世論 What Japan Thinks

NTT DoCoMo recently carried out a survey of users of mobile phones with electronic wallet functionality to see how, or even if, they were being used. Note when reading this survey that first NTT DoCoMo has heavily invested in the electronic money infrastructure and almost all of their new models come with this feature built-in. For their FOMA range (3G phones), it is a compulsory feature, and with sales figures showing over 80% of new and upgrading customers are choosing these models, NTT have a vested interest in the success of electronic wallets, as they no doubt get a transaction fee for every electronic money purchase. This may or may not have influenced the outcome of the survey. However, if accurate, it shows a pretty high degree of market penetration. UPDATE: If only I’d posted this right after I translated it last week, I could have beaten the BBC on this story!

Although launched only last July, in just one year and two months (September 3rd) DoCoMo reached 6 million electronic money-capabile phones sold, and by the first of October there were about 25,000 shops nationwide and 6,000 vending machines equipped with readers.

In this survey, 4,000 users of mobile phones with the DoCoMo おサイフケータイ (osaifu keitai, Mobile Wallet) service functionality built-in were interviewed, 2,200 male, 1,800 female, and their answers are as follows.

Q: Have you used the Mobile Wallet functionality of your phone?

	Using it	Used to use it, but stopped	Not used it
All	28%	3%	69%
Up to 19 years old	18%	4%	78%
20 to 29 years old	27%	4%	69%
30 to 39 years old	32%	3%	65%
40 to 49 years old	29%	3%	68%
Over 50 years old	21%	2%	77%

This 28% represents 1,108 people, and if this is scaled up to cover all people owning electronic-money ready DoCoMo phones, about 1.82 million people are using this service.

Q: How often do you use your Mobile Wallet? (Sample size=1,108)

Over thrice a day	6%
About once a day	12%
About five times a week	5%
About thrice a week	15%
About once a week	24%
About once every two weeks	11%
About once a month	17%
Hardly ever use it	10%

Compared with the same question asked in May, the percentage using the service once a day or more has increased from 13% to 18%.

Q: Where do you use your Mobile Wallet? (Sample size=1,108, multiple answer)

Convenience store	84%
Rental shop	25%
Vending machine	24%
Airport	22%
Electrical retailer	18%
Pharmacist	16%
Book or CD shop	15%
Cafe	15%
Fast food store	14%
Bar or pub	12%
Family Restaurant	11%

Note that at some places, like at airports, the Mobile Wallet is not used as money, but as a member’s card for saving points, etc. When you buy a plane ticket from ANA online, you can get an email sent to your mobile phone that allows you to access an application that records a transaction identifier in the IC card of the wallet, so ticket collection and check-in can be performed simultaneously and effortlessly.

Q: How satisfied are you with your Mobile Wallet service? (Sample size=1,108)

Extremely satisfied	13%
Satisfied	69%
Dissatisfied	19%

SQ: If extremely satisfied or satisfied, will you buy a Mobile Wallet capable phone next time you change phones? (Sample size=902)

Definitely want to buy	47%
Want to buy	52%
Don’t want to buy	1%

Q: What do you like about using your Mobile Wallet? (Sample size=1,108)

Just hold over reader to use	73%
Speedy purchasing	60%
No fiddling with a wallet	46%
Earn points	21%
Can refill via iMode	20%
Can see remaining cash on display	17%
It’s OK not to bring a wallet	14%
Can use for lots of services	14%
Less stuff in my wallet	12%

Q: What services would you like to use in the future? (Sample size=4,000)

Electronic money	58%
Point card	56%
Rail pass	35%
Cinema ticket	20%
Cash card	18%
Home key	15%
Concert ticket	8%
Theme park passport	8%

iShare Inc have once again surveyed CLUB BBQ members, this time to find out about shopping trends on their mobiles. They got 2,270 valid responses to their survey, carried out at the start of September. 60.6% of their respondents were male.

iShare discovered that a lot of people did their shopping from the comfort of their own homes, so dubbed them “Couch Keitais (mobiles)”, which might be rendered in English as “immobile phoners”. On with the figures; note that the figures in most of the tables below have been reported with no decimal places.

