世論 What Japan Thinks

I’m still looking for a survey on the hottest topic these days, the disease formally known as swine ‘flu, but with no luck yet, so instead you’ll have to make do with a look at an update on last year’s pandemic of mass hysteria in this survey from iShare on the Apple iPhone’s image in Japan.

Demographics

Between the 13th and 16th of April 2009 342 members of the CLUB BBQ free email forwarding service who had a mobile phone for personal use completed a private internet-based questionnaire. 55.3% of the sample were male, 36.8% in their twenties, 29.2% in their thirties, and 33.9% in their forties.

In Q2 it is interesting that nearly all of the series mentioned are RPGs, but given the lack of an external keypad, I’m not really too sure how well they would play. As I suspected, if you have a jailbroken phone, the MAME emulator can be downloaded to give access to the older titles, and the touchpanel controls look nice.
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emoji, literaly “picture characters”, are the small graphical icons that fill (or litter, depending on your point of view!) many Japanese mobile phone email messages, but within Japan the three main mobile phone service providers have all got different encoding representations for them and support different sets of emoji, meaning that although they all perform encoding translation when exchanging emails, it can be a bit hit-or-miss as to whether or not the message gets through. Next, add into the mix the iPhone with support for at least four different kinds of mail (SMS, SoftBank’s own iPhone-specific mailbox, webmail, and third-party POP3-based mailboxes), and even within the one device a lot of trickery needs to take place to make the experience consistent for the user.

Google have recently been ramping up their advertising of Gmail in Japan as they currently languish with the also-rans in the popularity stakes. One aspect of their advertising has been to highlight their support of emoji, but the lack of a standard encoding method makes everything a bit more complicated than it need be.

Thus, engineers from Google and Apple have got together to try to propose an encoding for these emoji (they have identified 674 of them!) that can be added to the official standard ISO/IEC 10646, as can be seen in this document, Proposal for Encoding Emoji Symbols. The proposal uses a few of my translations as reference documents, which is nice.

This survey has perhaps a rather narrow sample, but it is the early 20s women who are the trend leaders (or the first to adapt trends promoted by industry, depending on how cynical you want to be) so this recent survey sponsored by JIDPO (Japan Industrial Design Promotion Organization) and conducted by goo Research into design reveals a number of interesting numbers.

Demographics

Between the 1st and 5th of December 2008 1,102 women from the goo Research monitor group aged between 20 and 26 answered an online private questionnaire. 33.2% of the sample resided in the Tokyo area, 33.6% in the Osaka area, and 33.2% in the Nagoya area. 9.9% of the sample were aged 20, 14.0% aged 21, 17.2% aged 22, 16.4% aged 23, 20.1% aged 24, 21.8% aged 25, and 0.6% aged 26.

Not surprisingly Apple feature prominently, but note that in Q1 there are six or less iPhone owners who rate their device (cross reference the data with Q3), versus 125 iPod owners, yet in Q2 the iPhone is the second-most appreciated device that people do not own. Both the SoftBank CEO and I know the reason for that.

I am surprised, however, by Sharp’s mobiles being high on the list. Their AQUOS mobile phone ball joint is an impressive piece of industrial design, but the overall phone is a bit ordinary, I feel. My personal favourite mobile phone from a design point of view is the NEC N703iD credit-card themed one.

Oh, and my wife has modelled wedding dresses for the Yumi Katsura in Q8.
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The people over at Strapya have come up with the latest innovation in Japanese space age technology to allow you to attach a cute (or otherwise) strap to your iPhone or other holeless mobiles with what they claim is their “long time dreaming item for everyone who loves cell phone straps”.

OK, it’s just a stick-on button, but at 210 yen (US$2.16 or so) for not one but two holes, you cannot go wrong.

Since I’m selling you stuff, I’d like to mention the following cases:

They seem very popular in Japan amongst the iPhone users I see.

