世論 What Japan Thinks

Here’s something quite strange and a bit off-topic, but given my love for emoji and Japanese emoticons in general, I thought I’d post about it.

There seems to be a project starting up to translate Moby Dick into Japanese email icons, or emoji.

I don’t really think I can say much more, except that I’ve pledged $10, and please visit the site yourself!

No, I’ve not decided to go into publishing, but instead I’ve just noticed that Google have digitised a book entitled “What Japan Thinks”, written by Kiyoshi Karl Kawakami in 1921 and are offering it in various formats on the Internet Archive for free.

The book is a collection of essays from various authors of various backgrounds written in the years just after the Great War, and provide a fascinating insight into thoughts on socialism, militarism, anti-racism and Christianity at that point in time.

I’m not sure if the phrasing in the story title is familiar to many, but in the UK where Harlequin novels are called Mills and Boon, the popular generic term for such style of romantic novels is the bodice-ripper. Anyway, that title serves to give away the results of a survey conducted by iBridge Research Plus and reported on by japan.internet.com into mobile phone novels.

Demographics

On the 2nd of March 2008 300 female members of the Research Plus monitor group completed a private internet-based questionnaire. 25.0% of the sample were in their twenties, 49.0% in their thirties, and 26.0% in their forties.

I’ve never read a mobile phone novel or even a novel on a mobile phone for that matter, although when I last translated a similar survey I mentioned that there are many readers for reading books on most types of mobiles, but like many other things I talk about I’ve never quite had time to try it out!
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Here’s a survey I translated last month but it fell through a crack and I forgot to publish it! It was performed by DIMSDRIVE Research, and looked at book purchasing.

Demographics

Between the 29th of October and the 13 of November 2008 9,566 members of the DIMSDRIVE monitor panel completed a private internet-based questionnaire. 50.2% of the sample were male, 1.1% in their teens, 12.8% in their twenties, 31.3% in their thirties, 31.4% in their forties, 16.1% in their fifties, and 7.3% aged sixty or older.

This was one of these surveys that I really liked the idea of, but as I started translating it I realised it wasn’t living up to my expectations, thus I ended up laying it aside and forgetting about its existance!

Note that books here include manga comics in book form, I believe. I’d have loved to have seen the average spend per person per month on books, how many of their monthly book purchases are from second-hand stores, and how often people swap or borrow books with friends or from libraries.
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I remember last time I was looking for an electronic book survey two came along at once, and this time too I have seen a couple in quick succession, so I’ll again double them up. Both surveys were reported on by japan.internet.com, and the first was on electronic books and conducted by iBridge Research Plus, and the second on book purchasing online and conducted by Marsh Inc.

Demographics

For the iBridge survey, between the 30th of October and the 1st of November 2008 300 members of the iBridge monitor panel completed a private internet-based questionnaire. 51.3% of the sample were female, 16.0% in their twenties, 39.7% in their thirties, 27.3% in their forties, 11.3% in their fifties, and 5.7% aged sixty or older. For the Marsh survey, between the 31st of October and the 4th of November 2008 300 members of the Marsh monitor group completed a private internet-based questionnaire. 50.0% of the sample were male, 20.0% in their twenties, 20.0% in their thirties, 20.0% in their forties, 20.0% in their fifties, and 20.0% aged sixty or older.

In Q2 from iBridge, 青空文庫, Aozora Bunko, Blue Sky Library, is a great place to find stuff to read, although the formatting could do with some work to be more friendly to modern browsers that can display readings of kanji over the characters rather than inline after them. However, this is a list of viewers for Aozora Bunko. The last book I read from there was Kenji Miyazawa’s Night on the Galactic Railroad, which is a nice short story for intermediate-level students. I also don’t understand why they restricted the question to PC users, since as can be seen from the viewer page, there are suitable readers for almost everything including an iPhone. Do any of my iPhone using readers want to do a road test of these packages?
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A few months ago there was a couple of articles in the US press with suspect (or just poorly-reported) statistics on cellphone literature in Japan, but at the time I didn’t have any good data to refute the stories with. However, this weekend not one, but two surveys come along, one from goo Research and one from Marsh, both reported on by japan.internet.com, on this very topic of cellphone novels.

Demographics

For the goo Research sample, between the 22nd and 25th of September 2008 1,074 people from their online monitor group completed a private internet-based questionnaire. 52.9% of the sample were male, 16.3% in their teens, 17.5% in their twenties, 21.9% in their thirties, 16.3% in their forties, 16.2% in their fifties, and 11.8% aged sixty or older.

For the Marsh sample, on the 26th of September 2008 they interviewed 300 females from their monitor panel by means of a private internet-based questionnaire. 21.7% were in their twenties, 51.3% in their thirties, and 27.0% in their forties.

Very surprising for me is that goo Research’s mixed sample showed a higher percentage of readership than Marsh’s young female group, although the level of enjoyment was relatively similar for both groups. The reasons for this would be interesting to investigate.
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I’ve read a grand total of exactly one book on a PDA, and zero on mobile phones. I just found it too tiring squinting at a small screen, and as I’m not on an unlimited plan, downloading material to my mobile phone is prohibitively expensive. To find out what Japan thinks, let’s look at a survey reported by japan.internet.com and conducted by goo Research on the topic of electronic books.

Demographics

Between the 18th and 20th of September 2007 1,088 members of goo Research’s online monitor panel completed a private internet-based questionnaire. 52.0% of the sample was male, 17.3% in their teens, 19.9% in their twenties, 18.0% in their thirties, 17.2% in their forties, 16.6% in their fifties, and 11.0% aged sixty or older.

Note that DoCoMo and SoftBank (and most likely au too) have free manga libraries for their customers, if you have an unlimited contract and looking for something to download and practice your Japanese on.
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infoPLANT recently published the results of a survey on the topic of electronic publishing contents consumption on mobile phones, or in other words reading books and magazines on a cell phone.

Demographics

Between the 8th and 15th of May 2007 5,380 people chose to complete a survey made publicly-available through NTT DoCoMo’s iMode mobile phone menuing system. 62.8% of the sample was female. As has been noted before and will be highlighted within the article below, this tends to bias the survey towards heavy users on unlimited usage plans, but unlimited plans are becoming the norm these days, with now over 30% of DoCoMo users on fixed-price plans.

Note that perhaps interestingly the original Japanese survey uses the term “comic”, not “manga” to describe the picture book format, so please don’t get upset by me using “comic” too!

I’ve personally never downloaded any reading material to my mobile phone, as I love the tangibility of real paper, and squinting at a tiny screen must be tiring on both the eyes and the arms.

SoftBank Mobile have also just recently started advertising that they have over 500 comic titles available for free download.
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japan.internet.com recently released an opinion poll, performed in conjuction with goo Research, to see what people thought about the novelisation (or novelization, if you prefer) of blogs and other web contents. 1,013 people completed their internet-based questionnaire, with 60.4% female. 27.0% of the respondents were in their twenties, 42.7% in their thirties, 23.9% in their forties, and 6.4% in their fifties.

When a similar survey was carried out a year ago, during the height of the “Densha Otoko” boom, 35.0% of the people surveyed then said they would want to buy a novelisation of a blog.

I can’t say I’ve come across any blogs I’d like to see as a book, although having said that I don’t follow any regular diary-like narrative-based blogs, which would seem to be the best material for making into a book.
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