世論 What Japan Thinks

Sorry folks, but real life is still very busy, and may be hectic for another couple of weeks as I’m studying for a kanji exam that should be quite tricky, given my total inability to write kanji properly! I’ve also decided I should open another blog to allow my more creative side (if I have one, of course) to develop, or at least just provide an outlet for general moaning about Japan, life and everything, and a test-bed for various blogging tools and stuff. I’ll officially announce it once I get it set up correctly and get a wee bit of content.

I’ve had an embarrassingly huge amount of hits for my H*T N*K*D J*P*N*S* T**NS post! Almost 25% of my traffic for a week came in through Technorati tags, and just this week I’ve got into the MSN Search index and been having a steady flow of hits from pervie searches. I’ve had but one Google hit in all the time I’ve been in there, but MSN Search seems to be turning up the goods for me.

Since this blog, like many others, and like real life too, is littered with adverts, it might be useful to look at how the Japanese perceive advertising. This survey from goo Research attempted to address this issue. This survey was carried out amongst 2,147 people residing in Tokyo and the surrounding prefectures of Saitama, Kanagawa and Chiba. It was performed as a real time survey using mobile phones, whatever that means. I think it means they just phoned mobile numbers from their survey group at random, so people could answer about their current surroundings.
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As someone who chews gum after almost every meal at home, the following survey from goo Research on usage in Japan is interesting to me. I suppose I could add comments on the dodgy state of Japanese teeth, but (a) I’ll resist the temptation, and (b) that sort of comment is often from Americans with unnaturally straight white gnashers. In addition I’ve received wonderful treatment from my Japanese dentist. So, back at the survey, they questioned 2,167 people from their private internet group at the end of August, and obtained the following results.

However, first I will explain a couple of terms. “Functional” gum means gum with medical or other beneficial claims associated with them, whether it be direct ones like some on the market with Xylitol, teeth whitening properties, non-smoking, or more vague claims about relieving dry throats or caffine-laced products. The TOKUHO mark is a stamp of approval by some government body to say the prduct thus stamped has been demonstrated to actually have the healthy properties that are claimed. With most (all?) brands of bottle gums, there is a book of small-sized Post-It Notes ™-like “disposal paper” included that is meant to be used for wrapping your used gum in.

Q: How often do you chew functional gum? (Sample size=2,167)

Almost daily	14.7%
About twice or thrice a week	15.2%
About once a week	12.1%
About twice or thrice a month	13.7%
Less than once a month	21.2%
Don’t chew functional gum	23.2%

Q: What is your reason for chewing functional gum? (Sample size=1,665; multiple answer)

Getting rid of bad breath after food, etc	55.5%
Cavity prevention	45.5%
Preventing tiredness	39.5%
Relaxation	34.0%
Just chew because it’s to hand (eg on top of desk, etc)	23.9%
Instead of cleaning teeth after meals, etc	23.3%
Prevent dry throat	7.4%
Others	3.7%

Q: What type of functional gum do you normally buy? (Sample size=1,665)

	All	Male	Female
Bottle type (loose tabs)	34.7%	36.0%	64.7%
Stick type	34.7%	43.9%	54.7%
Packaged tab type	34.7%	29.0%	73.6%

Q: After buying bottle type gum, how has your gum consumption changed? (Sample size=577)

Increased greatly	31.5%
Increased slightly	42.1%
Stayed about the same	23.6%
Decreased a little	0.2%
Decreased a lot	0.4%
I didn’t buy other gums before buying bottles	2.3%

Q: What do you use the “disposal paper” in the bottles for? (Sample size=577)

Throwing away the chewed gum	64.9%
As a memo pad	19.1%
Just throw it away without using it	10.4%
Didn’t know there was disposal paper inside	4.2%
Others	1.6%

Q: Do you check whether the gum has an effect when you buy it? (Sample size=2,167)

Always check	15.3%
Sometimes check	42.6%
Don’t really check	30.7%
Never check	11.4%

Q: Do you check whether the Tokuho mark is present when you buy gum (of any kind)? (Sample size=2,167)

Always check	4.7%
Sometimes check	22.1%
Don’t really check	44.2%
Never check	29.1%

Q: Do you check whether the Tokuho mark is present when you buy functional gum? (Sample size=1,665)

Always check	5.7%
Sometimes check	26.2%
Don’t really check	47.2%
Never check	21.0%

Following on from the recent census, there are some additional questions that need to be answered by all foreigners living in Japan. I urge all readers to urgently visit this page and complete the survey! (*^_^*)

Also, sorry, but real life’s been a bit busy so updates are thin on the ground!

