世論 What Japan Thinks

Having looked a few months ago at water servers (or water coolers), this time DIMSDRIVE Research looked at domestic water servers and disasters.

Demographics

Over the 22nd and 23rd of August 2011 500 members of the DIMSDRIVE monitor group who (a) lived in one of Tohoku, Kanto, Koshinetsu, Aichi Prefecture and Shizuoka Prefecture, and (b) had purchased or rented a home water dispenser. 58.2% of the sample were female, 1.6% in their teens, 12.6% in their twenties, 30.2% in their thirties, 25.2% in their forties, 21.2% in their fifties, and 9.2% aged sixty or older.

The survey size here is quite small, but because there was the pre-selection of those with water servers (perhaps there was a follow-up with those from the first survey?) the margin of error should not be too large.
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I omitted to translate an earlier, more detailed, survey on this topic, so instead you’ll have to make do with the highlights from an article published on japan.internet.com regarding a survey conducted by goo Research into disasters.

Demographics

Between the 18th and 22nd of October 2007 1,086 members of goo Research’s online monitor panel successfully completed a private internet-based questionnaire. 53.1% were male, 16.6% in their teens, 18.5% in their twenties, 21.4% in their thirties, 16.2% in their forties, 15.6% in their fifties, and 11.7% aged sixty or older.

Whilst we all hope that we don’t need it, there is always the risk of being hit by an earthquake, typhoon or other natural disaster in Japan. One important service offered by NTT is their Disaster Emergency Message Dial, basically an answering machine service that allows people to leave messages accessed through their home phone numbers. The linked site provides full English-language instructions on how to use it. Connected with this are the Broadband Disaster Message Board (web171), and the Mobile Disaster Message Boards, for DoCoMo, au, and SoftBank.

Note that the Broadband Disaster Message Board does not have an English version, which is pretty useless for relatives from overseas who might wish to check up on you, and, when you read the fine print at the bottom of the front page, you see that the recommended OSes are Windows 2000 SP4 and XP SP2, and the recommended broswers are Internet Explorer 5.5 and 6.0 only. Even better, you cannot interact with the buttons if you have JavaScript disabled, and the w3c validator dies trying to verify the code!

The final service is the Earthquake Early Warning system which detects a quake as soon as it happens, so if you live a little away from the epicentre you get a few seconds warning of the impending shock.
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