世論 What Japan Thinks

Welcome back to normal service from What Japan Thinks, and my apologies again for being offline for so long. We’ll start off the year with a survey connected with one of my most popular themes of 2008, a look with japan.internet.com at goo Research’s 42nd regular monthly survey on mobile upgrade needs, with a question on touch panels.

Demographics

Between the 16th and 19th of December 2008 exactly 1,000 mobile phone users from the goo Research online monitor panel completed a private internet-based questionnaire. 52.0% of the sample were female, 2.1% in their teens, 18.4% in their twenties, 36.6% in their thirties, 27.6% in their forties, and 15.3% aged fifty or older.

The figure of 0.3% Apple users reflects about 300,000 people given the estimate of about 100 million contracts, but given that on one hand there is a lot of multiple phone ownership and on the other iPhone users may be more likely than average to be the sort of people to participate in online surveys, it’s difficult to extrapolate from the three iPhone owners in this survey.

Note that it’s not clearly stated in the survey, but looking at the wording of the questions in Japanese, there is a possibility that the survey was conducted via mobile phone internet, so the questions may actually apply to the phone currently being used to answer the questions.
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With the demise of HD DVD in February 2008 as a format for recorded media, ths recent suvery from goo Research reported on by japan.internet.com into video devices showed some surprising results.

Demographics

Between the 27th and 30th of November 2008 1,081 members of the goo Research monitor group completed a private internet-based questionnaire. 52.6% of the sample were male, 16.3% in their teens, 18.3% in their thrties, 21.6% in their thirties, 16.2% in their forties, 15.7% in their fifties, and 11.9% aged sixty or older.

I really do find the HD DVD drive ownership stunningly high! It would be interesting to investigate exactly why, and whether or not these drives are still in use or just gathering dust.

Do any of my readers have HD DVDs, and if so, how do you find it?
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Here’s a quick second dose of goo Ranking for today, this time they asked women what words of faint praise are they not sure if they should be happy to hear.

Demographics

Between the 21th and 24th of October 2008 1,056 members of the goo Research online monitor panel completed a private internet-based questionnaire. 52.5% of the sample were female, 5.0% in their teens, 13.2% in their twenties, 28.4% in their thirties, 31.5% in their forties, 13.1% in their fifties, and 8.8% aged sixty or older. Note that the score in the results refers to the relative number of votes for each option, not a percentage of the total sample. Since this was a female-only survey, only the 554 women answered.

Pictured above is the top answer, a Heian beauty (well, I think she’s from the Heian period!), to let you decide whether it is a compliment or not.

Photo from whatsound on flickr
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Since I started running an ad blocker (Ad Muncher), I don’t see any advertisements in search results. However, the use of such software was not investigated in this recent survey published on japan.internet.com and conducted by goo Research into the topic of internet advertising. This is the first in a regular (monthly, presumably) series.

Demographics

Between the 17th and 20th of November 2008 1,091 members of the goo Research monitor panel completed a private internet-based questionnaire. 53.2% of the sampe were male, 16.7% in their teens, 18.2% in their twenties, 21.4% in their thirties, 16.0% in their forties, and 27.8% aged fifty or older.

Note that this report concentrated on search results advertising, but the full survey covered many more kinds of internet advertising.

As you might have noticed, I’ve started with contextual advertisements in my RSS feed. Perhaps next month’s survey might cover them, but given the low figures for RSS usage, I don’t hold out much hope!
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It’s time for another installment of the goo Research mobile phone upgrade needs survey, the 41st in the series of monthly looks at people’s upgrade plans. This time one question looks at the Autumn and Winter 2008 models, with all three major carriers having just released, or being in the process of releasing, new models.

Demographics

Between the 11th and 14th of November 2008 exactly 1,000 members of the goo Research online monitor pool completed a private internet-based questionnaire. 52.2% of the sample were female, 1.1% in their teens. 18.9% in their twenties. 38.3% in their thirties, 25.2% in their forties, and 16.5% aged fifty or older.

In Q1 it is interesting to note that SoftBank is down a couple of percentage points compared to the average level reported, however this might just be a sampling blip for this survey.

I currently have no plans to upgrade, although on Sunday I might look at a shop I know that should be selling this summer’s models at knock-down prices as most of the new phones from docomo are minor cosmetic revisions of the summer phones; Panasonic has added a two-way keyboard to go from a P906i to a P01-A, Sharp an 8 megapixel camera differentiating their SH-01A from the SH906i, and NEC have a fancy ball joint on their N-01A.

I have my eye on the Sharp SH-04A smartphone, not out until February or March 2009, as I was tempted to jump ship to Willcom for their Sharp 03 earlier this year. However, I’ll have to wait and see how they price it, but I’m not terribly hopeful of getting a decent deal.
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Whenever I get around to upgrading my desktop display, I think it will be a wide-screen monitor that I go for; sadly, this recent survey from goo Research and reported on by japan.internet.com into home computers did not discuss people’s purchase intentions.