First of all, only 9.1% of the survey group (207 respondents) have bought mail-order goods via their mobiles. However, the most popular by far place for shopping was sitting on the sofa at home, with 44.5% of the 207 (92 people) reporting that as where they make their purchases. Next was while on the move, with only 23.1% selecting that.

When asked why they use a particular mobile phone shopping site, the most popular reason, with 34.2% of shoppers choosing it, was that because it’s the same site as usually used from a PC. Conversely, given the choice between a PC site and a sister mobile-based site, 42.2% (of everyone or just mobile shoppers?) would choose to continue using the PC.

I wonder if the full report asks what people think about using a portable PC (or even PDA-sized) and wireless LAN instead?

Now to some of the numbers that have been quoted in detail.

Q: For those of you who have used a shopping site from your mobile, are you on a flat-fee mobile internet use plan?

Yes	43%
No	57%

Q: For those of you who have not used a shopping site from your mobile, are you on a flat-fee mobile internet use plan?

Yes	16%
No	84%

Q: For those of you who have used a shopping site from your mobile, what have you bought?

Clothes	10%
Food	12%
Books	28%
Tickets	21%
Other	30%

“Others” in the last two tables include primarily CDs and DVDs.

This was a multiple answer question, but they have presented the results as a percentage. You have to pay money to find out the real figures…

Q: For those of you who have not used a shopping site from your mobile, what might you like to buy?

Clothes	3%
Food	5%
Books	35%
Tickets	46%
Other	12%

Q: When buying goods from your mobile, how did you pay for goods? If you’ve not shopped how would you want to pay? (Single answer)

	Net Shoppers	Not net shoppers
Together with phone bill	8.9%	31.6%
Credit card	43.8%	26.6%
Convenience store	12.5%	19.0%
Bank transfer	12.5%	8.1%
Others	5.2%	2.8%

Better late than never, the Asahi Shimbun conducted a telephone survey on an unspecified number of people on the 22nd and 23rd regarding attitudes to the general election a month and a half ago, and discovered that most people felt it was a media election.

First, 52% thought the election was interesting, with 39% feeling it wasn’t. Those in their twenties found it especially interesting, with over 60% of that age group expressing that opinion. Perhaps this was due to all the coverage of Horiemon?

53% thought that media coverage of the election had either a great or somewhat of an effect on the outcome. For those who voted for the LDP, 63% felt the media had had an influence on the result. This is perhaps due to the coverage of Koizumi’s female assassins.

Regarding which medium people accesses the most for information, television was first with 51%, newspapers at 40%, and the internet a mere 4%. LDP voters favoured the TV more, at 56%, whereas DPJ supporters preferred newspapers, at 48%. Women also got their information primarily from TV, at 58% versus 34% for newpapers, whereas men were at 44% for TV, 46% for newspapers. For those under 50, TV was the primary media; over 50 and it was newspapers.

As to whether the media concentrated on particular parties or constituencies, 50% held that impression, versus 41% who did not. 60% of DPJ voters held that impression, but I wonder how much of that is to do with being on the losing side? For LDP supporters, only 46% felt bias in the coverage.

Regarding when people decided who to vote for, 68% decided over a week before the election, 23% decided with less than a week to go, and 8% on the day of the vote itself.

Finally, 50% said they support the current Koizumi cabinet, and 33% do not. This is down from 55% for and 30% against in a snap survey on the 17th and 18th after Koizumi visited the neo-nationalist Yasukuni shrine; perhaps the ramifications of his visit have started to sink in?

A new research company to me, Rakuten Research, carried out this recent survey on the use of mobile contents and services, the 18th time they’ve carried it out, but the first time I’ve heard of it!

The survey was carried out at the start of this month amongst Rakuten Research’s monitor group; 2,460 people were selected, almost exactly 50:50 of each sex, with 2,074 of them (86.4%) being mobile phone users from the four main networks, DoCoMo, au, VodaFone and TU-KA. Unless otherwise noted, the sample size for questions are these 2,074 mobile phone users. The main areas of the survey was to find out about the use of “full browsers”, meaning mobile phone browsers that can view PC-based contents, the views on mobile phone information leakage, and communications with eldery parents. However, they have split the results reporting into two articles, so this report is about full browers only. Note that I have translated another survey regarding full browsers.

