世論 What Japan Thinks

japan.internet.com recently published the results of an opinion poll conducted by goo Research into search keywords in television advertising. At the end of September 1,088 people from thier monitor group successfully completed a web-based private questionnaire. Demographically, 58.1% were female, 21.8% in their twenties, 43.7% in their thirties, 24.0% in their forties, and 10.6% in their fifties.

Recently, Japanese television advertisements (and some print advertisements too) have tended to use instead of URLs a search keyword. Sometimes there are unique, made-up keywords, such as ウサタク, usataku, which, if fed into Google, matches the expected page. Others, however, have much more generic terms, even just HIS, but which, at the time of writing anyway, also works in Google. This seems like they would be a great target for googlebombing, but this seems not to have happened, which does seem a bit odd to me.
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japan.internet.com recently published the results of a survey by goo Research’s mobile group on what sort of mobile phone people had. This mobile survey is slightly different from the usual style – this is sent directly to the mobile phones of members of their monitor group, and is called a “real time” survey. This was their sixteenth mobile users’ survey (but the first I’ve translated, I think), and this time they received 1,086 successfully completed questionnaires. 56.5% of the respondents were female, 3.8% in their teens, 30.8% in their twenties, 41.0% in their thirties, 20.6% in their forties, and 3.8% aged fifty or older.

This survey is quite an incomplete one, so apologies in advance for the lack of full information for some of the questions. I should register with them so I can get the full data, although I do worry about infringing copyright if I republish data obtained via a semi-private site, even if it is free to access.
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japan.internet.com recently published the results of a survey carried out over three days in early September by goo Research into the use of instant messenging (IM) software. 1,063 members of their internet monitor group successfully completed their private questionnaire; 46.9% of the sample was male, 22.7% in their twenties, 44.0% in their thirties, 22.7% in their forties, 8.4% in their fifties, and 2.3% in their sixties.

I’m both surprised and not surprised by how low the figure for usage at work is, namely less than 9%. Surprised because I get the impression from Slashdot that the vast majority of American workers use it, and in fact it seems to be actively encouraged in many big corporations. Not surprised, because my workplace has the network locked down pretty tight (in places…) so I expect the more common ports are blocked, although you can, of course, use most of the IM software through the HTTP port 80, but then the proxy might have blacklisted the servers. I’d better stop here before I (a) get all bitter and twisted about company policy, and (b) leak some confidential information through my bitterness and twistedness!
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japan.internet.com recently reported on goo Research’s 27th regular monthly survey into blogs. The reported results this time were for the basics of blogging. Over four days at the start of September they interviewed 1,074 people from their internet monitor group. Demographically, 56.0% were female, 2.6% in their teens, 21.6% in their twenties, 41.2% in their thirties, 20.6% in their forties, 10.8% in their fifties, and 3.3% aged sixty or older.

I’d love to see how these figures compare with other countries; over half the bloggers update at least once a week, with women 8 percentage points higher than men. Blogs are now almost universally known, and with over a third of the people having blogged, blogging is becoming a standard practice for internet users.

It’s also interesting to see that men prefer the passive communication of trackbacks, whilst women much prefer actively commenting on other people’s blogs.

Finally, I’d like to see them ask how many people have their own hosted solution.
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This slightly old survey by goo Research into Japanese dignity and morals was conducted over the last weekend in May this year. 2,114 people from their internet monitor group successfully completed a private questionnaire: 51.2% of the sample was female, 17.9% in their teens, 16.7% in their twenties, 19.0% in their thierties, 22.2% in their forties, 18.1% in their fifties, 4.6% in their sixties, and 1.5% seventy or older. By occupation, 3.2% were board-level management, 32.8% regular employees, 5.2% contract employees, 7.4% self-employed, freelancing or working from home, 5.8% part-timers or casual workers, 18.4% housewives (no househusbands!), 18.9% students and 8.3% otherwise, or not at all, employed.

This survey is in response, I presume, to a recent best-selling (2 million at the last count) 日本人論, nihonjinron book, 「国家の品格」, “kokka no hinkaku”, “Dignity of a Nation” (please visit this link to marxy’s translation and analysis of the book) by an apparently bonkers right-wing author, Masahiko Fujiwara.

As this was a difficult translation, and perhaps subject to personal bias, I’ll also note the Japanese term that I translated, so that others can either check or apply their own personal biases instead! First, the two basic terms: 道徳観, doutokukan, I have translated as morality; 品格, hinkaku, as dignity.

In addition, the font used in the graphs in the orginal is too small, so some of the kanji were very difficult to read, so I may very well have a mistake or two there.
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japan.internet.com recently published the results of a poll by goo Research into awareness about domains. 1,081 members of their internet monitor group successfully completed a private internet questionnaire at the start of September. The demographic breakdown was 55.8% female, 2.4% in their teens, 21.9% in their twenties, 39.9% in their thirties, 26.2% in their forties, 9.3% in their fifties and 2.7% in their sixties.

