世論 What Japan Thinks

Yahoo! JAPAN recently annouced the results of a number of their “Best of 2008″, and one of the categories was what rare products people just couldn’t resist click through to. Voting was (as far as I understand) open to all registered users of Yahoo! JAPAN. The items were collected from all the Hot Items selected by Yahoo! Shopping between January and October of this year.

If you do like the look of Marimokkori, you can in fact buy him here.
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The only convenience store close by my house closes about 10 pm, and anyway I’m too broke and too married these days to get up to much at the midnight hour. However, this recent survey from MyVoice into late night and 24 hour businesses shows that there’s a lot of people active in the small hours.

Demographics

Over the first five days of May 2008 14,350 members of the MyVoice Internet Community successfully completed a private online survey. 54% of the sample was female, 2% in their teens, 15% in their twenties, 38% in their thirties, 29% in their forties, and 16% in their fifties.

Conspicuous by their absence in the list of late night operators are trains and buses. Most lines have their last train depart by midnight, with one reason being safety, to allow the operators four hours per night for essential maintenance. The other more cynical reason is that it keeps taxi drivers in business. It’s quite an amazing sight the first time you see taxis twenty deep outside the railway station after the last train departs!

Image from wukong on Flickr.
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I may be trying to outdo Tokyo Times for alliterative headlines, but I’ll not be challenging his collection of themed bras and panties. (Each word is a different link!) This is instead a photograph-free fact-filled serious survey into pantie purchasing (OK, you get the idea, back to normal!) conducted by iShare and reported through BlogCh.

Demographics

Between the 7th and 9th of May 2008 723 members of the iShare online monitor group completed a private internet-based questionnaire. 54.1% of the sample was male, 20.5% were in their twenties, 53.4% in their thirties, and 26.1% in their forties.

The lucky underwear in Q3, or as it’s known in Japanese, 勝負下着, shoubu shitagi, refers to underwear worn on the whole, I think, when going on dates (or just going out) in the hope of getting lucky.

I’m not really sure about the 1.0% of guys wearing T-backs in Q4, and I wonder if going commando is a significant percentage of the others in Q4 and Q5.

Most of mine are Hello Kitty and other cute character boxers, bought by the wife, if you must know!
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Japan may be one of the top producers of the latest home electrical items, but is it a big consumer of what it produces? With the smallness of the average home being perhaps a factor, how many gadgets make their way to the consumer? Recently infoPLANT (who seem to be in the process of changing their name to Yahoo! Japan Value Insight) published the results of a short survey on home electricals ownership and purchasing plans. Note that this survey was conducted just a month before the summer bonus season started, so perhaps some of the respondents were thinking about what they wanted to buy.

Demographics

Over a week from the 29th of May to the 4th of June 2007 infoPLANT made the survey available through the menuing system of NTT DoCoMo’s iMode mobile phone system, where 6,606 people, 63.2% female, self-selected themselves and successfully completed the survey.

Personally, we manage just a big fridge, an air purifier and a video camera, and perhaps we would like sometime to buy a hard disk recorder.
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With the rather amusingly-name “My Bag” campaign to persuade Japanese consumers to start bringing their own shopping bag with them gathering steam, MyVoice recently published the results of a survey they conducted into the reuse of check-out bags. This is quite a timely survey, with the big convenience store chain 7-11 recently announcing that it would start charging 5 yen per bag at all its stores.

Demographics

Over the first five days of May 2007, 15,078 members of the MyVoice internet community completed a private internet-based questionnaire. 46% of the sample was male, 1% in their teens, 17% in their twenties, 40% in their thirties, 28% in their forties, and 14% in their fifties.

This is a subject I’ve looked at before, but this survey takes an interesting look at what exactly people do with the bags once they get home. Sadly, Q2 and Q3 were badly-worded, lumping two questions together; I would have rather seen the two parts asked individually.
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DIMSDRIVE Research recently conducted a poll on the subject of check-out shopping bags, the plastic bags most supermarkets give away free to shoppers. However, some chains have introduced charges for bags, most of the others encourage people to bring their own, and there is talk of introducing legislation to force all shops to charge for bags.

Demographics

Between the 7th and 15th of March, 2007 7,504 members of DIMSDRIVE’s online monitor group successfully completed a private internet-based questionnaire. 58.4% of the sample was female, just 0.3% were in their teens, 16.6% in their twenties, 36.9% in their thirties, 27.9% in their forties, 13.7% in their fifties, and 4.6% aged sixty or older. 65.2% were married; 42.5% worked full-time in the private or public sectors, 24.2% were homemakers, 12.8% were part-timers, 9.2% were self-employed, 5.7% were unemployed (including retirees), 2.9% were students and 2.7% had other employment statuses.

Note that as well as taking your own bag with you, some supermarkets offer baskets for sale. In addition, if you refuse bags, supermarkets often offer points that may be collected and exchanged for gifts.

Last time I was in Austria shopping at a Spar in Vienna, they only had pay-for bags, costing, if I remember correctly, a not insignificant number of Euro cents (60 or so?), but this was for a large and substantial bag, which I think is a far better idea than charging for the current bags which are difficult to reuse for anything other than collecting household garbage, and I think people may be more understanding about paying for something valuable and definitely reuseable.