When I wrote my iPhone R.I.P. article last month a lot of people told me I was completely wrong for making such a big deal out of emoji as the key feature missing on Apple’s iPhone in Japan.

However, at a recent press conference, Masayoshi Son, the CEO of SoftBank, the Japanese carrier for the iPhone, said the following about the planned update of the iPhone software and the addition of emoji:

“Email without emoticons can’t be email in Japan. We persuaded Apple Computer (to localize iPhones for the Japanese market).”

Since I’m tooting my own blog’s horn here, I’d also like to point out that Apple still need to add a retro CHTML (iMode-like) browser and a strap hook.

A recent survey reported on by ITmedia and conducted by ASCII Media Works looked at Mac users, in particular contrasting them with Windows users.

Demographics

In mid-September 2008 278 Mac users and 494 Windows PC users who were memebers of the ASCII General Research monitor group completed a private internet-based questionnaire. The age and sex profiles were not noted, although given the small amount of housewives and given that ASCII is a computer magazine, the respondent pool appears to be mostly male.

There’s so many great figures in this survey – Mac users earn more, are more creative and are more interested in foreign goods, whereas Windows users are more conservative and like the same old same. The most stunning figure, however, was for liked mobile phone manufacturers in Q7; not surprisingly over two in five Mac users were iPhone fans, but a surprisingly-low 5% of Windows users expressed an interest. Following up, Q8 showed that over half as many again Mac users were with SoftBank; remember, SoftBank carry the iPhone, and with similar percentages for other carriers, one must conclude that around one in ten Mac owners have bought iPhones to accompany their phones from other carriers.
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Only two months after the most-hyped mobile phone launch in Japan, with people queueing round the block to buy it and journalists spilling thousands of gallons of ink in praise of it, the consensus now seems to be that Apple’s iPhone has failed in Japan, with boxes piled high in many stores and sales predictions being halved from the initial one million units in a year. But why, in a country that has embraced the iPod, relegating all bar Sony to a single-digit percentage share of the MP3 player market? It’s an easy question to answer.

Emoji.

Yes, emoji, and emoji alone. It’s missing a FeliCa RFID smart card, but most people use them embedded in credit cards, not phones; everyone talks about wanting One Seg but most people don’t actually watch television on their mobiles; there’s no QR code scanner but there’s a free App Store program to download for that; SD memory cards are popular add-ons, but the iPhone has lots of built-in storage; there’s no place to hang a strap, but an after-market slipcase can be decorated instead; there’s no emoji, yet having a lot of text emoticons and smilies in the dictionary does not paper over the chasm.

Emoji, these small icons (pictured in the top right) that almost every Japanese phone has, for expressing happy and sad faces, hand gestures, weather symbols, sports and hobbies and star signs to name but some of the kinds available, are the killer application, and their absence from the iPhone has killed its sales. One unfamiliar with the Japanese market might think that such a seemingly trivial feature would appeal only to children, but over a third regularly use them, and another two in five sometimes use them, making them second nature to the vast majority of Japanese. For instance, if you’re emailing an invite to go for a beer, on beginning to type “beer” up pops a graphic of a pint mug as an auto-completion option, so why not? That is how emoji have become second-nature to most phone users. For the poor iPhone user on the other hand, on sending the message there’s no nice graphic to add, and on receiving, if they are lucky they’ll see something like “Fancy going for a ¾?”, the dreaded moji-bake corrupted character, if they are unlucky (which is most of the time) the iPhone will relegate the whole of the message into an attachment, requiring an extra step before the reader finds out they cannot.

The not one but two drops in price for light users by SoftBank illustrate that they recognise there are people not really that interested in surfing with the Safari web browser (remember, public WiFi is the exception rather than the rule in Japan) but instead are mail-centric, but without full suppport for both reading and writing emoji, the iPhone is useless. When the iPhone first launched, a review in Nikkei Trendy Net described it as a foreigner with excellent Japanese, noting that although it can handle technical aspects of Japanese very well (the pop-up kana input for instance is a very clever solution that can only work on a touch panel) it fails to understand the culture.

