世論 What Japan Thinks

Here’s a quick ranking survery from goo Ranking to squeeze in as my entry to the September 2008 Japan Blog Matsuri on poorly-understood job titles in Japan. As the theme of this month’s Matsuri is language, I’ll list the original Japanese too. I’ll bet many of my readers will be stumped by some of the translations too!

Demographics

Between the 25th and 28th of July 2008 1,072 members of the goo Research online monitor panel completed a private internet-based questionnaire. 50.3% of the sample were male, 5.7% in their teens, 14.4% in their twenties, 31,0% in their thirties, 28.1% in their forties, 10.5% in their fifties, and 10.4% 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.
It’s interesting that most of the confusing job titles are English ones. Number 7, Vice-President, refers not to people like Dick Cheney, but to something I notice in start-ups, where everyone in at the founding and/or with substantial shareholdings gets an honorary vice-presidentship for their troubles. I’m not sure what number 14 is doing on the list - an orchestra conductor is a 指揮者, shikisha - do they mean bus conductor?

I used to have an unofficial job title of Transcontinental Code Monkey (I might even still have the T-shirt somewhere), but that’s another story.

Oh, and for the Blog Matsuri I though this or this would have been much more appropriate, but the translation defeated me!
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Ahh, the youth of today! If it wasn’t hard enough to follow Japanese in the first place, the kids are using romaji (roman alphabet) abbreviations that make LOL, BRB and CUL8R seem so simple. This survey from goo Research in conjuction with the Yomiuri Shimbun into in-vogue abbreviations looked at their use and abuse.

Demographics

Between the 25th and 28th of March 2008 533 young people from the goo Research monitor panel completed a private internet-based questionnaire. The report says there was a 1:1 male to female ratio, but that would leave one extra. The age split is not noted, but 35% of the respondents were students, 30% were full-time employees, and 11% were home-makers.

I think most foreign residents of Japan will have heard of KY at least; indeed, one of the best selling non-fiction books these days is a KY Dictionary!

When the survey questions mention “conversation”, I believe it is referring to spoken language, not email.

Q3 is probably wrong in many places, so I hope my readers can point me in the right direction!

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As part of their 104th Ranking Research, DIMSDRIVE Research asked 5,003 members of its monitor group why it was good that they were born Japanese. This poll was conducted towards the end of November.

When I first read this I laughed out loud at the item ranked second, and I think everyone else who has lived in Japan will raise at least a wry smile when they see probably the most groan-worthy stereotypical nihonjinron-like answer.

If I had to choose the top reasons why I’m happy that I was born Scottish, I’d probably choose the Scottish socialistic (with a small ’s’) character, the great outdoors, our football team that can inspire both laughter and tears, something to do with our culture and heritage, and, of course, that I wasn’t born English.
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Another word of the year list for your entertainment, this time as selected by the editors of (or contributors to?) the annual magazine 知恵蔵, chiezou, Store of Wisdom, a publication that covers the theme of current language matters.
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On the first of December Japan’s biggest correspondence course company, U-CAN, and Jiyu Kokumin Sha (a book publishing company) released the results of a survey into the top words or expressions to come into vogue this year. The voting was conducted, I believe, by means of a public web poll though both of their web sites, but no demographic information is available. On the web site linked above you can find all sixty candidate words that the winners were selected from.

The handkerchief prince meme became one of the most irritating ones for me; it seemed that almost ever comedian picked up on it, and the merest dab of their foreheads with a blue hanky was enough to send the studio audience into paroxisms of mirth.

Regarding Metabolic Syndrome or middle-age spread, and to stray rather far away from the topic, I had an intersting discussion at work this afternoon regarding the best way to tackle this issue. This year’s winter bonus seems to have been spent in one of two ways; first, on the Panasonic Joba, a decidedly non-bucking bronco for your living room. One colleague recounted a story how one of the old guys in her English class is a cowboy freak, so at home indulges in cosplay by dressing up in a cowboy outfit, saddling up and watching John Wayne movies. As a result, his English is rather advanced but contains many expressions that died in the Wild West. Second, the Wii. Quite a lot of people old enough to know better queued overnight for the release and spent the weekend working out to Wii Sports.
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A little while back goo Ranking published the results of a poll into the top 30 new internet words. Many of these neologisms are unlikely to ever find their way into a dictionary, other than perhaps one of the Wiki family, of course. As usual for goo Ranking, the top vote gets 100 points, and all the rest get a value representing the percentage of votes relative to the number one choice.

As you might suspect, many of these words were coined on 2 Channel.

As I no doubt have made many, many mistakes, please feel free to correct me!
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Hopefully this doesn’t trip everyone’s spam filters, but I’ve just added a new page linked from the right-hand margin that contains a list of lots of companies that will pay you pennies, well yen (or sometimes just shopping points), to fill in surveys for them. Most of them require you to be a resident of Japan at least, and a few do require you to be in fact “native” Japanese. They all do seem relatively reputable companies, and I personally have signed up with a few.

Note that everything on the target web pages is naturally in Japanese, so if nothing else, it is good practice for your Japanese reading skills. Please only sign up if you are genuinely interested in helping out with market research; the rewards available are usually so small that just randoming selecting answers is not going to make you rich. This will be an ongoing project, so you may wish to visit later on to see what extra has been added, although I will add blog entries whenever I do update the page.

In November last year, DIMSDRIVE Research interviewed via an internet-based questionnaire 3,604 people (1,620, or 45.0% male) regarding what foreigner they thought was good at Japanese.

