世論 What Japan Thinks

Dentsu released a report on this year’s top products and predictions for next year’s big things, based on various public and private marketing surveys and a little bit of guess work by various style magazines. As I don’t read any of these style magazines, be they English or Japanese, some of the topics are a bit difficult to work out, so apologies in advance!

Just in case you’re wondering, the picture to the right is of Miki Ando (Mikitty), who represents at least three of the products listed below – figure skating, flat screen televisions (she’s one of the Viera advert figures), and Nintendo DS adverts. And she’s got an awfully nice smile.
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MyVoice conducted a survey into the use of MP3 players, especially in relation to Podcasting amongst 15,525 members (60% female) of their MyVoice community at the start of November.

I’m not much of a Podcast fan myself (although I have an idea for one for here…) nor a portable player owner, so I have never got into the whole idea at all, so I suppose I’m glad to see that four in five are in some degree of ignorance of the whole subject, and, barely four in one hundred have actually listened to one! Comparing the figures for Japan with those for other countries may be an interesting line of research, however, which I should do sometime soon. In fact, I am thinking of writing a regular column on survey analysis, so watch this space to see what develops.
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goo Research carried out their eighth survey into web-based mail service opinions, in conjuction with Anchor Research and japan.internet.com. 1,065 people from goo’s internet montior group replies to the poll questions, 41.41% male, and 40.75% in their thirties.

I use web mail rather heavily – in fact my mail for this domain is managed through a webmail service, autoforwarded to GMail, where I then pick it up, along with two other mail boxes. My permanent mail address is reserved for non-blog-related spam. Note that in Q7 below I discover data that significantly disagrees with that obtained from a previous survey regarding New Year cards.
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infoPLANT carried out a survey to find the most popular comedian in Japan, either single performers or manzai double-acts. 8,302 people filled in their choice through the opinion poll offered in an iMode mobile phone menu option during one week at the start of October. 30.4% of the respondents were male, and 69.6% female.

The most often chosen solo performer was none other than the man of the moment here, Lazer Ramon HG! “Hard Gay Number One Fuuuu!”, as he might exclaim. HG’s a guy who inspires as much hate as he does love – I find him very funny, on the whole, mainly as he is far more spontaneous than the average comedian, whereas others hate what they see as the negative image of gay people that he portrays. Although he does dress up like the stereotypical leather man, the character behind it is rather a fun-loving sort of image, I feel. Of course there’s the other category of haters that find his pelvic thrusting at children (not as bad as it sounds, really) a bad influence, which I say I must agree with, and I would try not to let any kids of mine watch him.
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InfoPLANT conducted a self-selecting survey in the middle of October through the iMode menuing system, to which 9,290 people replied, with just a third of them male, to find out what people do in the train.

I have a two hour commute myself, with about 40 minutes each way actually spent in the train. My usual activities are mobile phone mailing and reading a book, with my current reading material being a kanji study text book. I don’t usually sleep during my normal commute, although at the weekends I often feel my eyelids rather heavy. I’m not surprised at the high use of mobile phone games, but most of the men, especially, seem to play just mah jongg or pachinko games.
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Forgive the horrendously punny headline with a rather naff neologism, but MyVoice recently conducted a survey of their MyVoice internet community here in Japan to find out their views regarding Social Networking Services (SNS). 15,537 people, 60% female, completed the web-based opinion poll, with almost four in ten of the respondents being in their thirties.

Speaking personally, I’ve never really been into online communities, and even when I seriously played MMRPGs, I kept friendships at purely functional levels in-game, and although I was more outgoing on message boards, I never moved to private messaging or email, let alone anything more serious. I get the impression that mixi and others do appeal to the demographic that are looking for “anything more serious”, though! It’s interesting that people would much, much prefer to invite real-life friends, though.
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goo Research recently carried out a massive opinion poll to investigate how people in Japan use internet banking.In cooperation with NTT Resonance and Mitsubishi Research Institute they surveyed 43,074 members of the goo Research internet monitor group and ordinary goo users. This public poll was conducted for two weeks in the middle of October, with 56.0% of the respondents female. 2.2% were in their teens, 23.3% in their twenties, 40.4% in their thirties, 23.8% in their forties, 7.8% in their fifties, 2.1% in their sixties, and just 0.4% over seventy.

It seems that both conventional banks’ net services and net-only banks do not give any significant discounts on transaction fees – Japan still has lots of fees for doing almost anything outside working hours or more complicated than withdrawning money – but even with that worries about security, which is probably as much due to perceptions as actual danger, need to be addressed to give potential customers the assurance that the services are safe.
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[part 1] [part 2]

goo Research recently carried out a massive opinion poll to investigate how people in Japan use internet banking.In cooperation with NTT Resonance and Mitsubishi Research Institute they surveyed 43,074 members of the goo Research internet monitor group and ordinary goo users. This public poll was conducted for two weeks in the middle of October, with 56.0% of the respondents female. 2.2% were in their teens, 23.3% in their twenties, 40.4% in their thirties, 23.8% in their forties, 7.8% in their fifties, 2.1% in their sixties, and just 0.4% over seventy.

I am unsure whether or not PayPal counts as a net-only bank, or even if it, or an equivalent system, is popular is Japan. However, it seems internet-only banks are surprisingly popular (although since this is an internet-based survey there is some built-in bias), but if bricks and mortar banks offered transaction fee discounts for online usage, perhaps they could seriously erode the net-only banks’ customer base. It’s interesting, given that one of Koizumi’s pledges has been to do away with silly rules for the sake of it, that it seems that net banks cannot be used for utilities payments or lottery ticket purchase. My bank back home, first direct, has internet-based services, but I still prefer the telephone (and with Skype it’s ridiculously cheap!) for all my business.

This is another large survey that I will publish over two days.
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With the one hundred post mark fast approaching, and my confidence in the site improving, and in order to give you, the reader, more confidence in who I am, I have decided to add a short biographical page to introduce myself to you. Pleased to meet you!

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In September of this year, the Cabinet Office Japan conducted an opinion poll, interviewing 1,896 people, 55% female regarding attitudes towards environmental issues. This rather lengthy survey will be split over three days. Now for lifestyle and car issues – people on the whole still want stuff – perhaps they hope that it will be others who make changes to their lifestyles.

Q14: Considering the high production, high consumption, high disposal society, to control consumption of natural resources, reduce waste, reuse and recycle and reduce the burden on the environment, What do you think about the promotion of measures for establishing a recycling-oriented society? Select the one that is closest to your way of thinking.

If the current lifestyle level drops, I cannot accept it	1.7%
It is best if without dropping the current lifestyle level, whilst continuing high production and high consumption, we have active promotion of waste reuse and recycling	29.3%
If waste disposal facilities or natural resources run out, we cannot avoid moving to a recycling-oriented society	21.7%
Even if the current lifestyle level drops, we should move to a recycling-oriented society	17.6%
Whilst changing the current attitudes to the importance of owning and consuming stuff, regardless of any drop to the current lifestyle level, we should move to a recycling-oriented society	14.5%
I don’t know what sort of society a recycling-oriented society is	7.1%
Other	0.1%
Don’t know	8.0%

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