世論 What Japan Thinks

With a longer and hotter summer than usual in Japan, tempers inevitably fray, so goo Ranking took a look at what tends to be the cause of lovers’ tiffs in summer, for both men and women. However, looking at the answers there seems to be no pattern to which side starts the argument.

Demographics

Over the 21st and 22nd of July 2010 1,159 members of the goo Research online monitor group completed a private internet-based questionnaire. 63.4% of the sample were female, 12.4% in their teens, 21.1% in their twenties, 28.3% in their thirties, 23.6% in their forties, 8.2% in their fifties, and 6.4% aged sixty or older. Note that the score in the results refers to the relative number of votes for each option, not a percentage of the total sample.

What most irritates me in summer (although it hasn’t started an argument, yet…) is my wife’s constant utterances of “it’s hot!” roughly every two minutes, even when inside air-conditioned facilities. Her cooler settings at bed time are also far too low, but I just snuggle up a bit more…
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A recent survey from goo Research, reported on by japan.internet.com, into chat services found that more people were aware of, and used, internet telephone than instant messaging services.

Demographics

On the 5th of August 2010 1,069 members of the goo Research monitor group completed a private internet-based questionnaire. 53.7% of the sample were male, 17.0% in their teens, 17.5% in their twenties, 21.0% in their thirties, 16.4% in their forties, 16.0% in their fifties, and 12.2% aged sixty or older.

Back in March I translated identical questions from a different survey company. That time the sample was only 300 people, so one would expect this goo Research one to be more accurate, but even still it’s hard to explain why the last time the top four were MSN text, Yahoo! text, Skype voice and Skype text, but this time is a reversal with Skype voice, Skype text, Yahoo! text and MSN text.
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A recent survey from iShare into relationships with one’s boss revealed some interesting facets of the worker-boss relationship in Japan.

Demographics

Between the 20th and 23rd of July 2010 427 members of the CLUB BBQ free email forwarding service completed a private internet-based questionnaire. 53.9% of the sample were male, 30.4% in their twenties, 31.1% in their thirties, and 38.4% in their forties.

I do regularly but not frequently talk to my boss about career advancement, but I’ve never had a decent answer from him, thus I’d be in the 27.4% in Q1SQ4. I’ve only had one direct boss that I can say I respected totally; my employer seems to breed large number of middle management who do not want to rock the boat and would prefer to stay in the office until all hours producing low-value but high-volume reports rather than asking why the information is needed.
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Around two in five of the online population questioned here to be precise have heard of it, although usage of PayPal is still very low according to this survey from goo Research and reported on by japan.internet.com.

Demographics

Between the 28th of July and the 1st of Augut 2010 1,079 members of the goo Research online monitor group completed a private internet-based questionnaire. 53.4% of the sample were male, 16.4% in their teens, 18.2% in their twenties, 21.2% in their thirties, 16.1% in their forties, 15.8% in their fifties, and 12.2% aged sixty or older.

I’ve bought from the US, the UK and Australia through PayPal, although it’s always for software or services. My most frequent transactions are with Namecheap for domain name purchase – I can’t recommend them enough, especially if like me you’d got fed up with GoDaddy’s upselling every time you try to make a simple transaction. If you do decide to use them, don’t forget that they also have an official coupon code blog where you can get a few cents or dollars off each transaction.
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iShare took a look at young people’s opinions regarding their mother’s cooking, in particular the flavour that reminds them of home. I cannot think of a British expression, but it’s the stereotypical Italian “Just like Mama used to make” that the survey is about.

Demographics

Between the 22nd and 27th of July 2010 454 members of the CLUB BBQ free email forwarding service completed a private internet-based questionnaire. 53.7% of the sample were male, 27.8% in their twenties, 36.6% in their thirties, and 35.7% in their forties.

I don’t think I have any particular taste of home – perhaps salmon is the closest, but that is more to do with the freshness of the salmon rather than the cooking per se. Just before you complain, Mum, it’s that I’m happy to get anything cooked for me rather than nothing being memorable. If we expand to cover baking, I’ve tried to reproduce her scones and pancakes but with very, very little success!
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In the fifteenth regular monthly survey by goo Research into terrestrial digital television broadcasts, japan.internet.com reported that very nearly three in four are now terrestrial digital ready, whether it be with television or video equipment.

