世論 What Japan Thinks

With the impending IPO of mixi (related here by Gen Kanai), at an initial offer price of just over a million yen, or nearly £5000, per share, it may be timely to have a look at a report on japan.internet.com of goo Research’s second regular look into Social Networking Services, or SNS. 1,090 members of their internet monitor group responded to the survey; 55.8% were female, 1.6% in their teens, 22.1% in their twenties, 39.2% in their thirties, 24.6% in their forties, 9.4% in their fifties, and 3.0% in their sixties.

Last time I published an SNS survey I asked for an invite; I did get a couple of offers, but I’ve still not had time to actually take up any of them! It would be nice to have an account just for the sake of being able to say I do have one, and also as I do get the occasional hit from mixi that I cannot view without an account…

Q1: Do you use Social Networking Services (SNS)? (Sample size=1,090)

Currently using an SNS	23.9%
Used to use SNSs but don’t any longer	5.4%
Never used one	44.0%
Don’t know what they are	26.7%

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goo Research recently published a massive survey of 35,925 internet users by means of a public internet-based questionnaire on the use of railway IC cards. They collected replies during a week at the end of June and the start of July. 53.3% of the respondents were female, 2.3% in their teens, 22.3% in their twenties, 39.6% in their thirties, 24.0% in their forties, 8.7% in their fifties, 2.3% in their sixties, 0.6% in their seventies, and the remaining 0.2% chose not to reveal their age. Also, 30.6% of the sample lived in the Tokyo area, 7.4% in the Nagoya area, and 16.6% in Kansai – Tokyo and Kansai have railway smart card services (namely JR’s SUICA in Tokyo and JR’s ICOCA and the private railways’ PiTaPa in Kansai) and major train concentrations, but I don’t believe Nagoya has, although it is the third major centre of population in Japan. According to the survey, though, there is plans to launch a JR TOICA card for the Nagoya area.

For those of you not familiar with their operation, here is a quick history of the cards in the Kansai area. First, JR launched the ICOCA card with two key features; one, a pre-paid season ticket and two, electronic cash, whereby money could be added manually then used either for shopping around the station or to use instead of train tickets for travel outside the season ticket’s area. A couple of years later the private railways launched the PiTaPa system, which had a quite different payment model. First, there was no season ticket, but instead between two nominated stations you got a 5% discount for each journey in your first month, rising to 15% for the third, if I remember correctly. These fares were post-pay; at the end of each month all your travel was added up and automatically withdrawn from a nominated account. For purchases other than train fares, there was also a standard electronic wallet system as for ICOCA. In addition, if you chose a credit card version of your PiTaPa card, when your available cash fell below a certain point, the card could be set to automatically recharge itself as you passed through the ticket gates. Note that although there are about seven or eight transport companies that support PiTaPa, when using another company’s transport your fares come from the electronic cash portion, and no discounts are available. This makes it a major pain for people like me who use two private railways and JR to get to work, as I would need to carry three separate cards, probably in three separate wallets to avoid interference, to get full benefit from the discounts.

In the meantime, JR announced their Smart ICOCA, which was an ICOCA card and credit card combined, with the similar auto top-up feature. In addition, ICOCA and PiTaPa got together and now allow the electronic cash to be used at each other’s ticket gates. Finally, Hankyu have just started a pre-pay system for season tickets (just like the original ICOCA), so holders of their Hana Plus PiTaPa-compatible credit cards can add a season ticket to their card, for people who’d rather manage their commuting fares that way round.

I almost forgot – the latest DoCoMo FOMA mobile phones also support some aspects of railway IC cards’ electronic cash system, but I’m not really sure of the exact capabilities.

Note also that the Tokyo JR SUICA cards can be used in the Kansai ICOCA area and vice versa. I’m not sure whether or not SUICA and PiTaPa interact, though.
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japan.internet.com published the results of a survey by goo Research into the use of web site passwords carried out at the start of this month. 1,091 members of goo’s research monitor group successfully completed the private web-based questionnaire. 56.7% of the sample was female, and 20.3% were in their twenties, 41.5% in their thirties, 24.5% in their forties, 10.2% in their fifties, and 3.6% in their sixties.

