世論 What Japan Thinks

This recent survey from iShare looked at cinemas, touching on where I went for my first date with my wife, the cinema, which is actually a really poor place to choose, but that’s another matter altogether!

Demographics

Between the 12th and 14th of November 2008 just 404 members of the CLUB BBQ free email forwarding service completed a private internet-based questionnaire. 54.7% of the sample were male, 13.6% in their twenties, 47.8% in their thirties, 27.7% in their forties, and 10.9% in their teens or aged fifty or older.

Note that for Q1 there are two reasons why women go to the movies more; first there are more women with the free time to go, and second most cinemas have a “Ladies’ Day” once per week where they charge 1,000 yen per ticket for the ladies. Us men only have the first of the month to get our cheap tickets, although I have seen one cinema, Movix Rokko, that also has a Men’s Day.

Two days I also signed up for a Toho Cinema Mastercard that promises to give one free movie for every six, including movies watched using advance discount tickets.
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Ponyo on the Cliff by the Sea was the sweetest film I’ve seen since My Neighbour Totoro, and over 8 million Japanese seem to agree with that sentiment. The official Ponyo site itself has racked up just under a million visitors, 995,000 to be precise, (low in my view) from home computers in July, the highest ever figures for the film maker Ghibli’s properties, with the main ages of the visitors being 34% in their thirties and 29% in their forties. By sex, 57% were female. Previous records were 701,000 in November of 2004 for Howl’s Moving Castle, and 444,000 in July of 2006 for Tales of Earthsea.

For all of the Ghibili sites visitors jumped from 114,000 in June to 1,123,000 in July.

For box office sales, number one for the first half of the year was 相棒, aibou, with 311,000 predominantly male viewers in May alone, with over half of the total being over forty years old. In July, the top movie was Hana Yori Dango (Boys before Flowers) with 576,000 ticket sales, 85% of them to females, and 38% of the viewers 19 years old or younger.

Story from the Japanese original on IT Media.

According to recent news, in 2006 Japanese movies took in more revenue at the box office than foreign films for the first time for 20 years, although it must be noted that the cinema-going frequency in Japan is still much lower than most of Western Europe and the USA. To understand more about Japanese habits, Yahoo! Japan Value Insight recently performed a survey on this topic of film consumption.

Demographics

Between the 10th and 24th of August 2007 Yahoo! Japan Value Insight published an open survey through the menuing system of NTT DoCoMo’s iMode mobile phone menuing system. 3,604 people self-selected themselves to take part in this survey; 57.9% were female, 5.6% in their teens, 30.3% in their twenties, 41.2% in their thirties, 19.3% in their forties, and 3.6% aged fifty or older.

The movie rankings in Q5 are rather interesting; I never understood why Japan loved Armageddon so much, both men and women, it seems. Men chose just one Japanese live-action movie in their top ten, whereas women chose three Ghibli animations, for instance.

One may also note that Q1 does not include downloading off the internet, either through legal or illegal channels.

Oh, and although Jack Sparrow defeated Hans and Harry in this poll, Japan Probe recently reported on him surrendering in the face of a bunch of cute kids.
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Continuing on the movie theme, last week japan.internet.com published the results of research conducted by goo Research into cinema ticket buying habits. I would love to find a web site that allows you to buy tickets at a discount, but such a site doesn’t seem to exist. Does anyone know of a good one?

Demographics

1,064 members of goo Research’s online monitor group successfully completed a private internet-based questionnaire. 52.1% of the sample was male, 23.3% in their twenties, 22.3% in their thirties, 22.5% in their forties, 21.3% in their fifties, and 10.6% in their sixties.

It may be interesting to cross-reference the results here with the recent MyVoice survey I published yesterday on cinema attendance.
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MyVoice published the results of a survey conducted over five days at the start of February into going to the movies.

Demographics

13,171 members of their monitor group successfully completed the survey; 54% were female, 2% in their teens, 20% in their twenties, 39% in their thirties, 26% in their forties, and 13% in their fifties.