Until Apple realises emoji are the key element of Japanese mobile culture, the iPhone will not sell.

Last time I looked at the iPhone I got a comment on me being a bit negative in my outlook, so this time in a survey by BlogCh looking at smartphones I promise to be more positive!

Demographics

Between the 27th and 29th of August 2008 801 members of the free email service CLUB BBQ who also had a mobile phone for private use completed an online survey. 54.2% of the sample were male, 17.5% in their twenties, 48.3% in their thirties, 29.0% in their forties, and 5.2% in their teens or aged fifty or older. Note that the CLUB BBQ demographics is more technologically aware than the average internet user.

I thought my next mobile phone might be just another bog-standard one, but I just recently read a bit about the HTC Touch (or the HT1100 as DoCoMo label it) and it gets a lot of good reviews and comes in at the same price as… but it doesn’t do emoji. Curses! However, the Willcom 03, one of the subjects of this review, can at least display them.

Indeed, looking at the Willcom 03 feature set it looks like it is what the iPhone should have been for the Japan market. Oops, I’m being negative again, but for the sake of research I stopped at a mobile phone shop and picked up the Willcom 03 leaflet. It’s very feminine, telling the story of a week in the life of a young businesswoman in suitable pastel colours, and for just 6,700 yen all-in for unlimited data and zero money down (I think), it’s a winner.

Incidentally, I’ve not seen an iPhone in the wild yet, and I’ve seen just one or two iPod touches
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We’re now two months into the iPhone era in Japan, so this 39th regular mobile upgrade needs survey from goo Research and reported on by japan.internet.com took a closer look at some of the issues surrounding this device.

Demographics

Between the 18th and 21st of August 2008 1,000 mobile phone-using members of the goo Research online monitor pool completed a private internet-based questionnaire. 51.2% of the sample were female, 2.0% were in their teens, 18.3% in their twenties, 40.8% in their thirties, 24.6% in their forties, and 14.3% aged fifty or older.

Note that for Q1 and Q2, for people with multiple providers or multiple phones, they answered for their main one only.

Apple on 0.3% for this survey is a difficult number to interpret. If you take the aproximate figure of 100 million mobile phones in Japan, this represents about 300,000 users, but figures suggest there has been about 100,000 iPhones sold in Japan. The age group of respondents is biased toward the iPhone demographic, and almost all of them own home computers, so it would suggest a bias, but how much is difficult to predict.

Q4 is a difficult one to interpret. Just over half of those surveyed do not welcome some of the phones; in English being not welcome has negative connotations, but it may be more correct to say that people are just not bothered.
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With the iPhone era in Japan now about three weeks old, and with previous surveys showing vast numbers of people willing to sell their own grannies in exchange for an iPhone, this survey from BlogCh into the iPhone, conducted the weekend after the release of the Jesus Phone shows a bit about how the Japanese have reacted.

Demographics

Between the 18th and 22nd of July 2008 433 members of the CLUB BBQ free email forwarding service completed a private internet-based questionnaire. 65.8% of the sample were female, 9.9% in their teens, 28.2% in their twenties, 43.2% in their thirties, 15.0% in their forties, and 3.7% aged fifty or older.

The sample size is a bit small, as is the number of purchasers from the sample, so it is a bit difficult to extrapolate the numbers, but I’ll of course keep my eyes peeled for further data in the coming months. However, just 3 people are planning to buy later, which does suggest that the euphoria has passed. Despite being cheaper than first predicted by me, cost scares off more than two in five.

I know at least two of my Japanese readers were more than willing to kick the SoftBank dog out of the way (and perhaps even the SoftBank lady out of bed) to get their hands on an iPhone, but I’ve not seen any English-language reviews of how it performs in Japan. Drop me a line if you know of any, and I’ll link to them from here.
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