世論 What Japan Thinks

Since it’s nearly the holiday season, let’s look at fun in Japan!

goo Research, in conjunction with NTT Resonace anand Mitsubishi Research, carried out a survey of 30,456 members of their internet monitor group in mid-September to find out what was their definition of fun. The respondents were 57.3% male, with 1.5% aged nineteen or under, 23.8% in their twenties, 40.3% in their thirties, 23.6% in their forties, 7.9% in their fifties, 2.0% in their sixties, 0.4% in their seventies, and 0.5% did not disclose their ages.

One surprising figure is the mere two percent who find enjoyment through religion or supernatural stuff. The actual number of members of religious groups is around 8.8%, so it seems not very many people at all derive pleasure from their practice. Perhaps, as Marx said, religion is the opium of the people from which the majority of people derive merely reassurance to keep them secure. Of course, as a member of Soka Gakkai myself, I would say that most of the people I know who practise do indeed appear to derive pleasure from their activities.
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infoPlant published a survey on purchase and consumption of low-alcohol drinks. They got 6,071 responses, 63.3% female, from their usual method of an iMode menu-based prize draw survey, held for a week at the end of November.

Note that low-alcohol drinks here are not what you might guess them to be, namely reduced- or zero-alcohol beers, but instead means any alcoholic drink that is not too strong; a chugging rather than a sipping drink, perhaps. The survey introduction specifically mentions chu-hai, a usually rather dangerous fruity cocktail that often weighs in at 7% alcohol by volume yet tastes like just a fruit soda, along with beer and ready-mixed can cocktails as being the drinks of interest in the questionnaire.

Whether or not people were answering for themselves personally or for their whole family, or whether or not purchases in bars and restaurants were included is not clear, although I suspect that it means store-bought alcohol, judging by the answers to question 2.
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Recently, IT Media published a list from Yahoo! Japan of the top search keywords through Yahoo!’s search engine, grouped into various categories. Below are a few of the categories, where I presume the more adult search terms have been removed! First, the top overall keywords.
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infoPLANT conducted a survey regarding mobile phone game usage in Japan amongst 8,984 users of the DoCoMo iMode sevice, by offering the survey through the iMode menuing system. The questionnaire was available for a week in mid-November, and of the 8,984 respondents, 63.5% were female.

infoPLANT’s survey methods obviously indicate that they will most likely result in an over-representation of the heavy user demographic, but regardless this still presents an interesting snapshot on how some people use their mobile phones. One could argue that since a previous survey showed the majority of people were on unlimited usage plans (although the methodology of that survey was probably flawed), these consumers could more easily budget for pay games, and download them without worrying about additional transmission costs over and above the basic fee. Also note that almost all mobile phones come with built-in games, not just Tetris clones and the like, but pretty good quality commercial-grade RPGs and pet simulators. As for my own phone, I have a nice golf game, but I beat that and quit, and the shoot-em-up is no fun. I once downloaded a trial version of a pay-for game, but it took a long, long time and the game play was rather lacking, so basically I haven’t played any games at all this year.
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goo Research, along with japan.internet.com carried out their fifth survey on the usage of internet tools. 1,044 people from all over the country, 42.43% male, filled out an internet-based questionnaire in mid-November regarding their usage of internet tools. The age demographics of the survey was 2.30% in their teens, 23.95% in their twenties, 40.61% in their thirties, 22.32% in their forties, 7.85% in their fifties, and finally 2.97% sixty or older.

My personal usage of internet tools is relatively low, I think, even though I run this blog. Feedburner and BlogLines fulfil most of my RSS-related requirements, and Google deskbar is useful too, but since I am a big Opera fan, add-in browser toolbars are not available, but not really needed either. I’m not sure about the exact definition of Alert Services that is used; does setting Windows Update (or any of the numerous other apps that have their own updater) to automatic checking count as using such a service?

Note also that the most popular reason for using a particular RSS service is that a site recommends it. From a blogger’s point of view, does this suggest that we really should jump onto the bandwagons and push our feed links more strongly at our readers? However, after noticing this post on Performancing (the whole site is a recommended read) I wonder if as bloggers we should concentrate as much on a mail feed as on RSS, especially given that over 50% more of the people surveyed here used mail alert services compared to RSS readers.

