世論 What Japan Thinks

With the Olympics over for another four years and with Japan getting a reasonable haul of medals, Macromill performed a survey into post-Olympic views.

Demographics

Over the 25th and 26th of August 2008 516 members of the Macromill Monitor group completed a private internet-based questionnaire. The sample was exactly 50:50 male and female in each age group; 24.8% were in their twenties, 25.2% in their thirties, 25.2% in their forties, and 24.8% in their fifties.

I didn’t watch much of the Olympics, but for me the most moving moments were Usian Bolt winning his two individual medals; celebrating the 100 metres win 10 metres before the finish line, then pulling out all the stops on the 200 metres to win by the proverbial mile.

Also, just today I read that Kosuke Kitajima, the double-double gold medal swimmer, was voted best beerist for knocking back a pint or two in celebration!
Read the rest of this entry »

If you're new here, you may want to subscribe to my RSS feed, or check out my weekly newsletter. Thanks for visiting!

First, a quick apology for no post yesterday, but I was in transit and away from a free internet connection, and on top of that the site seemed to have crashed… Hopefully I can post to my usual schedule for the rest of the week.

Since I didn’t have a decent internet connection, this is a survey from a couple of weeks ago conducted by the Nippon Research Council into olympic sponsorship and olympic viewing intentions.

Demographics

Between the 30th of May and the 4th of June 2008 1,200 members of the NRC monitor panel resident in the Tokyo city area (Tokyo city, Saitama, Chiba and Kanagawa) and the Keihanshin area of Kansai (Kyoto city, Osaka city and Hyogo) completed a private internet-based questionnaire. Sex and age breakdown was not noted.

Note that Panasonic and National are both brands of Matsushita Electric Industrial, but at the AGM of shareholders on Friday the 20th of June 2008 the board got a motion officially approved to change the company name to Panasonic and to kill off the National brand (used mostly for domestic appliances and other white goods), unifying everything worldwide under the Panasonic banner.

It’s all a bit depressing that the two best-known sponsors are suppliers of highly-sugared empty calories and fat-laden burgers, hardly the image of the ultimate in human physical achievement.
Read the rest of this entry »

This is my first translation from JR Tokai Express Research, apparently part of the Central Japan Railways group of companies, and it’s a very topical subject, a look at what people are thinking about regarding the upcoming Turin Olympics. They interviewed 436 people by means of an internet questionnaire over four days at the start of February, although it is not clear how they collected this sample. 110 people were in their twenties, 111 in their thirties, 110 in their forties, 110 in their fifties and 95 ages sixty or over. The numbers for each sex is not given.

Although the host city’s name in English is Turin, the Japanese use (as would be expected, of course) the Italian pronunciation as the guide for adopting it into Japanese, thus Torino. As one of these “You know you’ve been in Japan too long…” moments, I’m familiar with the locations of Torino, Firenze, Munchen, etc, but occasionally I have to pause to translate Vienna and Naples in order to understand where they are. Mind you, back when I was a kid, and in fact up until I was about 25 years old or so, I was under the impression that Ibiza and Eye-bee-tha were two totally separate places.
Read the rest of this entry »