Finally what I have been searching for, a bit late, but nonetheless, it’s the only survey I could find on the topic. DIMSDRIVE performed a public opinion poll on the two days right after the recent general election, questioning 3,598 people from all around the country in an internet-based survey. The source of the pool of respondents is not clear, however. 45.5% were male, 54.5% female, from all around the country. The Kanto area seems, however, a bit over-represented: 56.4% of panel lived there whereas the actual population is closer to 30% of the total Japanese population. This bias to urbanised areas might affect the Post Office privatisation opinions expressed later on.

Q: Did you vote in the election?

Yes	81.7%
No	18.3%

Note that the actual turnout was 67.5%, so perhaps a good number of the non-voters refused to participate in this survey too. The age and sex breakdown of voters is also interesting: 23.2% of the 20-29 year-old men didn’t vote, and 33.0% of the women of the same age didn’t. In the 40-49 years old bracket, both sexes are at just under 14%, and the 60 years old and over category has a mere 3% of non-participants in democracy.

Q: What was the most important policy issue for you?

Post office privatisation	32.9%
Pensions and benefits	22.7%
Political reform	7.7%
Education or population shrinkage	7.5%
Tax reform	7.0%
Economic measures	5.9%
Constitutional revision	1.6%
Foreign affairs	1.3%
Job creation measures	0.9%
Environmental problems	0.5%
Others	3.1%
Don’t know	1.0%
No important policies	8.1%

Regarding pensions and welfare, not too surprisingly the older the respondents got the more important it became! Some of the other issues that were listed as important were “fiscal issues”, “administration selection” (I think this means choosing the correct leaders for the country), “amakudari“, “anti-war”, “expressing tangible figures” (not sure what this one refers to), “restructuring”, etc.

Q: For those who voted, did you read any manifestos or other political promise documents? (Sample size=2,939)

Carefully read them	13.1%
Skim read them	36.1%
Glanced at them	20.7%
Had them but never read them	1.4%
Didn’t even receive one	28.7%

Q: For those who didn’t vote, why didn’t you vote? (Sample size=659)

I thought I wanted to vote, but there was no candidate or party (…I could support?)	31.0%
It was inconvenient, so I couldn’t go to the polling station	29.9%
I think it’s just the same whoever wins	22.0%
I don’t think my single vote makes any difference	19.6%
No interest in politics	12.9%
I didn’t know much about the candidates and parties	10.6%
Too far, or I was ill, etc, so I couldn’t go to the polling station	8.5%
I want to vote for policies, but not for parties	7.4%
I’m not on the electoral roll	0.5%
Others	9.0%
No particular reason	5.0%

Some of the other reasons recorded were “because it was raining”, “I didn’t study enough to be able to vote”, “it was predicted to be an LDP walk-over anyway”, “Too much noise about Post Office privatisation”, “I couldn’t choose who to vote for”, “I’m posted far away from home”, “I forgot”, “I lost my voting card”, etc.

Q: Do you think Post Office privatisation is necessary? (Sample size=3,598)

Rather necessary	28.5%
Fairly necessary	36.3%
Can’t say one way or the other	20.8%
Not really necessary	7.9%
Not necessary at all	5.9%
Difficult to say	0.6%

For those who voted, the opinions on privatisation were in line with the table above, with an extra 3% viewing it as rather essential, and a corresponding 3% less sitting on the fence. However, for non-voters, these two figures were basically reversed, with only 16.7% strongly favouring it and 32.2% undecided.

Strangely, I thought, looking at the age breakdown, the older one gets the more in favour of privatisation they become. Only about 20% of the youngest age group saw it as rather necessary, yet 45% of the pensioner age group favoured it. As age increased, the rather necessary fraction steadily increased at the expense of the undecided fraction only. Given that the older one gets the more one may rely on the services of the Post Office, and given some of the (basically untrue) stories about wholescale branch closure, I find this a result worthy of further study.

Q: Did your interest in politics increase during this election period?

	All (N=3,598)	Voters (N=2,939)	Non-voters (N=659)
Increased rather a lot	14.5%	16.1%	7.3%
Increased a bit	33.8%	34.9%	28.7%
Not really changed	48.4%	45.7%	59.9%
Decreased a bit	1.6%	1.7%	1.1%
Decreased a lot	1.9%	1.6%	3.0%

Looking at the age and sex breakdown, the only significant figure seems to be that over half the old ladies are now significantly more interested in politics, although it is worthy of note that there was only 37 women over 60 who took part in the survey, so these figures may be biased by the small group.

According to this survey by MyVoice, performed at the start of August of this year amongst 12,317 registered members of the MyVoice Community, the following views on electronic money are as follows. 7,002 women and 5,295 men took part in the survey, with almost 40% being aged 30-39.

