 yen per day; the same two million yen can also be withdrawn as cash. If using a Smart Card, the amount that can be transferred or withdrawn has been raised to TEN MILLION YEN, fifty thousand pounds or one hundred thousand dollars!
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With the 11th anniversary of the Great Hanshin-Awaji Earthquake (Kobe and surrounding area) on 17th of January 1995 being today, I thought it would be appropriate to present this survey by the Japanese Government’s Cabinet Office regarding people’s opinions on earthquakes. Out of 10,000 people asked, 7,232 people completed questionnaires regarding earthquakes over a two week period at the end of September. Demographic information is available at the end of the survey. Note that for a change, because this was a personal interview-based survey the age spread is much broader than most of the internet-based polls I present. All questions were answered by all 7,232 respondents.

For the last few years, at least once every couple of months there has been a special on TV regarding earthquakes, covering in particular how everyone is going to die horribly when The Big One hits Tokyo. In amongst the tabloid sensationalism is, however, the occasional nugget of useful information. Two nights ago, for instance, they covered how to escape from a lift stuck between floors, then emergency toilets, including how much water is needed to flush a standard three-jobbie plus loo roll down to the nearest main sewer pipe (five litres to go 15 metres, in case you’re wondering and I’m remembering correctly).

This survey was taken before the Aneha scandal blew up, so perhaps if this survey was repeated today, the answers would be rather different.

Although the above-mentioned Great Hanshin-Awaji Earthquake happened before I came to Japan, I have talked to a number of people who were living in Kobe at the time, and almost everyone had some tale of personal or family-related disaster that really impressed upon me the human scale of the disaster. I recommend anyone with the opportunity to talk to someone from the area to sensitively enquire about their experiences.
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In early December NEPRO Japan looked at the usage of video-enabled mobile phone calls amongst the Japanese mobile-phone using population. They surveyed 4,575 people across the country, 59% female, and 42% in their twenties. The participants were self-selected by means of a link available for just one day from the iMode, Vodafone live! and EZweb service provider’s portal web site.

This survey is self-selecting, so the accuracy is somewhat suspect. For iMode users, most of DoCoMo’s new sales are of phones with video calling features, and users of these new 3G phones tend to choose fixed price plans, so use iMode more, thus are more likely to find these surveys, biasing the survey towards the heavy user, I suspect.

Personally speaking, my current phone has no video calling facility, and I have no real desire to use the feature even if available, as mail is usually sufficient, and it’s a bit embarrassing, plus I don’t know what happens about sound quality if you have to hold the phone twenty or thirty centimetres away from your face. Perhaps a headset becomes necessary for proper use, therefore since BluTooth has only now just started appearing in a significant number of phones we may see an increase in users this year?
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Last September, DIMSDRIVE Research questioned 13,855 people, 6,102 male, by means of an internet-based survey about what their least favourite souvenir from overseas was.

The whole business of buying おみやげ, omiyage after trips, whether they be to abroad or to domestic locations, is a horrendously expensive process, often involving buying absolute tat for friends and expensive gifts for those you may respect, of feel obliged by society to respect. My wife, for instance, always has to buy her dentist (who is, in my opinion, at least mildly incompetent) some decent wine or the like; for me personally, receiving a gift is a very impersonal act, as I know from my own experience that the person offering the gift just rushed round Duty Free and picked up a handful of the closest boxes of not-too-expensive nor not-too-cheap chocolates with a picture of their holiday resort on the front to distribute as required. Postcards, on the other hand, I love writing and receiving, as the person has to make some effort to write them, but in Japan, even with the traditions of nengajou postcards for New Year, mochuu cards for deaths, chuugen cards in the summer, etc, holiday postcards are almost never sent, and in fact are very difficult to find even at the big tourist spots.

Anyway, back to the rankings.
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INFOPlant performed a survey at the end of last November to find out people’s views on buying domestic cars. 8,559 people, 38.8% male, filled in a questionnaire available through an iMode menu.

I don’t see myself buying a car of any origin in the forseeable future. Living right in front of the railway station and with all stores offering cheap home delivery for big stuff, it’s so much cheaper to just rent whenever I have a need for my own transport. Also, running costs, or more accurately, sitting in the parking area not running anywhere costs, are pretty steep in Japan, even if the vehicle itself is relatively cheap.
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In mid-November of last year DIMSDRIVE Research asked 5000 members of their internet monitor group, 50.8% of them female, to tell them what kanji character best described themselves.

There is another more famous Kanji of the Year survey performed by Kiyomizu Temple and the Kanji Kentei organisation that chose 愛, ai, love as the character of the year, but that vote is for the character best representing the year in general, not people themselves. Given that “love” is a positive emotion, it is quite a contrast (and rather depressing) that almost all of the kanji chosen here represent negative feelings or thoughts.

For me personally, I’d probably choose 疲, tsukare, tired out.
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With today being Japan’s Coming of Age Day – 成人の日, seijin no hi – Seiko (the watch people, as a watch is a popular present for these new adults from their parents) published a survey of soon-to-be adults to see what their views were regarding time. They questioned 517 people, 258 male, 259 female, in the middle of November last year. The demographics were almost exclusively students, numbering 89.6% of the total, with 3.5% part-timers or other temporary staff, just 1.8% in full-time employment, 0.4% self-employed, and 1.0% full-time housewives.

On the TV today, there was the usual coverage of the various Coming of Age Ceremonies, but the one I always find the strangest is the new tradition of spending it at Tokyo Disneyland, where it seems people are not celebrating their last chance at being a child by dancing with Mickey and Minnie, but are instead just continuing their relationship with Disney. Interviews with the participants afterwards always shows a child-like wonder at having touched Mickey and Minnie, the sort of reaction I would associate with a ten-year-old, not a twenty-year-old!
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In November last year, DIMSDRIVE Research interviewed via an internet-based questionnaire 3,604 people (1,620, or 45.0% male) regarding what foreigner they thought was good at Japanese.

To most people who have never been to Japan this probably sounds like a really bizarre question to ask, but with Japan having only about 2% non-Japanese residents, and with the vast majority of these actually being born in Japan and often bred as Japanese (Google for zainichi), the number of non-native speakers of Japanese is very low, and of course Nihonjinron tells the Japanese that we gaijin cannot learn the language properly. (Actually, Japanese is relatively easy for basic speaking fluency, as most verb and noun conjugation is regular, the core vocabularly is quite small, and pronunciation is mostly straightforward. However, the intricacies of polite language and kanji (although kanji is not excessively difficult, there’s a lot of it to learn!) inhibit most people from getting to perfect mastery.) In fact, being told you are good at Japanese by a Japanese person is more often than not お世辞, oseji, flattery, bordering on the line of patronisation, which I suspect is the reason that the third-placed person is there.
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