世論 What Japan Thinks

Recently (how recently is not stated!) goo Research published this survey on blog awareness and usage in Japan, their 19th survey in their series on blogging. 1,042 Internet users aged from teens to their 50s were surveyed, with 58.83% (uggh, what’s with the two decimal places? I’ll round to one for the rest of this story) of the sample women. The following results were obtained:

Q: Within the last month, have you looked at someone else’s blog?

Yes	75.4%
No	18.9%
Don’t know what a blog is	5.7%

The viewers percentage has tripled since their first survey last April and the don’t knows have decreased from almost 41% first time out.

Q: Within the last month, have you posted a comment on someone else’s blog?

	All	Male	Female
Yes	25.4%	22.2%	27.8%
No	74.6%	77.8%	72.2%

Q:Have you made a blog yourself?

Yes	27.2%
No but I want to try sometime	33.3%
No, and don’t plan to	32.2%
Don’t know what a blog is	7.3%

The number not knowing what a blog is has increased! Perhaps people paniced at this question and realised they didn’t really understand things after all?

There now follows a large table describing what blogs people use, but rather than reproduce the whole lot, the highlights from the sample of 283 bloggers are livedoor leading at 17.7%, down from 23.4% last time (last month?); goo at 16.2% down from 17.7%; and Rakuten at 15.2% from 15.6%. Yahoo! and not listed others are the only gainers, 2% and 4% respectively.

One reason for more losers than winners is that the question allows multiple answers. The last time the average blogger used just under one and a half services; this time it is just under 1.4 services, suggesting either people are keeping less blogs or moving their blogs to a single provider.

Q: About how often do you update your blog? (Sample size=283)

Daily or so	21.9%
Twice or thrice a week	26.9%
Once a week	13.8%
Twice or thrice a month	14.1%
Once a month	5.6%
Once every two or three months	6.7%
Less than once every six months	11%

Q: Has your blog received a trackback? (Sample size=283 I think)

	All	Male	Female
Yes	68.2%	72.6%	65.5%
No	31.8%	27.4%	34.5%

On the other hand, only 33.9% have sent a trackback to another blog.

Q: Do you use an affiliate (cash-for-clicks) program? (Sample size=283)

I participate in one already	16.6%
I definitely want to join one	26.5%
I want to join one	25.1%
I don’t really want to join one	14.8%
I don’t want to join one	6.4%
Don’t know	10.6%

Finally, bloggers and those who wanted to be bloggers were asked what were the three most important factors when selecting a blog service to build a blog in. Of the 630 respondents, the top three answers were “Easy to make” at 77.5%, “Easy to understand management system” at 59.0%, and finally “Freedom of layout” at 37.1%. Strangely, I thought, magazine recommendations was right down at the bottom, less than 1% selecting it as a key factor.

Looking at this survey on Japanese and their language, performed last year in January and February, it seems that three out of four of the 3,000 Japanese surveyed would normally read my blog’s title as yoron rather than seron! Only 18.9% plumped for seron whilst 73.6% went for yoron, with the remaining 7.5% either use both readings equally or just don’t know. Further investigation indicates both readings are perfectly acceptable, so one is neither more or less correct than the other.

Doing some study at work on patents, trademarks and copyright issues in Japan in Japanese, I found out that for the results of opinion polls and the like, copyright law does not apply, except in the case where the words “Reproduction Prohibited” (Japanese: 禁転載) are present along with the data, therefore this blog does not infringe copyright on the surveys as far as I can determine. The write-up on the surveys is covered by copyright, especially when opinion or other human creativity is expressed, so I still need to find out if the concept of “Fair Use” is enshrined in Japanese law. My translations and reportage are copyright as they contain considerable creative effort (although it might not seem like it all the time) but they may be derivative works, depending on how literally I translate the stories. I should be able to get away with “Fair Use” (unlike manga and anime translator who also claim it) as I don’t use all the source material, and I believe I add value only with my comments or with the uncopyrightable raw data.

Of course, I am not a lawyer, Japanese or any other nationality, so please take my advice only with a rather generous pinch of salt, and remember how much you have paid for this advice.

According to a survey published in the Nikkei Shimbun of 865 foreigners incarcerated in various prisons around Japan, performed in September and October of last year, the vast majority would prefer to do their time back in their home country. Note the slightly onimous (but statistically perfectly accurate) opening phrase, highlighted for your benefit, translated directly from the original article.

Amongst the continually growing foreign prisoner population, 80% answered that if they could choose where to be imprisoned, they would select their home country rather than Japan. Amongst Chinese prisoners, who make up almost half the total number, well over 80% of them hoped for their home prisons. The main reasons given was distance from their families and the differences in language and culture. The Ministry of Justice Correctional Office said that there is a possibility of introducing international prisoner transfers with some of those countries that we cannot currently transfer to.