Q1: Have you used a full browser on your mobile?

All (N=2,074)	9.5%
Male (N=1,042)	12.5%
Female (N=1,032)	6.6%

Q2: For those answering yes to Q1, within the last month, what sorts of web sites have you accessed with the full browser? (Sample size=202, multiple answer)

Search or portal site	46.0%
News or general info site	37.1%
Traffic, maps or travel	26.7%
Shopping	21.8%
Blog	19.8%
Bulletin board	18.3%
Auction	17.8%
Single-function service (dictionary, translation, etc)	10.4%
Other	7.9%

Q3: For those answering yes to Q1, after using the full browser, how has your frequency of access to mobile phone-targetted sites changed? (Sample size=202)

Hardly ever access previously-used mobile sites	35.1%
Frequency of access of mobile sites has decreased	13.4%
Frequency of access of mobile sites has not changed	42.1%
Frequency of access of mobile sites has increased	9.4%

Q4: For those answering yes to Q1, after using the full browser, how has your frequency of access to mobile phone-targetted pay sites changed? (Sample size=202)

Now never access previously-used paid-for mobile contents	47.0%
Amount spend on paid-for mobile contents has decreased	15.3%
Amount spend on paid-for mobile contents has not changed	30.2%
Amount spend on paid-for mobile contents has increased	7.4%

Q5: What issues might crop up (or have cropped up) as a result of using a full browser? (Sample size=2,074, multiple answer)

Packet charge increase	60.8%
Phone screen size too small	44.3%
Corrupted character encodings or screen layout broken	28.1%
Few usable features	25.9%
Worry about viruses or accessing dodgy sites	25.5%
Response from web servers slow	25.3%
Poor usability	20.6%
Cannot view Javascript or Flash-based high-spec sites	15.9%
Others	2.4%
No particular problems or worries	19.2%

Finally, the trends of usage patterns of various major features of mobile phones were investigated. For each of the main functions of the phone, each respondent was asked if they had used it within the last month. Looking back at the historical data the following trends can be seen:

• Picture mail usage has increased from 36.4% to 40.5% in the last two months
• Bar code and QR Code scans are up from 17.6% to 21.5%
• Infrared usage also up from 14.4% to 16.6%
• Usage of all other features up, but none very significantly
• However, electronic money feature usage is still less than 2%

Central Research Services, Inc published a report two months ago regarding leisure activities. The format of their report differs from the usual survey results that I translate as first, they scale the figures up to reflect the whole population (the current population of Japan is somewhere around 127 million), and second, they present the data within a coherent narrative rather than just the usual data dump, so the amount of data available is rather limited. It does say, however, that they interviewed 3,000 people aged 15 and over at some point to get their data. The main data worth presenting is the ranking of participation in various activities, based on how many people from the survey group performed each activity at least once in 2004, so although the lottery, for instance, is high on the list, each participant only spends a couple of minutes per week (or even per year, as the end of year big draw is very, very popular), so if the table was sorted by the actual hours spent, it would look very, very different.

Eating out	72,400,000
Travel within Japan	60,800,000
Driving (or being driven)	55,100,000
Karaoke	49,200,000
Watching videos	48,700,000
Doing the lottery	45,900,000
Personal computing (games, etc)	44,300,000
Cinema	43,900,000
Listening to music	42,400,000
Visiting gardens, museums, zoos	40,600,000
Gardening	37,500,000
Bars, pubs, and other drinking establishments	37,300,000
Bowling	32,000,000
Amusement parks	31,900,000
Physical exercise	30,700,000
Picnic, hiking, hill walking	30,600,000
Board or card games	30,300,000
Console games	30,100,000
Jogging, marathon	26,200,000
Concerts, live music	25,600,000

MyVoice recently published this survey regarding home robots. For me personally, all this robot stuff is very gimmicky; static sensor arrays would be much more useful for almost all purposes (except for vaccuuming of course), and the cost of static machinery is far lower that making some virtually useless moving guard robot, given today’s, or even tomorrow’s technology. However, with almost two-thirds of respondents failing to register anxiety at the robotisation of the home, and half keen on welcoming them into their homes, surely this is nothing but another win for the Lizard Alliance and the RoTM™?

