世論 What Japan Thinks

japan.internet.com recently released an opinion poll, performed in conjuction with goo Research, to see what people thought about the novelisation (or novelization, if you prefer) of blogs and other web contents. 1,013 people completed their internet-based questionnaire, with 60.4% female. 27.0% of the respondents were in their twenties, 42.7% in their thirties, 23.9% in their forties, and 6.4% in their fifties.

When a similar survey was carried out a year ago, during the height of the “Densha Otoko” boom, 35.0% of the people surveyed then said they would want to buy a novelisation of a blog.

I can’t say I’ve come across any blogs I’d like to see as a book, although having said that I don’t follow any regular diary-like narrative-based blogs, which would seem to be the best material for making into a book.
Read the rest of this entry »

japan.internet.com carried out a survey amongst 1,094 members of the goo monitor group (the split by sex is not recorded, but the text implies that it was all female) to find out how people use internet hotel reservation services. In the surveyed group, 2.1% were teenagers, 25.2% were in their twenties, 39.5% were in their thirties, 24.3% were in their forties, and 8.9% were in their fifties.

According to an as-yet untranslated by me survey last September on how women obtain word-of-mouth (or should that really be word-of-fingertips?) information from the internet, their top genres for picking up the buzz off the internet were make-up, dining, travel and clothes sites in that order, although four in five never added their own two yen to these sites, and just two percent regularly chimed in.
Read the rest of this entry »

japan.internet.com released a short survey, carried out at the start of February in conjunction with goo Research to find out about how people use web mail services. This is the tenth time they have performed this survey, once every month since May 2005. 1,090 people, 46.8% male, from up and down the country completed the internet-based questionnaire. 2.1% were teenagers, 22.5% were in their twenties, 40.6% were in their thirties, 24.3% were in their forties, 7.4% in their fifties, and just 3.0% aged sixty or over.

Given that according to another survey, one in five Japanese has tried dating sites, I find that only 2% have used a web mail address for this purpose suprising. Perhaps the rest used their mobile phones or an alternative form of aliasing; my main provider, for instance, offers up to five aliases, selectable from not just standard @isp.ne.jp, but vanity ones like @teabreak.jp. Or perhaps people just lied more here!

Note that when the provider usage statistics below are compared to an earlier survey on brand image, goo performs better here than its brand image suggests, and Hotmail worse.
Read the rest of this entry »

japan.internet.com, in conjunction with goo Research, carried out another of their short surveys, this time regarding what first sprung to mind when thinking about web services. They interviewed 1,036 people, 57.9% female, by means of an internet questionnaire. 2.7% of the respondents were teenagers, 23.0% were in their twenties, 42.3% in their thirties, 22.7% in their forties, 7.3% in their fifties, and 2.0% in their sixties.

Whereas an earlier survey looked at primarily how brand image is conveyed via advertising, these web services are perhaps not sold as heavily through conventional advertising channels, but instead make their mark by some combination of word of mouth, familiarity and accessibility.

The mere one percent naming Gmail as the first mail provider to come to mind seems very surprising to me, although I wonder if Google has been targetting that service towards the English-speaking demographic at the expensive of foreign language speakers? How does the Gmail brand image rank in other countries, including at home in the USA? Does anyone know?

One nice thing, however, about Gmail being below the Japanese radar is that our office’s firewall does not block it (yet…), unlike Hotmail, Yahoo! web mail (Japan but not the UK) and the other big providers. Not that I check personal mail at work; no no no, not me at all.

In addition, Gmail is still invitation-only, but that hasn’t stopped SNS services spreading widely amongst the Japanese. By the way, if anyone out there would like a Gmail invitation, I have lots to give away!
Read the rest of this entry »

At the start of this month japan.internet.com in conjunction with goo Research got 1,089 replies to an internet-based questionnaire about the use of Question and Answer sites in particular, and looking up things in general. The user demographics were 23.0% in their twenties, 41.0% in their thirties, 25.9% in their forties, 7.2% in their fifties, and 2.8% in their sixties. 53.3% of the sample were female.

From the English language point of view, I’ve only ever questioned and answered on Experts Exchange in the dim and distant past, and glanced at Google Answers once or twice recently. I’m much more of a BBS and Usenet person myself.

One question not addressed by this survey (or perhaps only addressed if you pay money to get the full survey results) is how much people trust the answers they get. However, even a seemingly simple question like that may not have a simple answer. Thinking of Wikipedia, for instance (which isn’t a Q&A site, admittedly), depending on the information I am searching, my trust level varies. In fact, I have recently stopped linking to it as I feel that because the pointed-to page can change, I may no longer be referring to the same information that I was pointing to in the past; in addition for controversial subjects the page can get frozen, or at least adopted as a base line, at a non-neutral point of view, despite the protestations of neutrality from the ‘pedia-philes.
Read the rest of this entry »

[part 1] [part 2]

Over four days at the end of November and start of December last year, goo Research carried out a closed internet-based survey of 2,207 businesspeople to find out about the use of intra-company communication tools and blogs, and other related matters.