Demographics

Between the 5th and 10th of November 2008 1,034 members of the goo Research online monitor group completed an internet-based questionnaire. 52.9% of the sample were male, 16.4% in their teens, 18.0% in their twenties, 21.3% in their thirties, 16.5% in their forties, 15.9% in their fifties, and 11.9% aged sixty or older.

It’s interesting to note in Q1 that notebooks outnumber desktops at home, and surprising to see one in four notebooks are wide-screen, even allowing for dual-head users with an extra monitor plugged in.
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Although almost all mobile phones can connect to the internet, and although most, if not all, providers offer free contract maintenance pages accessible directly from one’s mobile, the traditional offline methods are still most used, according to this survey from goo Research and reported on by japan.internet.com on mobile phone use.

Demographics

Between the 30th of October and the 2nd of November 2008 1,091 members of the goo Research monitor group completed a private internet-based questionnaire. 53.1% of the sample were male, 16.3% in their teens, 18.5% in their twenties, 21.8% in their thirties, 16.1% in their forties, 15.6% in their fifties, and 11.6% aged sixty or older.

I’ve recently started using docomo’s my docomo site (no English version) for almost daily bill checking now, as I’m trying to find out if their pake-hodai double plan is actually cheaper for me, as I suspect it isn’t as I use barely 1,000 yen’s worth of packets, but as part of my basic plan I get 1,000 yen’s worth of free packets, so I think I’d have to double my usage to get my money’s worth. I’ll know at the end of the month.

I also used docomo’s billing plan diagnostic service, but it was a really unfriendly service and did not link directly to my own bill, so rather than it using my last six months-worth of data, for instance, I had to retype all the data, and because it was done as some sort of AJAX/Flash hack, the browser back button didn’t work so I couldn’t easily try out different scenarios. Checking it again today it won’t let me use Opera 9.6 even though it says only Opera 8.5 and below are not good enough, and it recommends the just far too buggy Internet Explorer 6.0 instead.
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Even on my quite old analogue tube television, digital looks very, very nice, and this is the main reason for nine in ten being completely satisfied with terrestrial digital television broadcasting in Japan, according to this survey on the topic, goo Research’s third regular look at digital TV, and reported on by japan.internet.com.

Demographics

Between the 31st of October and the 4th of November 2008 1,044 members of the goo Research online monitor group successfully completed a private internet-based questionnaire. 52.9% of the sample were male, 16.5% in their teens, 18.1% in their twenties, 21.6% in their thirties, 16.1% in their forties, and 27.7% aged fifty or older.

I remember when I bought my television they were showing full digital-ready televisions alongside (with a decent markup at that time) at Yodobashi Camera and the picture quality between the two was incomparable. However, I noticed that the sample DVD they were playing on the set we eventually bought was a DVD encoded at a quite low bit rate, and I wouldn’t have put it past them to have been deliberately tampering with the signal to add a little noise.

Conversely, I’ve noticed on large-screen full digital LCDs and plasmas any flaws in the source material are crystal clear and… I feel I sound like an old fogey declaring that vinyl beats CD!

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I’m not really up on the issues myself regarding national testing, but I am against the whole culture of testing in Japan. I am all for publishing the results of regular examinations, but not tests for the sake of tests. However, I would appear to be very much in the minority according to the results of this survey into national educational level testing, conducted by goo Research in conjunction with the Mainichi Shimbun.

Demographics

Between the 17th and 19th of October 2008 1,075 mmbers of the goo Research monitor group aged twenty or older completed a private online questionnaire. No further demographics information was provided.

I’m a bit confused in Q1 why there is an answer “both the school and local authority level”, as it is a trivial task to take the school results and sum them up by area. Also, Q1SQ1 and Q1SQ2 should really be multiple choice questions and there are no “don’t knows”, so I suspect there has been some post-processing of the results for presentation.
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I’ve covered similar surveys to this one in the past, which found an unbelievably high three in ten claimed to currently own or have owned a domain (I’ve just now double-checked the source, and my translation is accurate), but this time goo Research found a much more acceptable figure in this survey on one’s own home page, as reported by japan.internet.com.

Research results

Over the 22nd and 23rd of October 2008 1,090 members of the goo Research online monitor group completed a private internet-based questionnaire. 52.8% of the sample were male, 16.7% in their teens, 18.2% in their twenties, 21.0% in their thirties, 16.2% in their forties, 16.0% in their fifties, and 12.0% in their sixties.

Even though .jp is the most popular domain name below, according to GoDaddy it costs $99 per year to register one, but for some reason whatjapanthinks.jp seems to be not for sale, although I cannot find any information why, as whois lookups are failing!

As I said on the previous survey, I think there is a degree of confusion in thinking that http://whatjapanthinks.blogspot.com/ is actually a top-level domain.
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