MyVoice surveyed 17,958 people registered in the MyVoice community; 42% male and 39% in their thirties. The results are as follows:

Q1: Do you think you’d want to use a robot in your home?

I absolutely want to use	13.9%
I probably want to use	36.0%
I can’t say whether I want to or not	29.6%
I don’t really want to use	12.2%
I absolutely don’t want to use	8.3%

Q2: What sort of robot functions do you want to use? (Multiple answer)

Cleaning the house	58.4%
Crime prevention	55.3%
Home minding	39.2%
Tidying up after meals	34.4%
Clothes washing	26.8%
Ironing	23.1%
Cooking	22.1%
Carrying baggage	21.8%
Healing	19.9%
Play	18.9%
Nursing	17.7%
Driving car	16.9%
Work or study help	15.3%
Communication or chat	15.1%
Health management	12.0%
Child minding or child eduction	10.4%
Others	2.2%
I don’t want to use a robot	11.3%
No answer	0.2%

Note: the difference between “crime prevention” and “home minding” is probably that “crime prevention” implies detection of intruders, whereas “home minding” is more just monitoring the house, answering the phone or the door, watching the cat, etc.

Q3: If you bought a robot, up to about how much would you pay?

Up to 10,000 yen	11.9%
10,000 to 100,000 yen	37.8%
100,000 to 200,000 yen	13.4%
200,000 to 300,000 yen	7.0%
300,000 to 500,000 yen	5.2%
500,000 to 1,000,000 yen	5.0%
1,000,000 to 10,000,000 yen	1.1%
Over 10,000,000 yen	0.2%
I don’t think I want to buy	18.0%
No answer	0.5%

Q4: Are you uneasy about the spread of home robots?

I feel completely uneasy about it	6.7%
I’m a little uneasy about it	27.4%
I can’t say whether I am uneasy or not	34.1%
I don’t really feel uneasy	22.4%
I don’t feel uneasy at all	8.4%
No answer	1.0%

A slight departure from my usual themes, but I found news of a class action lawsuit against the Japanese government regarding the lack of a specific law outlawing racial discrimination in Japan. Naturally, I support the idea of a bill being passed into law that will make such behaviour punishable, but it’s the approach (and the person doing the approach too, I suppose) that grates on me. Arudodebito Sugiwara, seems to represent the constituency of disgruntled English teachers. That’s a gross over-simplification of his position, of course, but it is a criticism that is easy to make.

Reading the statement outlining the proposed lawsuit, the text, on the whole, is commendable, and looking at the description of the planned second wave of more complex cases there is a lot to be said for this portion of the strategy, I think. However, I have issues with the proposed first wave. Putting on my statistical hat, it says:

Although our efforts have not gone ignored, the fact is that overt racial discrimination in Japan, evident in the increase in the number of businesses overtly displaying “No Foreigners Allowed” signs, is getting worse.

I wonder how he has determined that there is an increase in the number of businesses with discriminatory signs? Can we see the survey evidence that show the change in the number of signs over the years? I’m sure his collection of signs has increased over the years, but that may be just as much to do with more people photographing them, of course. (It is also interesting to note that many of the signs pictured on his web site are from places that look like dodgy hostess bars or snacks.) There may have been a spike for the World Cup in 2002, but is there any evidence of this?

Next, the claim that overt discrimination is getting worse. How has that been determined? Is it really increasing, or is it just more people reporting it to Debito (the mailing list he runs with others, for instance, constantly grows in membership), or just more people being over-sensitive and mistaking (or attributing) dislike for someone’s personality for dislike of someone’s origin? I personally have seen friends being bulls in china shops and getting offended when this behaviour has rubbed the locals up the wrong way. In addition, even if it could be demonstrated numerically that overt discrimination is increasing, the absolute number of discriminators could actually be decreasing; for instance, as the population of foreigners increases and more people have encounters with foreigners, they have opportunities to display their racist tendencies, but if at the same time some of these people change their minds, both the number of overt racists and the number of overt non-racists can increase.