Q: Select all the electronic money brands you know.

Suica (JR East)	71.3%
Edy (Bitwallet (ANA et al))	63.2%
WebMoney	35.7%
ICOCA (JR West)	34.9%
ChoCOM (NTT)	20.8%
BitCash	14.7%
Others	3.3%
Don’t know about electronic money	11.5%
No answer	0.2%

Q: Have you used electronic money?

Yes	37.2%
No	62.8%

Q: For those who have used electronic money, what brands have you used? (Sample size=4,582 I think)

Suica (JR East)	54.8%
Edy (Bitwallet (ANA et al))	34.7%
WebMoney	23.2%
ICOCA (JR West)	11.0%
ChoCOM (NTT)	5.7%
BitCash	3.9%
Others	4.4%
No answer	0.4%

Note that Suica and ICOCA are regional brands focused around the two conurbations of Tokyo and Osaka, so the overlap between the two brands might be pretty small, although in the Osaka area there has been adverts describing how the ICOCA can be used in the Suica area. I would also suspect that a lot of the Suica and ICOCA users are not using the wallet features of the card – the main use is perhaps just as an electronic season ticket. Personally speaking I didn’t use the electronic wallet portion until over a year after getting the card.

Q: For those who have used electronic money, what have you used it for? (Sample size=4,582 I think)

Travel tickets	55.6%
Convenience store	42.4%
Net shopping	23.2%
Kiosk (usually on station platform)	15.3%
Vending machine	5.0%
Theatre/event ticket booth	3.5%
Supermarket	3.3%
Pharmacy	2.7%
Department store	1.6%
Discount store	1.2%
Others	14.5%
No answer	0.4%

Q: From now on, do you think you want to use electronic money? (Sample size unclear. All participants perhaps?)

I want to use	19.3%
I might want to use	26.8%
I may or may not want to use	31.7%
I don’t really want to use	13.5%
I don’t want to use	8.1%
No answer	0.7%

Sample reasons for answers:

I want to use	34yo male	Cashlessness seems convenient
	20yo female	I want to get Miles
	33yo male	Points and other privileges
I might want to use	42yo female	I’ve got a Suica pass in mind
	25yo male	Handy in emergencies
	32yo female	It seems to be becoming necessary these days
I may or may not want to use	49yo male	Too many types, and the number of cards needed is inconvenient
	27yo female	Refilling the card is a pain. Still just a few places to use the cards.
	44yo male	If I had one I might use it (eh?)
I don’t really want to use	43yo female	I don’t feel I can trust the security aspect
	23yo male	I’m a cash man myself
	39yo female	I can’t yet really understand the whole idea
I don’t want to use	26yo male	I’m concerned that personal information will be disclosed
	30yo female	I’d probably lose all my money sense
	64yo male	It’s unnecessary

I can’t say I’ve seen any cards used outside of station ticket gates myself, but I wonder if people were including their standard credit cards in the list of places they had used these cards? Most Japanese credit cards come with an IC Card component, and most supermarkets have signature-less and PIN-less transactions that are just as good as electronic money. I’d be in the “probably don’t want to use” camp myself, even though I have an ICOCA. The private rail equivalent, PiTaPa, is post-pay, which I am still not 100% sure about myself, especially since even the season ticket component is not paid in advance.

Well, it’s now been just about a month since I started this blog, so I think a short retrospective is in order. First, the good stuff:

• Registered with most of the main directories and search engines
• Even getting some hits from above
• Done a lot of interesting (to me anyway) research and translations
• Managed to average just about one post a day
• Got a reasonably slick authoring environment with HTML-Kit
• AdSense monetisation set up

Now the bad stuff:

• Lack of punters
• Lack of comments – one real one, one spam so far
• Google ranking pretty poor – even seron what japan thinks hits blog directories first
• One solitary AdSense click
• Blog Explosion has been a waste of time

To explore the bad stuff further, first let us consider Blog Explosion. On paper it sounds great, for every two blogs you surf, you get credit for one hit in return, basically. However, the hits are extremely poor quality, as everyone, me included, is just clicking through to get credits. Admittedly, I’ve found two blogs that are interesting, the first being Blurred Line Blog, and especially his ongoing experiment with buying credits for Blog Explosion and tracking the hits. It’s also refreshing to find a blog written by someone who understands the English language correctly. The second is Tom’s Astronomy Blog. I’m not much of a fan of the science, per se, but he has a great set of pictures from his telescope and elsewhere and writes up descriptions for them that very clearly express his love of the stars. Both would be feeds for my RSS Reader, if I had one!