One could read some sinister undertones into this news item, as a lot of people are wont to do these days, but I shall not. One reason the foreigner prison population is growing is that the foreigner population is also. The exact statistical correlation is difficult to discern, however.

It’s the annual be nice to old folks day today, and the big statistical news is that this year over 20% of Japan’s population is over 65, passing Italy on 19.5%. The issue of the aging population and the lack of children in Japan is littered with interesting facts and figures, so I’ll have to dig out a few references to translate sometime in the near future.

Mixi is one of the most popular invite only Social Networking Service (SNS) in Japan, apparently, like Friendster et al. in the USA. They are not my cup of tea (just like I’m not really into all this blogrolling and incestuous linking here), but obviously other people like them. There was a report from a workshop at the Social Infomatics Fair 2005 at Kyoto University containing some interesting statistics on the social webs that had built up.

In February of this year, the number of users stood at around 360,000. Note it seems to be over a million now. The purpose of the research was to try to identify what sort of network of relationships had built up between users.

“My Mix” (in Japanese it’s pronounced closer to “My Mick”) is the slang term used to indicate the number of direct friends someone has registered; this would be roughly analogous to one’s blogroll in the blogging world.

According to a researcher named Kikuo YUTA from the Network Informatics Laboratories, 50.8% of the users have four or less people in their My Mix; 23.6% have but a solitary soul (perhaps just the person that invited them?) as a friend. On the other hand, the average length of a My Mix is just under 21.

For people with five or more names in their My Mix, the numbers stack up as follows:

5 to 11 friends	17.1%
12 to 25 friends	24.3%
26 to 40 friends	15.4%
41 to 87 friends	20.6%
88 to 197 friends	10.1%
198 to 1301 friends	2.9%

This adds up to 90.4% – what happened to the other 9.6%, you may very well ask. Well, here the story write-up is very vague (or I don’t understand it, of course), but what has happened is that the above table represents the share of the total number of links for each of the population sizes. This is explained further in the next paragraph.

A large minority of the My Mixers were very tightly intertwined, making them hubs for all the human relationships. Those with over 41 people in their My Mix list made up only 4.8% of the population, but accounted for 33.6% of the links. On the other hand, those with less than five in their My Mix (50.9%) had just 9.5% of the links.

Hmm, isn’t this just data simply derived from the population distribution, or is there a deeper meaning I am missing?

Kikuo YUTA also said that the high density of links in mixi was very rare – usually structure develops over time, but here it came into being almost right from the beginning. “It is the first time in the world such a unique structure has been found”, he said.

Maybe I’m missing something, but I would think that anything invitation-based would tend to have the sort of tight structure that they are describing? Being in Japanese limits the scope for spreading into disparate groups, I would think. Japanese just love being unique, however. Reading ahead I see more explanation… The rest of the article talked about other human aspects of the network, and whilst very interesting, is getting away from the main purpose of this blog, polls and surveys, so I’ll not translate. Also, the Japanese was getting rather hard!

– now in Google, but still no links to me to be found — got a strange hit from Yahoo! mail — need a better counter than SiteMeter — worked out how to write a macro in HTML-Kit, so can do tables faster — all other Blog Explosion users just perform click throughs, never read, just like me too — Google Blog Search returns rather poor results for the keyword “Japan” — translating is fun! — lots and lots of stats to translate, historical comparisons might be fun — trying HaloScan, but might bin their comments and stick with Blogger — goodnight all –

With the XBox 360 release date now announced, and the new Revolution controller previewed (and I must say it looks interesting!) more research shows the PS3 still the top must buy for people. It will be interesting to see if the Revolution moves up on the back of its showing at the Tokyo Game Show.
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This week’s silly survey, once again from Trivia no Izumi, took 100 mongrels and 100 owners, and when they went out for a walk, the owner fell over ill and hoped Lassie would come home and drag someone out to rescue their dying master. Of course, most people brimmed with confidence regarding their dog’s intelligence, but quite unsurprisingly to me, all failed miserably. A few dogs did demostrate concern, I thought, but then again others just took the chance to have a free run-around.

I saw a link to quite a surprising survey (not really a poll, but it’s an interesting statistic nonetheless) about the state of Japanese teeth, in particular children’s teeth.

According to a survey by a Nagoya dentist, in 1997 about 4.9% of children were missing adult teeth completely. However, last year the figure had ballooned to 11.6%, and on average each child was missing one or two adult teeth (excluding any wisdom teeth), with the worst case being missing six, over 20% of them!

The story provides no explanation that I can see for why, but it does seem a worrying statistic!