世論 What Japan Thinks

MutantFrog Travelogue has another great story, this time on how advertising agency Dentsu set up the whole Town Meeting business (allegedly). I”ve just added them to my Blog Roll - I should have done it ages ago as they’ve been publishing some pretty good and juicy news from Japan that usually doesn’t get aired in the English language.

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Dentsu Inc recently carried out a survey (their “Trendbox Research”, to use the brand name) to find out what people thought about their brains. At the start of January they interviewed 400 people from up and down the country. Exactly half and half of the respondents were male and female, and 100 people were in each decade of life from the twenties to the fifties.

Brain training is rather a hot topic in Japan today; products on sale range from books of simple arithmetic or simple kanji to read out loud, to the Nintendo DS Brain Training game series, to which I actually contributed a very, very small part!

Oh, and here’s a bit of brain training I learnt about on TV a couple of weekends ago for getting rid of some chronic fatigue. The idea is that you need to stimulate your frontal lobes before going to bed, as increased activity there results in more cortisone and serotonin, which gets your body recharged quicker, or something like that. So, in addition to taking in sufficient B complex vitamins and calcium, before you go to sleep press your temples as you slowely breath out, then release as you breath in. Repeat ten times, then just before you sleep picture someone’s face - it works best if it is someone you dislike, apparently, but make sure you don’t dislike them too much and stress yourself out!
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Dentsu released a report on this year’s top products and predictions for next year’s big things, based on various public and private marketing surveys and a little bit of guess work by various style magazines. As I don’t read any of these style magazines, be they English or Japanese, some of the topics are a bit difficult to work out, so apologies in advance!

Just in case you’re wondering, the picture to the right is of Miki Ando (Mikitty), who represents at least three of the products listed below - figure skating, flat screen televisions (she’s one of the Viera advert figures), and Nintendo DS adverts. And she’s got an awfully nice smile.
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