世論 What Japan Thinks

The above phrase may often be heard throughout Western homes a couple of days into the New Year as everyone has had their fill of left-over turkey, but what about in Japan? goo Ranking decided to find out what people fancied eating when they got fed up with お節, osechi, the traditional Japanese New Year cuisine. As usual, there’s no demographic information, and the survey was unseasonably carried out at the end of November.

This site described the posh shop-bought osechi, but most often it is home-made, and in our case consists of miso soup with mizuna and mochi. I fortunately managed to break the monotony with a 10-pack of Mister Donuts (twice!), but I could fair go a pizza myself!
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Just in time before deciding on New Year Resolutions, goo Ranking published the results of a quick survey they conducted in November into people’s unfinished business for the year. As usual, no demographics or other detailed numbers, just a rank of the percentage of the winning votes total.
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With Christmas almost upon us; indeed in Japan it has now passed, as X’mas (note the extra apostrophe there that Japan almost always uses) Eve is the main time for parties and the rest. With this in mind, goo Ranking published a survey a few days ago on what food people would most like to eat at a Christmas party. As usual, no demographics are available, but since it’s the holiday season, I hope you can forgive me for not having them!

For me, tonight’s X’mas Eve special dinner was pizza. Hope you had a fun time too!
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With お歳暮, oseibo, the end of year gift-giving season upon us, perhaps you need to send a present to someone and don’t know what is best? Not to worry, goo Rankings recently published the top 30 edible Oseibo gifts people would be happy to receive. As usual, we just have a ranking as a relative number of votes for each gift.
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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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With most train lines stopping around 12 midnight and not resuming until 5 am, there is always the danger of getting one over the eight and missing the last train. So, with this in mind, goo Ranking published the results of a survey conducted towards the end of October into what people did if they had to wait for the first train home. As usual for goo Rankings, there is no demographic information, and scores are the percentages of the top ranking choice.

Note that getting a taxi home is usually an infeasible option as taxis are horrendously expensive once you get past a few kilometres. Also note that family resturants tend to have all-you-can-drink soft drink options, so it is easy to hole up all night nursing a bottomless cup of coffee. The times I’ve missed (sometimes on purpose!) the last train home I’ve ended up in a karaoke box or even walking home, even though it was a good ten kilometres or so!
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Following my recent 100 top goo Japan search keywords of the year translation(with the top 10 covered in detail over at Recognize Design), we now have the top 50 words looked up in goo’s English to Japanese dictionary in the first 10 months of the year. As with the search terms, one suspects that the four-letter words have been filtered out. This time there is no score for each of the keywords to reflect their frequency.

I don’t know why vomit sneaked in at the bottom, and redundance seems a bit odd, but redundancy also maps to the same definition when looked up.

I also thought it was quite funny seeing bear in 30th place as I do get an occasional search like “how to say bear in Japanese”. Oh, it’s 熊, くま, kuma, just in case you are here actually searching for bear in Japanese. That’s the Japanese for the animal kind of bear, anyway.
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Here’s a silly wee survey from goo Ranking on ___-only carriages on trains. The fieldwork was carried out over four days towards the end of October by means of a public poll, so no demographics are available. The scores in the survey represent the percentage of the top vote-getter that each option got.

Note that the Japanese term, ○○専門, maru-maru senmon, perhaps translates better as “specifically for whatever“, even though the most familiar form, 女性専門, josei senmon, is usually translated as “women only”. I’ll stick with “only” in the table, even though some may make more sense as “specifically for”.

I suspect that many of the votes were for enforcing segregation, such as for keeping the drunks or overly-perfumed (or even screaming kids…) away from the normal people. My vindictive vote would be for a bad breath-only car, but given the vapours in the average morning rush train, perhaps three-quarters of the carriages would need to be dedicated to those whose oral health was lacking.

In position number 7, strong heating or cooling, is perhaps in response to many lines having in summer a “cool” car, with the air conditioning set a couple of degrees higher. However, in my experience the default temperatures are far too strong, so I can only imagine that people are wanting a sauna or ice blocks!

I have previously translated a more serious look at women-only trains.
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goo Ranking recently published the results of the top 100 search keywords used through their search engine for the first 10 months of this year from January 1st to October 31st. The top word, either individually or extracted from multi-word searches, got 100 points, and the rest of the words got a percentage rating for their frequency. I presume that the adult keywords have been filtered out.

There’s perhaps some interesting analysis that can be done of this data, but I’ll leave that for someone else to tackle! Links have been added to some of the search terms.
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