世論 What Japan Thinks

Autumn is probably my favourite season in Japan, but sadly that was not one of the questions posed in this survey from MyVoice, their second look at the taste of Autumn.

Demographics

Over the first five days of October 14,652 members of the MyVoice internet community successfully completed a private online questionnaire. 54% of the sample were female, 2% in their teens, 14% in their twenties, 38% in their thirties, 29% in their forties, and 17% aged fifty or older.

My Autumn foods would have to be the horrendously expensive matsutake mushrooms, although given the price of high quality ones I usually end up eating merely the prepacked off-cuts that come in rice topping kits. I do like chestnuts too, usually eaten with pasta or in chestnut flavour Kit-Kats, which have an almost coffee-like flavour and are well worth hunting down.
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Looking for a cheap tour of Tokyo or the surrounding area this autumn? To help you choose where to go, goo Ranking decided to ask what under 10,000 yen Hato Bus tour from their autumn schedule people would like to go on. As is par for the course, there was no demographic information supplied barring that the fieldwork was carried out between the 25th and 27th of September 2007.

Hato Bus run a full set of English tours too, should this survey whet your appetite.

Oh, and I have no idea what on earth number seven has to do with autumn, but it really does exist! Oh dearie me!

My apologies for the above link; calm your eyes with a soothing Hello Kitty bus or two.
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MyVoice decided to do a totally unseasonal poll last month, surveying 14,676 people from their community by means of a private internet poll about enjoying autumn. 54% of the sample was female, 4% in their teens, 21% in their twenties, 38% in their thirties, 25% in their forties, and 12% in their fifties.

This survey mentions a book and film called “秋の夜長”, aki no yonaga, “The Long Autumn Nights”, but I have an awful feeling I am falling into a linguistic or cultural hole, as WWWJDIC has an example sentence “秋の夜長は読書にまさるものはありません。” translated as ”
There is no use feeling sorry about it.” I might literally translate that as “There’s nothing like reading ‘The Long Autumn Nights’”, but there seems to be no such book or film on Amazon. Perhaps the true meaning is just to spend the long nights lost in a book or a video? Oh well, I’m here to try to improve my Japanese, so I might as well make my mistakes in public.

UPDATE: It seems that “The Long Autumn Nights” is just an expression, but the Japanese love of putting things into quotation marks was throwing me!
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