Finally, the “Japanese Only” signs have been, in at least one case I know of (what percentage are so, I don’t know), trying to express that the staff only speak Japanese rather than trying to specifically exclude other nationalities.

InfoPlant performed a survey of mobile phone users, carried out through the main menus of internet-enabled phones from DoCoMo, au and Vodafone. 16,833 people replied during the survey, lasting one week in the start of September. 67.4% of respondents were female, and iMode users, Ezweb users and Vodafone Live! users were 57.4%, 20.9% and 21.7% respectively. This is another self-selecting survey with a prize draw as a carrot, so the answers should be taken in that light.

Q1: Tell me how often you access sites from your mobile phone

	All	Male	Female
About every day	73.8%	76.7%	72.5%
Four or five days a week	10.4%	9.4%	10.9%
Two or three days a week	10.9%	9.5%	11.6%
About one day a week	3.1%	3.1%	3.2%
Less than that	1.6%	1.3%	1.8%

Not surprisingly, the younger the user, the more frequently they accessed.

Q2: Are you on a flat-rate packet plan? (ie, unlimited internet access)

	All	Male	Female
My phone supports it, and I’m using it	58.0%	59.9%	57.1%
My phone supports it, but I’m not on it, but want to change to it	12.3%	11.5%	12.7%
My phone supports it, but I’m not on it, and won’t change to it	5.9%	6.2%	5.8%
My phone doesn’t support it, but want to change to one that does	20.8%	19.4%	21.6%
My phone doesn’t support it, and won’t change to one that does	2.9%	3.0%	2.9%

Breaking down the table in Q1 by usage of inlimited access plans, we get:

	Unlimited access users	Not unlimited access users
About every day	85.7%	57.5%
Four or five days a week	6.8%	15.5%
Two or three days a week	5.5%	18.4%
About one day a week	1.3%	5.7%
Less than once a week	0.7%	3.0%

Q3: For unlimited access user, compared with before you started the service, what has increased? (Sample size=9,764; Multiple answer)

	All	Male	Female
Site Access Frequency	87.4%	89.7%	86.2%
Time spent at a particular site	60.0%	62.2%	58.9%
Number of games downloaded	29.0%	32.7%	27.1%
Number of non-game applets downloaded	20.1%	25.0%	17.7%
Number of ring tones downloaded	45.6%	46.5%	45.1%
Number of pay sites registered with	12.5%	12.6%	12.4%
Number of mails sent and received	36.9%	37.2%	36.8%
Number of times done shopping from mobile	14.3%	9.8%	16.7%
No change in particular	4.0%	3.3%	4.3%

The age breakdown has a couple of interesting spikes – ring tone download for teenagers is almost 50% more the next age group, and mail usage is about 25% to 30% higher for them too.

Q3A: For not unlimited access user, compared with before you started the service, what do you think might increase? (Sample size=7,069; Multiple answer)

	All	Male	Female
Site Access Frequency	66.9%	63.6%	68.4%
Time spent at a particular site	35.6%	34.8%	36.0%
Number of games downloaded	29.7%	32.9%	28.2%
Number of non-game applets downloaded	17.6%	20.6%	16.3%
Number of ring tones downloaded	41.2%	36.8%	43.2%
Number of pay sites registered with	7.9%	7.5%	8.1%
Number of mails sent and received	26.0%	23.6%	27.1%
Number of times done shopping from mobile	9.8%	6.9%	11.2%
No change in particular	12.1%	15.2%	10.8%

Things are ticking along quite nicely now. I’ve launched a sister blog to this one, 私論 – Shiron – What I Think that covers more chatty personal blog stuff on the whole, and perhaps the occasional rant about life in Japan. Excuse the rather egotistical title, but I might as well be up front about it!