I find it quite frankly hard to believe; no, make that impossible to believe that over a quarter (or three in ten if you include those who used to have one) have their own paid-for (or free from AOL) top-level domain. I strongly suspect that this figure includes ISP sub-domain owners; I don’t know about in Japan, but when I was a Demon customer you got a whole sub-domain to yourself, @foobar.demon.co.uk, to do whatever you wanted with. Also included must be free mail vanity addresses; Plala lets you use domains like foobar@wonder-boy.jp, foobar@surfer-wave.com to create extra accounts. Finally, blogging services might also be mistakenly included, counting http://foobar.bloggingservice.com subdomain as a domain. Note how email counts as the most popular use of these domains, which backs up my suspicions. Also note that registering a .jp address costs 20,989 yen for two years, and a .co.jp costs 42,000 yen for two years, and requires you to be a registered company; my two years of hosting for this place, including two .com domains, costs me less than than!

I’ve never heard of the .mobi mobile phone domain until this survey, though.
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goo Research recently published the results of a survey of their internet monitor pool on the subject of tobacco. They interviewed 1,076 people by means of a private internet-based questionnaire towards the end of July, but the survey report does not include any demographic breakdown.

Note that although there is no age, occupation or sex breakdown, given goo Research’s monitor pool there should be slightly less than average manual workers, the sort of demographic that has a higher smoking rate, I believe, so the 23.1% of regular smokers should not be extrapolated to the general population. Similarly, most goo surveys have about 55% to 60% women respondents, and women are significantly less likely to smoke (about 15% versus 50%) than men.

One strange thing about cigarettes in Japan is the uniformity of price; prices for a particular brand are the same across all vendors, from cigarette machines to big supermarkets via corner shops. In addition, the price for a case of 10 boxes is not discounted at all, except for them occasionally throwing in a small gift like a lighter or similar trinket. Beer is similar, although you do get discounts for six-packs, but soft drinks often vary in price as one might expect. Is there some law on price-setting?
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Recently goo Research carried out research into awareness of product and service safety issues. They interviewed 1,064 consumers by means of a web-based questionnaire, but details of the demographics of this sample were not reported.

Product and service safety has recently become a big issue in Japan, but quite frankly blown out of all proportion by the media. First of all there was the truely problematic Aneha scandal of blocks of flats and hotels not being built according to the building codes, thus liable to collapse even in moderately strong earthquakes. Next up was US beef, blown up out of all proportion, especially considering that not many people in Japan worry about (or even know about) the human growth hormones and antibiotics that are far more likely to aversely affect your health compared to BSE or vCGD, let alone the heavy metals in Japanese fish or the second-hand smoke in the average Japanese restaurant. Later was Schindler’s Lifts, which, as the linked story suggests, the brouhaha was caused as much by the company’s failure to appear sorry enough as by the death from the hardware failure itself. Note that at the end of August a man died after falling into an empty lift shaft, but this got very little press coverage and no mention of the make of the faulty equipment, at least in the linked story, so I would put good money on it not being one of Schindler’s.

I have also omitted mention of bits falling off planes or trains crashing or poison fan heaters or…

Oh, and the title of this story, “Safety Japan” comes from a common Japanese English mistake of using “safety” instead of “safe”, as in the other stereotypical “I am safety driver” expression.
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This rather buzzword-overloaded title refers to the results of a survey at the start of this month by goo Research, published by japan.internet.com, on spreading memes, or baton touching, to use the Japanese-English terminology; baton is the meme, touching is the spreading of it. 1,092 members of their monitor pool successfully completed an internet-based private poll; 56.8% of the sample was female, 2.4% in their teens, 21.9% in their twenties, 46.3% in their thirties, and 29.4% in their forties,

Here the meme is the creation and spreading of a set of questions through the blogosphere (uggh, buzzword overload!); you get tagged by someone, answer a set of questions on a theme in a post to your blog, ending by selecting five more victims to take their turn in answering, as in this, the first English example I could find through Google, or this, a Japanese blog dedicated to passing the baton. “Baton touch” is, as indicated, yet another Japanese-English phrase, just in case you are confused by it, where we would probably use “baton pass” instead in English. Apparently if you pop onto mixi and search for バトン, baton, you can find no end of them to join in with.

Note that apparently this baton passing is also being used for PR campaigns, and for CGM, Consumer Generated Media, but as to what form this takes, I am yet to learn.
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japan.internet.com published the results of goo Research’s 27th regular monthly survey into mobile phone upgrade needs. Over four days towards the end of August 1,000 mobile phone owners from their monitor group successfully completed an internet-based questionnaire. 55.3% of the group was female, 2.3% in their teens, 20.7% in their twenties, 42.0% in their thirties, 23.3% in their forties, and 11.7% aged fifty or more. I believe people were asked about their own personal phone rather than company equipment.

The almost zero interest in foreign phones (if we discount Sony-Ericsson) is both quite surprising and rather predictable to me. The design aesthetic of Western phones is quite different to the Japanese; fat stubby bricks versus thin rounded clamshells, to attempt to sum up the differences in a single phrase. Samsung is Korean, however, as might Pantech be (I’ve never heard of them before!), but I wonder if their non-existent sales is related more to poor model appeal rather than to nationalistic sympathies. Japanese phones do really poorly overseas (discounting Sony-Ericsson again) so perhaps the reasons are similar for both imports and exports?
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