Demographics

Between the 26th and 28th of July 2010 1,085 members of the goo Research online monitor group completed a private internet-based questionnaire. 53.1% of the sample were male, 16.7% in their teens, 18.1% in their twenties, 21.4% in their thirties, 16.3% in their forties, 15.8% in their fifties, and 11.8% agerd sixty or over.

The switchover to digital is now less than a year away, with the 24th of July 2011 being the analogue switch-off day. Although the news last weekend reported that television and other device sales over the summer softened, affecting the GDP adversely, with the eco point system due to end in December, I predict that the autumn and early winter will see the sales of televisions pick up again as both deadlines approach.

I need to buy two televisions; one for home, and one with a built-in hard disk recorder for the parents-in-law as they have been muttering that a tuner box will not be enough.
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Let’s get the What Japan Thinks show back on the road after the holidays with this look by goo Research, reported on by japan.internet.com, into home appliances, the sixth time this regular survey has been conducted.

Demographics

Between the 28th of July and the 3rd of August 2010 1,041 members of the goo Research online monitor group completed a private internet-based questionnaire. 52.8% of the sample were male, 16.2% in their teens, 18.0% in their twenties, 21.2% in their thirties, 16.2% in their forties, 15.9% in their fifties, and 12.4% aged sixty or older.

I did buy one electrical device last month, a Brother MyMio MFC-735CD phone/fax/answering machine/printer/scanner/SD card reader/kitchen sink device (linked US version has no wireless handset, but has networking). Our old telephone’s screen suddenly went blank, so we checked out new ones in a nearby electrical store and nearly bought there, but we instead used kakaku.com to do a price check (if you’re in Japan, don’t buy anything without checking them out first!) and found Amazon just 106 yen off the cheapest, so of course with they being a big name we ordered from there. We placed the order at about 5 pm on Sunday evening, and even with just their standard free shipping it arrived the next day at about 2:30 pm!

In Q2, note that three of the top four items, digital televisions, air conditioners, and fridges, award eco points for purchase.
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Following on from last week’s boyfriend beach FAIL, goo Ranking published the other side of the story, what men do not want to see their girlfriends doing at the beach or in the pool.

Demographics

Between the 21st and 23rd of June 2010 1,137 members of the goo Research online monitor group completed a private internet-based questionnaire. 65.1% of the sample were female, 8.0% in their teens, 20.4% in their twenties, 31.2% in their thirties, 23.9% in their forties, 9.2% in their fifties, and 7.2 aged sixty or older. Note that the score in the results refers to the relative number of votes for each option, not a percentage of the total sample. In addition, this question was for males only.

I’m not really sure why her spirally body hair is such a problem, as it should have been covered by the option above. Furthermore, I’ve never really noticed any Japanese women with enough body hair to make it an issue.

And don’t ask me why doing the butterfly well is a problem for men!

Finally, not surprisingly showing off too much skin comes dead last.

The photo on the right is taken from Okinawa Soba’s excellent collection on flickr.
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The last in this week’s series of introductions to my other web properties is for brainscannr.com, a site I developed after seeing the runaway success of the Japanese site Nonai Maker. Sadly for my wallet, I came nowhere near the 600 million accesses!

My rather happy brain is drawn on a bit of clipart that I actually paid good money (a whole $10!) to licence for the site. I did have plans to make a Facebook app out of it, but I didn’t know how to monetise it. Perhaps I should instead make it into a free Android app and fill it with adverts?

I’ll end my series of web sites here – I’ve not mentioned FAQ Japan as it’s mostly just a search engine trap, and I’ve got another site under development that I had hoped to launch during the recent Japanese election campaign, but I couldn’t solve one critical technical issue. It would have been nice to launch it with a slightly different emphasis tomorrow, but I’m still editing a critical image. By the way, if any of my readers know how to move an image on a web page through CSS and JavaScript, please drop me a line and I’ll link to you from the new site!

If you have no interest in Drama Queen activities in the English-language Japanese blog world, please stop reading now!

My fourth side-project is the most sensitive of my projects, as it is about a site, and the person behind it, that raises the most passions both for and against of any English-language Japan-related site, debito.org. My site is the coincidentally-named and coincidentally-designed tepido.org. The name comes from this video, which also serves as an introduction to Debito Arudou.

I was planning on embedding the video here, but curiously it’s been marked private.

Basically, Mr Arudou is a… No, I’ll just say have a look at both blogs, and make up your own mind. I’ll just point out that after highlighting at least three errors or inconsistencies on debito.org he has amended his site, so I can claim that tepido.org does have at least something positive to offer even for debito.org fans.