To most people who have never been to Japan this probably sounds like a really bizarre question to ask, but with Japan having only about 2% non-Japanese residents, and with the vast majority of these actually being born in Japan and often bred as Japanese (Google for zainichi), the number of non-native speakers of Japanese is very low, and of course Nihonjinron tells the Japanese that we gaijin cannot learn the language properly. (Actually, Japanese is relatively easy for basic speaking fluency, as most verb and noun conjugation is regular, the core vocabularly is quite small, and pronunciation is mostly straightforward. However, the intricacies of polite language and kanji (although kanji is not excessively difficult, there’s a lot of it to learn!) inhibit most people from getting to perfect mastery.) In fact, being told you are good at Japanese by a Japanese person is more often than not お世辞, oseji, flattery, bordering on the line of patronisation, which I suspect is the reason that the third-placed person is there.
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This is a slightly old survey carried out in March 2001 by the government regarding foreigners learning Japanese. Japanese language classrooms from around the country were sampled, with 581 foreigners aged 16 and above living in Japan responding to the questions. The questioning was, presumably, carried out in the native language of the respondents, but it does say that the question and answer sheet was read and completed by the respondent. Note that especially if local government classes were selected, the level of the classes would be rather low. Due to the lack of Japanese language teachers and the cost of one-to-one lessons, I think that lower-level students would be over-represented in this survey. Amongst my foreign friends and acquaintences, once we pass JLPT 3 level we tend to stop formal study.

First, Japanese language ability in various formal situations was investigated, broken down by length of study of Japanese. It doesn’t say if this means fulltime or nightschool classes, which would make a huge difference to ability, of course.

Q: In which of the following situations can you communicate in Japanese?

	All	Less than one year	One to two years	More than two years
Talking to doctor about illness	63.7%	56.2%	78.1%	88.8%
Discussions/questions with council officials, etc	50.6%	43.2%	63.5%	76.3%
Reading notices from schools or council, etc	48.9%	43.2%	56.3%	71.3%
Writing a CV	37.5%	33.5%	45.8%	47.5%
Reading work documents	28.7%	25.4%	36.5%	40.0%

Reading and writing ability seems rather too high!

Next, five situations where Japanese may be needed were rated in degrees from “absolutely essential”, “needed”, and so on down to presumably “not needed at all”. Note, this is a summary of a full survey, so a lot of detail is omitted.

Q: Do you think Japanese ability is absolutely essential in the following situations?

Exchanging greetings	60.4%
Telephoning a Japanese person	50.3%
Asking for directions	48.4%
Talking to doctor about illness	47.3%
Writing addressing in kanji	44.2%

Q: Can you do the following reading tasks?

	All	Read hiragana	Read katakana	Read romaji	Can’t read kanji but understand the meaning	Can read some kanji	Can read kanji	Can read and understand kanji	Can’t read anything	No answer
All	581	84.3%	75.2%	51.5%	15.0%	48.5%	12.9%	19.6%	1.9%	1.4%
<1 year study	370	85.4%	74.9%	54.9%	17.6%	47.0%	11.1%	16.5%	1.9%	0.5%
1-2 years study	96	88.5%	79.2%	50.0%	11.5%	47.9%	19.8%	22.9%	2.1%
>2 years study	80	86.3%	85.0%	43.8%	7.5%	66.3%	15.0%	32.5%	1.3%

I hope that table makes sense! I think if there had been some more distiction made between understanding kanji and reading (ie, knowing the Japanese pronounciation) kanji it would have been better, as Chinese (and Koreans to some extent) have a distinct advantage over other foreigners in that respect.

Q: Can you do the following writing tasks?

	All	Write hiragana	Write katakana	Write romaji	Write a few kanji	Can’t write enough kanji by hand but can when using word processor	Write sufficient kanji	Can’t write at all	No answer
All	581	84.0%	73.7%	49.1%	49.4%	9.3%	17.6%	2.9%	1.4%
<1 year study	370	84.6%	74.1%	51.9%	45.9%	7.8%	17.8%	2.4%	0.5%
1-2 years study	96	89.6%	78.1%	50.0%	57.3%	11.5%	17.7%	3.1%	1.0%
>2 years study	80	86.3%	78.8%	43.8%	68.8%	11.3%	16.3%	1.3%	1.3%

Q: What do you hope will be the outcome of your studies? (Multiple answers, top five answers only presented)

Become able to speak Japanese	59.0%
Can increase number of friends	55.9%
Be able to get to know neighbours	36.8%
Can understand TV programs better than before	32.2%
Be able to write my name	31.5%

Q: How will you use the results of your studies? (Multiple answers, top five answers only presented) Not sure on the exact difference between this and the last question!

Speak Japanese	71.1%
Study lifestyle and culture	54.2%
Increase number of friends	47.7%
Talk with everyone	43.7%
Deepen understanding of the differences in culture and viewpoint	30.8%

Uggh, that was impossible to translate! I had to skip the last couple of tables as they made very little sense to me. There looks as if there ought to have been another document describing the survey questions in more details, but I can’t see it at all.

Looking at this survey on Japanese and their language, performed last year in January and February, it seems that three out of four of the 3,000 Japanese surveyed would normally read my blog’s title as yoron rather than seron! Only 18.9% plumped for seron whilst 73.6% went for yoron, with the remaining 7.5% either use both readings equally or just don’t know. Further investigation indicates both readings are perfectly acceptable, so one is neither more or less correct than the other.