世論 What Japan Thinks

On my recent post on buttering up your Japanese wife I had a question from Galerius about pocket money, so I decided to look up about how much Japanese men get each month. In two in three married couples it is the wife who controls the family budget (see Q8) and she gives her husband an allowance each month to cover his lunch, after-work drinking and other incidental expenses. So, I found a pair of surveys, one on how much pocket money fathers get, and another on how much of the family budget women secretly skim off to spend on themselves.

Demographics

For the women, between the 22nd and 24th of June 2009 1,180 members of the goo Research monitor group completed a private internet-based questionnaire. 58.6% of the sample were female, 10.3% were in their teens, 22.9% in their twenties, 31.5% in their thirties, 19.2% in their forties, 9.6% in their fifties, and 6.4% aged sixty or older.

For the men, between the 23rd and 25th of March 2009 1,043 members of the goo Research monitor group completed a private online questionnaire. 52.2% of the sample were male, 7.8% in their teens, 17.1% in their twenties, 28.2% in their thirties, 24.8% in their forties, 11.4% in their fifties, and 10.7% 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. Also note that for the men it was only fathers who were asked, and for women it was either all married women or those with children; the stats aren’t quite clear,

I get as much or as little pocket money as I need to get, and usually use about 400 yen per weekday, plus charging lunch at the work canteen to my credit card.
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