Search engines are looking good – Google rating for the site itself using the blog’s title is still rather poor, but other keywords seem to work quite well! Search logs show a few good hits from Google, MSN and Yahoo! (about 10% of my traffic is now from search or directories), but not Google Blogs, however. Blog Explosion still ticks along, but I’m using it in a much more efficient manner now, I hope. I’ve done a few trackbacks and blog comment postings to get the word around, but I’m still to get even one decent incoming link outside of directories. Also, as there seems to be a Google Page Rank update going on at the moment, I find according to a site I can’t find again that my Page Rank has jumped from 0 to 4, mostly, I think, thanks to Jim Breen and his fine list of Japan-related links. I’d be lost without his WWWJDICT to hand for my translation needs.

It’s a bit disappointing, however, that my other blog has got more comments for the mindless nonsense that I’ve written there than this place, where I’ve put in well over 100 hours of effort in the last two months! Oh well, but at least I’m writing this as a reference source, not as a popularity contest.

I’m still to earn beer (singular) money from my AdSense – I think I could just afford to buy a cheap and nasty chuhai right now from Google.

The bad news: I had a complaint from one of the people whose material I translated due to my rather blatant spicing up of the story for hits. That experiment worked far too well, resulting in a 50% increase in traffic due to a wonky algorithm in MSN Search, which had decided to promote me to second place for various pr0n-related keywords. I’ve deleted the original and reposted a cleaned-up translation.

At the end of last month, goo Research performed a survey amongst over 20,000 women to find out their attitudes towards breast cancer. This research was carried out on behalf of three organisations, Japan Society of Breast Care, Japan Cancer Society and J.POSH.

The survey details are: the respondents were selected from goo Reseach Monitor Group’s female members, with 21,106 women successfully completing the web-based questionnaire. 1.0% were 19 years old or under, 8.5% were 20-24, 19.5% were 25-29, 26.3% were 30-34, 19.4% were 35-39, 13.3% were 40-44, 6.4% were 45-49, 3.0% were 50-54, 1.8% were 55-59, and just 0.8% were 60 or over. 66.7% were married, and 52.7% had given birth.

Q1: Are you concerned about breast cancer? (Sample size=21,106)

	Very concerned	Somewhat concerned	Neither concerned nor unconcerned	Not very concerned	Not at all concerned
All	30.0%	54.5%	11.5%	3.6%	0.4%
Up to 19 y.o.	16.5%	46.6%	22.8%	11.7%	2.4%
20-24 y.o.	23.0%	53.5%	15.2%	7.5%	0.8%
25-29 y.o.	28.6%	55.4%	11.7%	3.9%	0.3%
30-34 y.o.	30.6%	55.7%	10.8%	2.6%	0.3%
35-39 y.o.	31.1%	54.9%	10.4%	3.2%	0.4%
40-44 y.o.	32.0%	54.3%	10.5%	3.0%	0.2%
45-49 y.o.	31.6%	53.7%	12.7%	1.8%	0.5%
50-54 y.o.	33.3%	48.4%	12.7%	4.7%	0.8%
55-59 y.o.	37.2%	48.4%	9.4%	4.7%	0.3%
Over 60 y.o.	32.3%	49.4%	14.0%	4.3%	0.0%

Q2: Where do you get your information about breast cancer? (Sample size=21,106, multiple answer)

Mother	12.9%
Other family or relatives	6.1%
Friends and acquaintances	23.4%
Newspapers	29.3%
Books or magazines	41.0%
TV or radio	53.0%
Internet	45.2%
Local government information leaflet	13.0%
Doctor	15.6%
Medical check-up service organisation	23.3%
Workplace or school health service	3.6%
I’ve never had information about breast cancer	9.7%
Other	0.7%

Q3: Do you know the following information about breast cancer? (Sample size=21,106, multiple answer)

It’s rapidly increasing within Japanese women	48.0%
Over one in thirty Japanese women will get it	18.5%
Once past your late thirties, the chance of breast cancer drastically increases	47.4%
It’s the leading cause of death from cancer in women from 30 to 64 years old	15.1%
If discovered early, the chance of recovery is 95%	51.5%
If you have regular imaging checks, there is a good chance of discovering cancer	45.6%
It’s a disease you can detect yourself	60.2%
Mammography will discover abnormalities much earlier than touching examinations	55.3%
Don’t know any of the above	6.8%