I’m also glad to see Q1, the frequency of visiting supermarkets, a figure I’ve been interested in finding out for a while!

UPDATE: I see that in the UK, Sainbury’s have launched an “I’m not a plastic bag” bag that seems to have caused quite a stir! Would a similar campaign work here, I wonder, although reading the article I don’t know if they are actually going to be used by the general public, or just kept as keepsakes or investments.
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Over one week at the start of March, infoPLANT conducted a survey by means of a public questionnaire available throughNTT DoCoMo’s iMode menuing system on the subject of online shopping habits. Note that since this is a self-selecting survey, attracting perhaps heavy mobile phone users, there might be some bias towards higher levels of shopping than in the average phone-owning population.

Demographics

6,398 people, 66.1% of them female, successfully completed the survey. 3.1% were in their teens, 33.0% in their twenties, 43.1% in their thirties, 17.7% in their forties, and 3.2% aged fifty or older.

I personally have never bought anything through a mobile phone web site as I restrict all my purchasing activity to a full-size computer, and I’m really surprised to see clothes doing so well, but in part that might be due to people choosing clothes through a paper catalogue then completing the order by mobile phone.
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infoPLANT recently took a look at one of the first things that strikes many visitors to these shores, the interest in and habits surrounding high-class brand-name clothes, accessories and jewelry. Although this research was conducted by infoPLANT’s usual method of a self-selecting call for participants sent out through NTT DoCoMo’s iMode menuing system, the self-selecting nature should not have too averse an effect on the replies, I believe.

Demographics

Over a week between the 20th and 27th of February, 4,989 mobile phone users successfully completed the survey. 34.9% of the group was male, 2.8% were in their teens, 32.8% in their twenties, 43.1% in their thirties, 18.3% in their forties, and 2.9% aged fifty or older.

I don’t think I’ve actually ever bought a posh brand item myself, and the only interest I have in them is ensuring I drag wifey away as quickly as possible whenever she sets her eyes upon them! She used to be quite a bit of a brand freak, but she’s mostly recovered now! As I’ve got small wrists, I can’t even wear the average posh watch without it looking far too chunky, not that I’d want to anyway, as Rolex wearers always gives me the impression of being dodgy second-hand car salesmen.
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iShare Inc have once again surveyed CLUB BBQ members, this time to find out about shopping trends on their mobiles. They got 2,270 valid responses to their survey, carried out at the start of September. 60.6% of their respondents were male.

iShare discovered that a lot of people did their shopping from the comfort of their own homes, so dubbed them “Couch Keitais (mobiles)”, which might be rendered in English as “immobile phoners”. On with the figures; note that the figures in most of the tables below have been reported with no decimal places.

First of all, only 9.1% of the survey group (207 respondents) have bought mail-order goods via their mobiles. However, the most popular by far place for shopping was sitting on the sofa at home, with 44.5% of the 207 (92 people) reporting that as where they make their purchases. Next was while on the move, with only 23.1% selecting that.

When asked why they use a particular mobile phone shopping site, the most popular reason, with 34.2% of shoppers choosing it, was that because it’s the same site as usually used from a PC. Conversely, given the choice between a PC site and a sister mobile-based site, 42.2% (of everyone or just mobile shoppers?) would choose to continue using the PC.

I wonder if the full report asks what people think about using a portable PC (or even PDA-sized) and wireless LAN instead?

Now to some of the numbers that have been quoted in detail.

Q: For those of you who have used a shopping site from your mobile, are you on a flat-fee mobile internet use plan?

Yes	43%
No	57%

Q: For those of you who have not used a shopping site from your mobile, are you on a flat-fee mobile internet use plan?

Yes	16%
No	84%

Q: For those of you who have used a shopping site from your mobile, what have you bought?

Clothes	10%
Food	12%
Books	28%
Tickets	21%
Other	30%

“Others” in the last two tables include primarily CDs and DVDs.

This was a multiple answer question, but they have presented the results as a percentage. You have to pay money to find out the real figures…

Q: For those of you who have not used a shopping site from your mobile, what might you like to buy?

Clothes	3%
Food	5%
Books	35%
Tickets	46%
Other	12%

Q: When buying goods from your mobile, how did you pay for goods? If you’ve not shopped how would you want to pay? (Single answer)

	Net Shoppers	Not net shoppers
Together with phone bill	8.9%	31.6%
Credit card	43.8%	26.6%
Convenience store	12.5%	19.0%
Bank transfer	12.5%	8.1%
Others	5.2%	2.8%

BCN, some sort of umbrella organisation for small computer and electronic goods stores, performed this survey where they questioned 2,547 people, 57.2% male, and with an age profile of 14.5% under 30, 32.4% in their thirties, 34.5% in their forties, 13.2% in their fifties, and 5.3% over 60; and a bonus 0.1% unsure of how old. The PC usage history was perhaps also a bit top-heavy in veterans, 17.9% with less than 5 years, 39.8% between 5 and 10 years, 19.7% between 10 and 15 years, 9.4% between 15 and 20 years, and 13.1% over 20 years, which is quite stunning considering the PC itself is barely over 20 years old!
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