Note that this survey was carried out before probably the most famous Japanese blogging CEO became an ex-president and an ex-blogger, so I wonder how the answers to the questions in this second half would change if this survey were repeated today.

One thing I noticed from the company I worked for’s attempt to introduce a community was that a cheerleader or evangelist is needed to help get the ball rolling. Although the next survey question suggests that over half the people want to see management backing, the backing in itself is not the key, I don’t think, it is that the bosses should also be in the vanguard, otherwise there may be a tendency for the whole think to just fizzle out.
Read the rest of this entry »

[part 1] [part 2]

Over four days at the end of November and start of December last year, goo Research carried out a closed internet-based survey of 2,207 businesspeople to find out about the use of intra-company communication tools and blogs, and other related matters.

This is one subject I’d love to wax lyrical on, but sadly I suspect I’d probably get sacked if my boss read what I want to say! Suffice to say I am unaware of a blog by our prez; most of his communications are by PDF files. About a year ago we did try to introduce a community-based service that failed, perhaps partially due to it being seen as a gaijin thing, but more importantly … I’d better self-censor this post now.

The main problem people report is regarding information overload; either simply too much data or inability to highlight the new information. Interestingly, almost two-thirds are interested in work-related blogs, yet only just over half are interested in a community site, although the survey does not make clear what definition of “community” was used.
Read the rest of this entry »

On the 27th of January, japan.internet.com, in conjunction with goo Research, published their 23rd survey on blogging. 1,076 people from all around the country and of all ages completed the internet-based questionnaire. 42.3% were male, 3.4% teenagers, 24.4% in their twenties, 38.0% in their thirties, 24.4% in their forties, and 9.7% fifty or over.

See also the recent story from Mutant Frog to understand the Japanese blogosphere a bit better. I find it interesting that over 70% have had a trackback, but less than 40% have made one. I wonder how these figures compare with other countries? Mutant Frog suggested that the Japanese blog world is mostly ignorant of the world outside its borders. Are many of the bloggers also blogging purely for themselves? Of course another factor is that people may not be aware that their blogging platform automatically trackbacks any links.
Read the rest of this entry »

goo Research, in cooperation with the Nikkan Kogyo Shimbun Ltd, performed an internet-based survey in Decemeber of 2005 amongst 1,076 people regarding their views on NEETs and Freeters. At the same time, 218 companies also answered a similar set of questions, and the answers have been gathered together for presentation in this report, although the text does not make it clear whereabout the company answers have been included. Unfortunately, neither the sex nor the age breakdown of the survey is available, as that might have provided extra clues to interpreting the results.

First, I had better translate a couple of terms. NEET, or Not in Education, Employment or Training, was first coined in the UK to refer to teenagers, mainly, who left school with neither a job not ongoing education lined up. In Japan, it refers to a much wider population; there is no age limit, and as for employment, NEETs may do casual or very short-term labour (in fact, there are a number of heavily-advertised web sites that advertise these pocket-money jobs) and may very well have completed a university degree, but due to various factors have not decided to commit themselves to a job. I am not sure from where exactly they get money to support themselves, but it is most likely from their parents.

Freeters, on the other hand, is a purely Japanese word, formed by taking the English word “freelance”, or perhaps just “free”, and the German word “arbeiter”, meaning part-time, or at least not a full employee, 正社員, seishain. Many of the part-time jobs are in the service industry, so a freeter may flit from flipping burgers in McDonalds for three months, to doing the late night shift at the local convenience for another two months, to two weeks not working at anything at all.

The essential difference is perhaps that a NEET spends more time not working whereas a Freeter works just enough to fund his own time off. Along with the overall decrease in young people, with NEETs and Freeters not contributing much in the way of taxes, the ability of the government to pay pensions in the future is further threatened by the casualisation (is that a word?) of the workforce.
Read the rest of this entry »

japan.internet.com and goo Research recently performed a survey to see what brands sprung to mind when various products were mentioned. They questioned 1,084 people from goo’s pool of monitors, 42.53% male, 57.47% female, with 66.14% aged from 10 (well, it’s actually from 15, as that’s the minimum age for joining the goo Research monitor group) to 39, and 33.86% aged from 40 to 69.

As a slight digression, the original story did have these percentages to two decimal places, which seems an unnecessarily high degree of accuracy. Since the sample size is 1,084 people, one person equates to just over 0.09% of the sample, therefore quoting the percentages to two decimal places implies more accuracy than is possible from the sample size.

As a second slight digression, I’ve been a bit disappointed by goo Research recently – their main research results index now mostly points to japan.internet.com stories which only report a handful of the highlights from their survey, rather than the full gory details. Perhaps for you as a reader the short sharp story is easier to digest, but for me, often the juicer statistics are glossed over.

Note that this questionnaire is related to brand awareness, not actual sales figures, which often differ quite greatly from the numbers presented below; Matsushita/Viera is number one in terms of sales of flat screen TVs in Japan, USA and Europe, for instance.
Read the rest of this entry »