世論 What Japan Thinks

Having seen at the end of last year that over three in four are hurting financially, iShare followed up with a look at taking on a second job.

Demographics

Between the 4th and 7th of January 2010 495 members of the CLUB BBQ free email forwarding service completed a private internet-based questionnaire. 55.4% of the sample were male, 33.5% in their twenties, 31.9% in their thirties, and 34.5% in their forties.

16.1% of the men unemployed seems a very high percentage, and with only 4% between the figures for those in their twenties versus those in their thirties and forties, one cannot really say it is due to student numbers. I’d love to see the age figures broken down by sex just to see if there’s a trend.

I suppose I should count What Japan Thinks as my second job, and I wish I could say that I’m using the earnings to save for travel, but sadly it barely makes enough to cover my living expenses gap…
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Let’s end the year on a low point, by looking at a recent survey from iShare into how 2009 was financially.

Demographics

Between the 18th and 24th of December 2009 505 members of the CLUB BBQ free email forwarding service completed a private internet-based questionnaire. 56.6% of the sample were male, 30.7% in their twenties, 33.3% in their thirties, and 36.0% in their forties.

2009 was pretty horrendous for me – I recently got my end of year tax summary which showed that my salary was down close to 10% due to both stealth cuts through the bonus system and a renegotation of the overtime system which results in more money in my monthly pay-packet but less in the bonus. Also this year our mortgage discount rate ran out, which was another few percentage off the family budget. On the What Japan Thinks front, AdSense revenue has never recovered from two years ago when it suddenly died for reasons that were never too clear. Traffic is about double from then, but click-through and earnings per click are down. I’ve never really managed to understand affiliate advertising, despite many attempts…
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japan.internet.com recently reported on a survey conducted by JR Tokai Express Research into personel systems, in particular in this report, in how salaries are calculated.

Demographics

On the 30th of April 2007 JR Tokai Express Research questioned 330 members of their online monitor panel employed in either private or public enterprises. 67.3% were female, 15.2% in their twenties, 42.1% in their thirties, 31.2% in their forties, 9.4% in their fifties, and 2.1% in their sixties.

My salary is performance based with a horrendously complex evaluation system that changes almost every year. I’m just coming up to setting my targets for this year, which, as with the two 6-monthly reviews of progress towards these set goals, consists largely of horse-trading and inventing ratings so you don’t look either too good or too bad, and of course being foreign I don’t quite fit into the system, so more pointless tweaking takes place to make allowances. They have a box for TOEIC score, so instead I put down my Kanji Kentei targets, but “write like a Japanese middle-school student” is hardly a major achievement from a Japanese perspective! An ex-colleague had the right idea – he just refused to fill in any form that wasn’t in English.
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