Recently I’ve been to the cinema rather a lot; perhaps I’d be in the eleven to fifteen times? I think about twice a month sounds about right. As for the films I’d recommend, last weekend’s Perfume: The Story of a Murderer was a very enjoyable but rather dark murder-mystery; Pirates of the Carribean, if just for Johnny Depp’s frequent buggering (as it were); and Cars, because I love Pixar! I wanted to ask for my money back after The Da Vinci Code.
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In another silly wee goo Ranking report, people chose their most entertaining Christmas-themed movie. As always, the ranking is the relative votes for each movie, and no demographic information is available. The survey was conducted towards the end of November.

For most Americans, as I understand it, Miracle on 34th Street is the Christmas movie, although I cannot say I know it at all. For me, I cannot honestly recall any particular Xmas-themed movie - a film version of Dickens’ A Christmas Carol (Scrooge below) is about the only thing that comes to mind, but even then, I can only really remember the Blackadder version. In the UK, the tradition is more Wizard of Oz in the morning, and a Bond movie after the Xmas pud and the Queen.

Some of the titles also seem to have very tenuous links to Christmas.
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goo Ranking recently published the results of a ranking opinion poll into what Disney (including Pixar) animation they can enjoy as an adult, for both male and female. As usual for goo Ranking, just the relative votes for each title is listed.

The two big surprises for me are that the Jungle Book is nowhere in the rankings and that Pixar’s films are rather low in the charts. Perhaps Pixar has too many Western references in its cartoons, or perhaps it loses a lot of the subtelties in translation?
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[part 1] [part 2]

Over a week at the end of August and the start of September, DIMSDRIVE Research looked at movie theatre attendance. 5,180 member of their online monitor panel successfully completed a private internet survey. 43.1% were male, 1.2% in their teens, 17.2% in their twenties, 34.8% in their thirties, 26.9% in their forties, 14.2% in their fifties, and 5.7% aged sixty or over.

In this half of the survey we see that not surprisingly people find the movies in Japan just a bit too expensive. I can understand that, as even when buying the advance tickets, 1,300 yen is a bit much to risk on a movie you may not know too well, and all but the biggest blockbusters are worth the full 1,800 yen price.

I’m not sure about the attending the movies by yourself. Is this frowned upon in Japan? Some sort of black mark on your character?
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[part 1] [part 2]

Over a week at the end of August and the start of September, DIMSDRIVE Research looked at movie theatre attendance. 5,180 member of their online monitor panel successfully completed a private internet survey. 43.1% were male, 1.2% in their teens, 17.2% in their twenties, 34.8% in their thirties, 26.9% in their forties, 14.2% in their fifties, and 5.7% aged sixty or over.

I found the infrequency of cinema visits in Q1 rather surprising, with over two in five visiting once every sixth months or less and another one in five not having visited at all in recent years, but sadly there is no follow-up questions to find out why they don’t visit more often. Given that in Q4 46.0% use Ladies’ Day discounts (usually 1,000 yen instead of the standard 1,800 yen price), and since there were 56.9% female respondents, that means that just over four in five women use these discount. Since about half often buy popcorn and a drink, both of which have high markups, perhaps more Men’s Days or better still Couples Days would get more bums on seats and better profits. However, Q4SQ suggests that guaranteeing a seat ahead of time is a key requirement, but one usually cannot reserve seats at Ladies’ Day prices, so perhaps allowing reservations on these days is a way forward. However, if people turn up at the cinema and find no seats leftfor their favourite film, they may often choose another one since they’ve come all the way to the cinema, so if seat availability could be checked from home they’d actually have less custom.
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With both Amazon and Apple recently opening film and video download services, towards the end of September japan.internet.com, in conjunction with goo Research, looked at what people thought about downloading movies. 1,043 people from their internet monitor group, 55.5% female, successfully completed a private internet survey. 21.8% were in their twenties, 40.1% in their thirties, 25.9% in their forties, 9.1% in their fifties, and 3.2% in their sixties.

The results here are interesting; although there is a slight majority not interested in downloading, those who download want to watch on the television. However, with the proliferation of wide-screen televisions, high-definition broadcasts and Blue Ray disks, a standard lower-than-DVD quality download might look rather poor on a 38 inch plasma display.
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