Next, the lack of punters and comments. Well, I suppose it’s early days, so I can’t expect a healthy readership instantly, and I’ve not tried networking much at all. This problem ties in with the Blog Explosion experience above, I feel, as with Blog Explosion you need to spend thirty seconds surfing to get one viewer (assuming you assign all your credits to buying hits), who is probably only going to spend the minimal time on your page just so they can get their credit to spend on another pair of useless eyeballs. To get 30 visitors (my current daily average) I need to spend probably 20 minutes (allowing for overhead) surfing. But, if in that 20 minutes I instead search for a blog with a recent posting on a similar topic matter to mine – Google Blogs and Technorati are good places to look for candidates – and write a comment that either just has my top-level URL in the header or specifically links to one of my relevant stories, I should in theory get targeted traffic. I’ve only done this twice or thrice, mind you, and have had merely one or two hits in return, but if I can do twenty posts and once catch the blog owner’s eye, the chance of getting a trackback or even a blogroll entry increases, and a permanent link is worth it for getting that essential boost in the search engines.

I suppose all the other negative things are caused by the lack of punters, so I’ll just have to keep plugging away and see what happens. I genuinely believe that this blog will provide a useful database for someone, whether it just be settling Internet arguments about Japan, such as when discussing Japanese religiosity or lack thereof; or whether it be for more serious business reasons, such as trying to get a feel for Japanese public opinion on topics that perhaps rarely get translated. I really do feel I have some unique (within the context of the English language world) content here!

To conclude, one of my Technorati blog tags is public opinion. I am the solitary blog so tagged, and looking at the individual post tags, public opinion shows my own blog with five out of the latest ten entries (it would be more but Technorati is slow to update my blog, and I didn’t start tagging until recently), which must demonstrate something, probably about how ego-centric the average blogger is!

ARTICLE DELETED. Now rewritten at this page.

According to this survey published by infoPlant, QR codes are very well-known and widely used. One word of caution, however, is that this survey, carried out at the end of August, had the respondents self-selected from a link in the DoCoMo iMode menu system. 7,660 people completed the survey, 5,023 of them women, so naturally one would expect a strong bias in favour of the question.

Note that the QR Code at the head of the story was made for free at the web site here.

Q: Do you know about QR codes (2D barcodes)? (Sample size=7,660)

I’ve used them	73.3%
I know about them, and have a reader feature in my phone, but I haven’t used them	7.6%
I know about them, but don’t have a reader feature in my phone, so I haven’t used them	15.6%
I don’t know about them	3.5%

Looking at the age breakdown, for both males and females almost 90% of the under 20′s use them, but the rate steadily drops down to end up at just about half of all the over 50s.

Q: For those who answered that they used them, in what printed materials have you used QR Codes? (Sample size=5,513)

Business card	5.7%
Newspaper	31.9%
Magazine	84.2%
Advertising flyer	51.1%
Poster	14.2%
Direct mail	25.0%
Mail-order catalog	24.8%
PC web site	20.7%
Other	13.1%

There was no significant differences between the sexes, except for almost two and a half times more women used mail-order catalog QR Codes.

Q: Which of the following QR Code-based services do you want to use? (Sample size=7,660)

Easy phone book registration from a business card, etc	36.8%
Read a URL and access a site	74.3%
Replacement for company identification badge	29.0%
Cashless shopping at vending machines, etc	28.3%
Buying goods written about in magazines	27.7%
Replacement for tickets (concerts, travel passes, etc)	32.5%
Others	5.5%
Don’t want to use	7.4%

Strangely enough, I thought, those who answered in the first question that they didn’t know what QR Codes were didn’t want to use any services at all, on the whole. Almost two-thirds of that group answered “Don’t want to use” to the above question.

We had a visit today from the census representitive for next month’s census. The questions are mostly very simple – age, place of work, size of house (Japan has a target to within 20 years get the average family living space up from the current about 50 square metres to 100 square metres. Hoever, there are very few flats available over 100 square metres, at least not without getting into funny money, and even many houses barely top that in living area), hours worked per month, etc. The one problematic one I saw was there is a nationality box, Japanese or other, with a write-in area. All children from an international marriage are dual nationality until aged 20, so what do they tick? I saw on The Community mailing list the prevailing opinion was to tick both boxes and let them sort it out. One person did phone city hall, and their advice was to select Japanese for the kids, but that just hides the issue. Many international children may have special schooling requirements, especially if they have moved back from overseas.

On a lighter note, there is no box for religion, so we cannot repeat the efforts in New Zealand and the UK where people selected Jedi-ism as they religion. Perhaps instead for country of origin we can write in Endor (but that’s the Ewok land, isn’t it? Ohh ‘eck, I’m no Staar Wars geek!)