The stunning figure is that 266 people, or 24.4%, admitted to using a password identical to their user name, if allowed by the web site. 43.4% said they wrote it down, which arguably can be better than memorising a simpler one, although no questions were asked in this survey on how complex passwords were.

This survey highlights perhaps two possible approaches to hacking in addition to the headline’s method of using the same user name and password. Another would be a phishing attack, but one that on password entry presented a password error. Since almost half the people say they repeatedly guess at the password, this type of fake site might yield multiple passwords for various sites. Finally, an attack that I have never heard of, but seems ridiculously simple for such situations as online game bulletin boards for competing clans, where, by means of a backdoor into the password routines, one can extract user names and passwords which can then be used for whatever purposes, once you track down the places that that user frequents.

Back on the subject of personal password management, I once tried using a password management tool, but it was excessively cryptic and after entering two or three passwords I forgot exactly how to go about entering a master password, and couldn’t recover from the situation, so I had to delete the tool!

I can’t find a similar survey of passwords from other countries, but if anyone can provide a link, it would make a useful comparison.
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japan.internet.com recently published the results of a survey by goo Research into podcasting. Over three days at the end of July they interviewed 1,046 members of their internet monitor group. 55.2% of the respondents were female, 23.3% were in their twenties, 39.0% in their thirties, 26.0% in their forties, and 11.7% in their fifties.

It seems to me that podcasting has been replaced by YouTube as the in-vogue buzzword. The last podcast I downloaded (no link as I wouldn’t want to subject you to it too) was a personal “audio postcard from Japan”-kind of recording, but oh dear! Never again will I go near that style of podcast – the lack of a usable fast-forward that duplicates aurally the visual scanning of headlines sapped up all my enthusiasm for the medium and the whiny gaijin content turned me right off the person.
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As the rainy season finally finishes and the real summer season starts, the probability of lightning strikes increases. With this in mind, japan.internet.com published the results of a survey by goo Research into computers and lightning. Between the 21st and 23th of July they got 1,084 successfully completed responses to their internet-based questionnaire. In the sample 53.5% were female, 22.7% in their twenties, 39.7% in their thirties, 24.9% in their forties, 10.0% in their fifties, and 2.7% in their sixties.

Note that the headline is a bit of a stretch on the truth, but I’ve got limited space and want to keep it snappy! I love lightning myself, and I have many fond memories of sitting in the evening cool on terraces in Southern France or Austria watching huge storms firing bolts into the surrounding hillsides. Conversely, wifey is extremely wary of them, and as soon as she hears a rumble of thunder, it’s off with the TV and air conditioner until the storm passes.

However, I am rather sceptical about the 20% who say they are unaware that lightning can damage electronics! Was there something odd in the wording of the question?
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japan.internet.com reported on goo Research’s 26th monthly survey on blogging. 1,075 people from goo’s internet monitor group successfully completed a private questionnaire at the start of July. The demographics were 58.4% female, 3.3% in their teens, 25.6% in their twenties, 39.4% in their thirties, 22.0% in their forties, 7.8% in their fifties, and 2.0% aged sixty or over.

Looking at the headline, if you discount the “don’t knows” as having too little traffic to bother counting, on a good day I’m in the top 2% percent of Japanese blogs traffic-wise! Of course, another explanation is that the bloggers with more traffic are too busy keeping their sites ticking over to bother answering questionnaires.

It also may be instructive to cross-reference these results with over 90% of bloggers being anonymous and most bloggers earning peanuts in affiliate schemes.
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japan.internet.com, in conjunction with goo Research, recently published the results of a survey into what people think when blogs crash and burn. They interviewed by means of a private internet questionnaire 1,084 people from their monitor group, 57.1% female, 22.9% in their twenties, 43.4% in their thirties, 24.4% in their forties, and 9.2% in their fifties.

