世論 What Japan Thinks

I got the following message through another mailing list, so I’ll pass this on to anyone interested out there.

There is a questionnaire that has been authored by Katrin Kalb, a German Master Thesis student of Sophia University. The results of the thesis will be made available to the Japan National Tourist Organization (JNTO) to improve travel and tourism in Japan.

This is YOUR chance to make a difference for future travellers (including you) Make your observations and concerns heard. For a meaningful statistical evaluation, the student needs at least 300 responses, so please help by filling it out (will take 10 minutes) and forward it to people who you think can answer the questions.

Unfortunately the group of people being questioned is somewhat limited: western foreigners living for duration of at least 7 months in Japan (where at least three months should have been passed when completing the
questionnaire). You, or your partner should have a salaried (that is stable) income.

http://www.befrager.de/befragung.aspx?projekt=306

The URL is German, but the questionnaire is in English.

Note that there is also a German version of the questionnaire available. There does seem to be a small prize draw if you leave your email address after completing the survey.

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.