世論 What Japan Thinks

I’ve previously translated surveys looking at Japanese text emoticons (kaomoji) and at graphical icons (emoji) but now let’s look at a recent survey from BlogCh on emoji and kaomoji.

Demographics

Between the 11th and 13th of June 2008 433 members of the BlogCh monitor panel who owned mobile phones. 53.1% of the sample were male, 15.5% in their twenties, 49.9% in their thirties, 27.0% in their forties, and 7.6% of other ages.

I use emoji almost exclusively, with one of the main reasons being that I cannot remember the meaning of most of the kaomoji! I also occasionally download, or more often save icons from other people’s mobile phone email.
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Rather than text-based smilies that we’ve looked at in earlier surveys, this time we look at the emoji graphical icons that the three main Japanese mobile operators all support to varying degrees, called 絵文字, emoji, picture characters. Here is a full table of the set of emoji common across the three main carriers, NTT DoCoMo, SoftBank, and EzWeb (au and TU-KA from KDDI) so you can see for yourself how good or bad each provider’s art work is. Recently, MyVoice investigated this subject of mobile phone emoji graphical icon usage.

Demographics

Between the 1st and 5th of June 2007 13,158 members of the MyVoice internet community completed a web-based questionnaire. 54% of the sample was female, 2% in their teens, 18% in their twenties, 39% in their thirties, 27% in their forties, and 14% in their fifties or older.

Note that some of the newer DoCoMo phones, such as the Panasonic P703i come with an enormous library of pseudo-emoji, implemented as embedded images in HTML mail.
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