As a cross-reference, I found a post by Joi Ito regarding this topic with figures from mid June or earlier. RSS readership has grown 50% in just six months, and those not knowing what a blog is has fallen to a quarter of what is was before, according to a recent survey.
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The Smoking Cessation Information Centre recently sponsored research to discover what smokers’ reactions to tax hikes in cigarettes would be. They interviewed 1,980 smokers via an internet-based questionnaire at the start of December. This poll is rather timely as there are plans to raise the tobacco tax by a mere 20 yen per packet, to about 290 yen for 20, probably still the cheapest in the developed world.

Of course, people saying they are going to quit and people actually quitting are two different things. All the evidence suggests that raising taxes brings in more money overall, as the rate of quitters never reaches the rate of tax increase. Anything that does something to decrease the number of smokers, however, is most welcome. Simple things like effective smoking segregation at restaurants are not yet implemented here. Even though most restaurants (rather than izakaya pubs-with-food places) are heavily frequented by women (in my experience it’s often over 75%, and quite often, in fact, I am the only man there!) and only about 10% of women smoke, few restaurants are all non-smoking; in fact often it is either 50:50 or no segregation at all!

Also note that at least one in eight do not seem to believe the literature telling you smoking is bad for you, and two-thirds think it’s expensive.
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goo Research recently carried out a survey on Oseibo gifts, the traditional end of year gift-giving period in Japan, in conjunction with Yomiuri Shimbun and NTT Resonance. Just 1,079 people were questioned from their internet monitor group, but no breakdown by age or sex is reported, nor is the sample size for each individual question noted.

Luckily at my place of work there is no Oseibo bribery gift-giving custom from employee to boss, but we do get the occasional free calendar or diaries from associated companies, and a friend of the family usually gives us a couple of jars of instant coffee.
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It’s now just about a month since I moved my site to this new domain, so I think it’s about time for a site news update.

I’ve installed the rather nice ExecPHP PHP pass-through plugin for WordPress and the rather naff, but it works, PHP graphing library LibChart, which I did modify somewhat in order to stop it sorting pie segments and to set the background colour. I suppose I should really add APIs for these functions. Since LibChart is released under the LGPL, if anyone requires my minor modifications, please ask and I will provide. I use ExecPHP only when preparing the post – as I always have to press the Advanced Editing button to get to the Technorati tags, the action of displaying the preview generates the pie chart in my graphics directory, so I can then delete the PHP from the final post, saving some processor overhead and potential file access issues. At some point, however, I should replace the PHP stuff with my own plugin that generates the graph is a slightly simpler fashion. I think having a graphic on most of the stories helps catch the reader’s eye a bit, and serves as a teaser to get them to read beyond the front page.
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Trivia no Izumi (Fount/Spring of Trivia) outdid itself tonight, with a survey to find out when people who had been married for three years first heard their wife pass gas! They interviewed 1000 Japanese husbands by means of an internet poll, and as you can see in the pie chart on the right, almost half the wives (43%) couldn’t keep it in for more than a year. 29% first let rip in the second year, 16% avoided a bottom burp until their third year, and 12% of husbands have been spared their wives’ anal emissions.

For good measure, this segment of the show also had face-to-face interviews with some of the husbands describing the how and where of their wives’ flatulance, accompanied by their wedding photos, leaving their neighbours in no doubt who they were talking about!

To finish up this item of trivia, they persuaded one of the wives who had never passed gas in front of her husband to try to do it, so their hidden cameras could capture this moment for posterior-ity…

Oh, and I certainly will not tell you what category my wife falls into!

According to a short article found on the Yomiuri Shimbun’s web site, they performed a face-to-face interview-based opinion poll in the middle of November to discover people’s attitude towards national politicians and politics. I wonder how much of the negative attitudes towards politicians was fired by the election of Taizo Sugimura and his all-too-honest youthful enthusiasm for the freebies awaiting him? Perhaps even the mostly positive image of Horiemon was soured by people realising that the whole business of Koizumi’s assassins was just too cynical a ploy?

The headline figure was that 69% felt there were too many Diet members, versus 24% who thought it was just about right, and 2% wanted more representitives.

Regarding respect for national politicians, 76% felt it had decreased from in the past, and 72% felt that the convictions (of the political, not the criminal, kind!) of the politicians had also decreased. When asked about their image of the current crop of Diet members, the top answer was “No convictions” at 38%, next being “Self-preservation” at 37%, “Acting in their own self interests” at 36%, then “Bias towards special interest groups or industries” and “Cannot understand popular sentiment” at 27% for each. All of the top ranked answers were negative images.

Only a third trusted politicians, whereas two-thirds did not, and with just 2% don’t knows, there are serious issues that the political machine needs to address to recapture the hearts of the person on the street.