Young married Japanese women and ecology
Recently, goo Research, in conjuction with All About, looked at young married women and ecology and lifestyle.
Demographics
Between the 3rd and 5th of July 2008 1,039 married women from the goo Research online monitor panel successfully completed a private internet-based questionnaire. 100% of the sample was female, of course, 33.3% in their twenties, 32.6% in their thirties, and 34.1% in their forties. 38.4% were full-time employees, 11.4% contract or dispatch staff, and 50.2% were full-time housewives. I don’t know why no part-timers or students were in the sample.
A recent story from the New York Times misrepresented the situation regarding energy consumption of heated toilets, but thinking about the situation more and seeing a couple of much more efficient European products, I realised the biggest domestic energy saving that can be made with little alteration to the average Japanese person’s lifestyle is to replace the hot water pot with some of the newer types of kettle.
I was going to post something describing the relative power consumptions, but it’s really difficult to get figures for kettles in sensible units – all I got was stuff like “If everyone boiled only the water they needed to make a cup of tea instead of filling the kettle every time, we could save enough electricity in a year to power the UK’s street lights for nearly 7 months. This is the equivalent of the electricity used by 300,000 households for a year or output of a typical power station for nearly 5 months.” If these figures weren’t incomprehensible enough, it said the above would save “enough CO2 to fill Big Ben tower more than 50,000 times.”
Just how much CO2 is 50,000 Big Ben’s worth?
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Strategies for coping with stress, and mental health care in general, are sadly lacking in Japan. This recent survey from goo Research, conducted in association with All About Japan, into 
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