Q4: If you found a lump or other abnormality on your breast, what sort of clinic do you think you would go to? (Sample size=21,106)

Gynecology clinic	51.9%
Obstetrics and gynaecology clinic	9.6%
Internal medicine clinic	3.7%
Surgical clinic	8.7%
Breast specialist	25.8%
Others	0.4%

Q5: Do you know about specialised breast clinics? (Sample size=21,106)

I know about them	26.6%
I’ve heard about them, but don’t know the details	25.2%
Not heard of them at all	48.2%

Q6: How frequently do you have general health check-ups? (Sample size=21,106)

Every six months	3.5%
Once a year	48.3%
Once every two years	6.9%
Less than once every three years	10.5%
Not had one for over five years	13.1%
Not had one for over ten years	7.2%
Never had one	9.8%
Don’t want to answer	0.8%

Q7: What sort of breast examinations have you had? (Sample size=19,799, multiple answer)

Self-examination	25.6%
Visual and touch examination	34.5%
Mammography	15.6%
Ultrasound	17.6%
Never had one	55.3%
Don’t want to answer	0.7%

Q8: How frequently have you had a uterine cancer test? (Sample size=21,106)

Every six months	2.3%
Once a year	25.5%
Once every two years	9.1%
Less than once every three years	9.0%
Not had one for over five years	6.0%
Not had one for over ten years	2.2%
Never had one	44.7%
Don’t want to answer	1.2%

Q9: What was your motivation for having a breast cancer examination? (Sample size=8,706, multiple answer)

It was recommended that I should	10.2%
I saw information about it in the media (roadshow, magazine, TV, etc)	8.2%
It was part of a workplace check	25.5%
It was part of a local government check	34.2%
I felt myself it was necessary	35.5%
Because a friend or acquaintance has breast cancer	6.5%
Because a family member or relative has breast cancer	6.5%
I was motivated by a breast disease other than cancer	3.6%
Other	9.1%

Q10: Why did you not take a breast cancer examination? (Sample size=12,264, multiple answer)

I’d not had lumps or other symptoms recently	62.6%
At my age, breast cancer is not an issue	12.3%
No-one around me is taking them	12.8%
Takes too long to do it	20.4%
Scared that cancer might be found	7.8%
Not part of the workplace or local government health checks	12.0%
Not had an opportunity to take it	43.9%
I don’t know where to get an examination	15.1%
Nowhere locally to get an examination	5.2%
It’s a delicate matter	13.6%
I’m not concerned about breast cancer	3.6%
Other	5.0%

Q11: In the area you live in, does the local government carry out breast cancer screening? (Sample size=21,106)

Carries out	53.4%
Doesn’t carry out	2.9%
Don’t know	43.7%

Q12: If answered “Carries out” to Q11, in the area you live in, what sort of breast cancer screening examination does the local government perform? (Sample size=11,274, multiple answer)

Visual and touch examination	75.6%
Mammography	40.0%
Ultrasound	18.8%
Other	14.5%

Q13: Which of the following topics do you want to learn about regarding breast cancer? (Sample size=21,106, multiple answer)

About the disease	50.9%
About hospitals that do screening	59.0%
Infomation about breast specialists	54.4%
About local government measures	40.9%
About disease prevention methods	59.1%
About treatment methods	53.5%
About after-effects	34.9%
About medicines	30.2%
About fees for treatment etc	53.4%
About communities and information exchanges	13.4%
About latest information	31.8%
No information I want	2.4%
Others	0.8%

A bit of a biggie again tonight. I’m surprised that there is no direct question about how often people have had breast cancer checks (is this deliberate as they don’t want to highlight a largish figure?), although I note with a bit of surprise that over a quarter have yearly scanning downstairs, which seems to be higher than I would have expected, especially in light of an article by Rebecca K Green I read on Japan Today reporting that only 3% of women have mammograms, yet here 15.6% say they have had mammograms, and even more have had ultrasound checks, although of course the same people could be getting both examinations.

There’s also the other issues that yearly breast cancer checks are, according to UK calculations, not cost-effective (although it’s a difficult thing to cost), and that testicular and prostate cancer get almost zero coverage, even though they can be just as deadly.