I must admit to quite enjoying a flame war on the whole, as long as the level of abuse remains relatively intelligent. However, this being the internet, things usually deteriorate to either mindless flaming or argument by Google, where people quote the first URL they find that agrees with their position.

Now I think about it, I do dislike a real flare-up; intelligent abuse is usually not serious, I feel, and will soon blow over.
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japan.internet.com recently published the results of research by goo Research into how well IT buzzwords are understood. At the start of July they interviewed 1,033 members of their internet monitor group. 42.6% of the sample was male, 1.8% in their teens, 20.3% in their twenties, 41.9% in their thirties, 23.2% in their forties, 10.4% in their fifties, and 2.2% in their sixties.

Most of the buzzwords seem to get imported straight into Japanese as the English term, be it a complete word or an abbreviation. The rest perhaps just end up as katakana renditions of the term, like, for example, Social Network[ing] Service/Site, which ends up in Japanese as just SNS or Social Network Service or Site spelt out in katakana, which doesn’t really help many Japanese as the word “social”. Actually, there’s already a slang term in Japanese for SNS, 出会い系サイト, deai-kei saito, but perhaps it is loaded with overtones of seedy (or downright fraudulent) dating sites, whereas SNS suggests a different, more Western-style location?
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The Yomiuri Shimbun (Osaka only?) recently published the results of an opinion poll conducted in conjunction with goo Research to find out what users of Hankyu and Hanshin think about the takeover plans by Hankyu. Over four days at the end of June they got 1,065 members of the goo Research monitor group who were resident in the Kinki area to respond successfully to their internet-based questionnaire. 2% of the sample were under twenty years old (actually just 18 or 19 years old), 20% in their twenties, 41% in their thirties, 25% in their forties, 9% in their fifties, and 3% sixty or older. 58% of the sample was female. Note that sample sizes for the various sub-groups are not described.

For those of you not familiar with the Osaka private railway situation, both Hankyu and Hanshin run between Osaka and Kobe, along with a few other lines, of course. Although price-wise both services are much the same, Hankyu are nominally the first-class service, Hanshin third-class. (The ex-state-owned JR is second-class.) Hankyu has plush green seats with wood-panel effect walls in the carriages, and their line runs at a higher elevation between the two cities; the line, in fact, when passing through some of the posher areas like Shukugawa, Ashiya and Mikage defines the land prices to some extent; the hill side is more pricey than the sea side. Hanshin on the other hand passes through a lot of council housing estates, industrial areas, and the like, and while their trains are kept in tip-top nick, like almost all trains in Japan, of course, they are built to a much more basic design and finish.

The other business area where the contrast between the two companies could not be clearer is in their most famous subsidiaries; the manly and sweaty Hanshin Tigers baseball team versus the trying-to-be-manly-but-not-succeeding and definitely not showing any sweat Takarazuka Revue, the all-female song-and-dance theatre.

Finally, just as a bit of trivia, the name 阪神, hanshin, is just an abbreviation of the kanji for Osaka and Kobe, whilst 阪急, hankyu, is a contraction of Osaka Express.
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japan.internet.com, in conjunction with goo Research, published the results of a survey carried out in the middle of June into advertisements in search results. This was part of a bigger survey on search engines in general, but sadly the results are not available to the general public. They interviewed 1,031 members of their monitor panel by means of a private internet-based questionnaire. 55.8% of the respondents were female, with 23.9% of the total sample in their twenties, 40.8% in their thirties, 25.8% in their forties, 8.0% in their fiftiesm and 2.0% in their sixties.

One very suprising result is that MSN has a mere 3.7% market share as a primary search engine. Given that MSN is the default page for Internet Explorer in most new installs of Windows, this indicates perhaps a serious level of dissatisfaction with MSN overcoming user inertia.

Another surprise is over two-thirds of users go at least three pages deep into search results. However, the question is not phrased explicitly to find out the maximum or the average, but I feel the answers given indicate the average limit of the user’s patience. I don’t know if this result indicates if people are bad at formulating queries or the search results are usually pretty poor.
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