世論 What Japan Thinks

Following up, in a way, on Saturday’s look at the taspo card, let’s look at smoking in Japan, according to a survey conducted by Central Research Services, Inc.

Demographics

2,000 people aged twenty or over were randomly selected to take part in this survey. 1,328 people of those selected took part in face-to-face interviews between the 6th and 9th of June 2008. Further demographic information was not provided. This was the 22nd time the survey has been conducted; the previous ones were in 1978, 1983, and every year since 1987.

Notice in Q1 there has been a slight rise in smoking rates. Unfortunately no historical information is provided for the demographic breakdown, so it’s difficult to see where the rise is coming from - is it more new smokers, or less people quitting? Is the problem under-age smokers getting addicted, or adults choosing to start?

Q4, giving the numbers bothered by smoking, is a bit difficult to interpret, as both smokers and non-smokers answered.
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Central Research Services recently published a survey on a topic I’ve been keen to find a survey on, namely gambling. I’d still like to find a more detailed survey, especially to see if lottery scratch-card addiction is an issue, as the promotion of them on television is extremely irresponsible in my opinion.

Demographics

Between the 7th and 10th of July 2006 (CRS are always slow to report their surveys!) they conducted face-to-face interviewed with 2,000 randomly selected individuals from all over the country. 1,379 successful responses were obtained.

This topic covered legal gambling in Japan, namely horses, boats, cars, lottery, football pools, and of course pachinko and slot machines. Stuff like internet gambling or holidays to Las Vegas were outside of the scope of this survey.

I’ve only indirectly gambled in Japan, due to someone giving me a year-end lottery ticket. I’d love to visit a Pachinko Parlour sometime, but I’m scared to go as I fear I’d either go deaf or inhale far too much second-hand smoke!

However, the Pachinko advertisements on television are often rather interesting. Thanks to Japander for uploading!

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Central Research Services Inc recently reported on a survey into media consumption in 2005. The survey itself was conducted back in October 2005, and although detailed demographics are not available, the sample was randomly selected from residents up and down the country aged between 15 and 69, and conducted by means of face-to-face interviews. The response rate was 57.4%, giving a raw sample size of 3,443 people.

I don’t think this survey teaches us much that intuition suggests to be true, but it’s always interesting to get these hunches backed up by raw data. However, although almost three-quarters read a paper every day, how much they actually read versus just headline skimming is another question that hasn’t been asked here.

Q3 is a rather weird question - perhaps it’s to see if people start with the news or the sports. The tabloids have sports on the back page, but the broadsheets usually have the television listings, then the sports from the second-last page, so I don’t know how that affected the answers.
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Over four days in early March (sorry, but they are always slow to report) Central Research Services, Inc carried out a survey on views on pets. 2,000 people throughout the country aged 20 or over were randomly selected for face-to-face interviews; just over two-thirds, or 1,341 agreed to participate. The same questions had also been asked in other surveys carried out in 1999, 2000, 2002 and 2005.

Pet ownership is yet another of the facets of Japanese society that we foreigners find hard to understand. Whilst this survey does highlight some of the things that seem strange to me, sadly it does not explain them. In reference to the headline, a few years ago there was a huge boom in Chiuwawa sales thanks mostly to a series of adverts for high interest loans, with some other adverts following suit. One that particularly sticks in my mind was for a product I forgot, but the daughter was moving out to her own place, and you saw her coming in with her newly-bought puppy only to find the parents already waiting with another one. Oh, how they laughed!
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Last August, Central Research Services, Inc performed a survey regarding the introduction of lay judges to the Japanese judicial system by questioning 1,384 adults from an initial pool of 2,000 by means of face-to-face interviews. This is the third time they have carried out this survey, once in 2003 and once in 2004, so the main text will compare this time’s results with previous results. The results were presented mainly as a textual report rather than raw data, so that is the way I too will present this translation.

The system of lay judges was passed into law in 2004 and is due to be introduced in 2009. One thing I always regretted when I lived back in the UK was never being asked to serve on a jury, as being a very civic-minded sort of person, seeing first-hand and participating in the legal process would be quite an honour to me. A friend of mine once sat on a jury for someone charged with nicking car radios. After the first and only day at trial, my friend went back to his car and found, rather ironically, that his radio had also been pinched.

The support for this new law, however, has grown weaker, shrinking from about half the population being behind it two years ago to now just over a third. In addition, as can be seen from the pie chart on the right, just one in twenty has the confidence in their own abilities to perform as a law judge.

Note that Japan has not had a trial by jury system since 1943.
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Central Research Services, Inc published a report two months ago regarding leisure activities. The format of their report differs from the usual survey results that I translate as first, they scale the figures up to reflect the whole population (the current population of Japan is somewhere around 127 million), and second, they present the data within a coherent narrative rather than just the usual data dump, so the amount of data available is rather limited. It does say, however, that they interviewed 3,000 people aged 15 and over at some point to get their data. The main data worth presenting is the ranking of participation in various activities, based on how many people from the survey group performed each activity at least once in 2004, so although the lottery, for instance, is high on the list, each participant only spends a couple of minutes per week (or even per year, as the end of year big draw is very, very popular), so if the table was sorted by the actual hours spent, it would look very, very different.

Eating out	72,400,000
Travel within Japan	60,800,000
Driving (or being driven)	55,100,000
Karaoke	49,200,000
Watching videos	48,700,000
Doing the lottery	45,900,000
Personal computing (games, etc)	44,300,000
Cinema	43,900,000
Listening to music	42,400,000
Visiting gardens, museums, zoos	40,600,000
Gardening	37,500,000
Bars, pubs, and other drinking establishments	37,300,000
Bowling	32,000,000
Amusement parks	31,900,000
Physical exercise	30,700,000
Picnic, hiking, hill walking	30,600,000
Board or card games	30,300,000
Console games	30,100,000
Jogging, marathon	26,200,000
Concerts, live music	25,600,000