Over 70% of Japanese households have newspaper subscription
Japan is well-known the world over for being a nation of newspaper readers, so on the surface the headline figure from this survey by DIMSDRIVE Research into newspaper purchase is not too big a surprise. A quick language note – in Japan 新聞, shimbun, is the Japanese for newspaper, which you could probably work out anyway from Q3!
Demographics
Between the 17th of September and the 2nd of October 2008 10,231 members of the DIMSDRIVE monitors completed a private internet-based questionnaire. 52.8% of the sample were female, 1.2% in their teens, 13.4% in their twenties, 34.2% in their thirties, 30.2% in their forties, 14.8% in their fifties, and 6.2% aged sixty or older. By employement status, the three largest percentages were 40.4% full-time company employees, 20.7% homemakers, and 12.4% part-time or casual labour. By household income, 6.6% earned under 2 million yen per year, 19.8% under 4 million yen, 24.4% under 6 million yen, 15.3% under 8 million yen, 9.6% under 10 million yen, and 10.3% over 10 million yen. 14.0% were not saying or didn’t know.
One way that Japanese newspapers keep their print subscriptions up is to limit the amount they publish on their web sites. Most keep stories down to two or three paragraphs, often publishing just newswire articles, and expire them after just a few days.
If anything, the numbers reported here may be lower than actuality, as the third-biggest daily newspaper in Japan, the Seikyo Shimbun, is missing from the list. Whether this and other organisation’s dailies were explicitly excluded is not stated, as for instance the Shimbun Akahata (Red Flag – guess whose that is!) also shifts almost 1.7 million copies per day.
The photo is of Danny Choo being featured in a Japanese newspaper, from his flickr collection. I and many others, I think, are secdretly jealous that he gets such coverage and makes so much dosh just for doing the stuff he loves!
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