世論 What Japan Thinks

japan.internet.com, in conjunction with JR Tokai Express Research, carried out a rather short survey on the use of SNS, or Social Networking Services. The survey was carried out by means of an internet-based questionnaire amongst 442 members from all over the country belonging to their private research monitor group. 58.1% of the sample was male, 33.3% were in their twenties, 37.6% were in their thirties, 24.4% were in their forties, and 4.8% were in their fifties.

According to figures gathered at the end of September of last year, there were almost four million users registered across all the SNSes in Japan; the big ones being mixi and GREE. Note that this would include some degree of duplication, both from people registering in more than one service and from people registering twice. Note also that I have previously translated another survey on the usage of SNSes. However, this survey suffers from a small sample size, in particular Q1SQ2 had only 13 respondents so not much can be drawn from the results.

Personally, I barely have enough time to conduct a real-life social life, let alone a second virtual one!
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Forgive the horrendously punny headline with a rather naff neologism, but MyVoice recently conducted a survey of their MyVoice internet community here in Japan to find out their views regarding Social Networking Services (SNS). 15,537 people, 60% female, completed the web-based opinion poll, with almost four in ten of the respondents being in their thirties.

Speaking personally, I’ve never really been into online communities, and even when I seriously played MMRPGs, I kept friendships at purely functional levels in-game, and although I was more outgoing on message boards, I never moved to private messaging or email, let alone anything more serious. I get the impression that mixi and others do appeal to the demographic that are looking for “anything more serious”, though! It’s interesting that people would much, much prefer to invite real-life friends, though.
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iShare performed this survey at the start of October where 1,525 users (52.9% female, ages from teenagers to those in their forties) of the CLUB BBQ mail service responded about their use of Social Network Services (SNS) and other web-based introduction services. In Japan, the term deai-kei, 出会い系 site, dating-related site, has a slightly dodgy meaning, I think, so perhaps that caused some of the respondents to be more reserved about their answers to the questions. There is also the suggestion of enjo-kousai associated with deai-kei, a Japanese euphemism for child prosititution, basically. SNS is not quite so well-known a term, so there is maybe not yet any particular stigma attached to it. However, I don’t know how much, or even whether or not, of a dating scene there might be at these SNS sites.

Also note that percentages listed to one decimal place are accurate figures, but those without decimal places are read directly off the graphs so are a bit inaccurate. Money also features in many of the surveys, as there are various rumours about gold-diggers and others out to scam people on dating sites.

Q1: Have you used a dating web site service?

Yes	18.7%
No	81.3%

Q2: For those of you that answered Yes in Q1, what was the outcome? (Choose one only)

Met in real-life and became friends	31.4%
Didn’t meet anyone	26.0%
Didn’t meet, but became e-mail friends	19.5%
Met in real-life and became lovers	10%
Met in real-life but was disappointed	5%
It got messy…	2%
Got money	0%

The various Social Network Services like mixi and GREE can be considered as “dating sites” in a rather broad sense. However, without an invitation from an existing member, these SNSes cannot be used.

Those in their twenties are the biggest user groups of SNSes, and of those who have heard about them but not got invitations, 31.4% of men and 38.5% of women have instead used dating sites. It looks as if there are lonely friendless people who are using dating sites for blind dates.

Q3: Which of the following applies to you regarding SNS like Mixi, GREE, etc?

	Currently using SNS	Used to use SNS	Know what they are, but never got an invite	Know what they are, but don’t think I want to use them	Don’t know the term SNS
10-19 year olds	15%	1%	3%	20%	59.7%
20-29 year olds	32.0%	2%	5%	22%	37.1%
30-39 year olds	21%	2%	4%	20%	50.5%
40-49 year olds	12%	2%	6%	20%	60.3%

It seems men more than women want to check out dating sites advertised in the spam they may receive, especially if the risk of fraud and the like from unsolicited mail is mitigated. Also, as men get older, the more likely they are to click on the dodgy links in spam mail; the older you get, the lonelier it is!

Q4: Have you ever clicked on a URL in unsolicited mail that you thought was for a dating site?

	Yes
Men 10-19 years old	14.3%
Men 20-29 years old	20.0%
Men 30-39 years old	20.5%
Men 40-49 years old	26.6%
Women 10-19 years old	3.3%
Women 20-29 years old	7.7%
Women 30-39 years old	9.2%
Women 40-49 years old	6.1%

Q5: For those who haven’t used one, do you want to try a dating site?

	Want to use	If there is no danger, I want to use	Don’t want to use	Can’t really say
Men 10-19 years old	0%	22%	58.5%	20%
Men 20-29 years old	4%	20%	61.6%	15%
Men 30-39 years old	1%	20%	71.2%	12%
Men 40-49 years old	0%	22%	63.9%	18%
Women 10-19 years old	0%	20%	71.4%	15%
Women 20-29 years old	1%	12%	78.1%	10%
Women 30-39 years old	1%	11%	83.0%	7%
Women 40-49 years old	1%	11%	83.0%	7%

Looking at those who have used dating sites, again it seems that loneliness is the main factor. Considering that those in their thirties are the heaviest users, and that is the age people get the urge to marriage, there seems a distict correlation. Speaking personally, most of the dating site spam I get seems more to do with bored housewives and prostitutes, not people looking for marriage!

Q: Why do/did you access the dating site?

	10-19 year olds	20-29 year olds	30-39 year olds	40-49 year olds
Want a lover	9.1%	2.1%	23.9%	7.9%
Want to “play”	9.1%	12.8%	8.5%	11.1%
Lonely	27.3%	4.3%	7.0%	0.0%
Want a mail friend	27.3%	27.7%	25.4%	44.4%
Want to banter with someone	0.0%	0.0%	0.0%	0.0%
Just had some free time	27.3%	31.9%	19.7%	15.9%
Want to share hobbies	0.0%	14.9%	14.1%	17.5%
Want money	0.0%	0.0%	0.0%	0.0%
Others	0.0%	6.4%	1.4%	3.2%

Another fun translation task. I liked how they used さみしい, samishii rather than さびしい, sabishii for lonely, a rather cute girly spelling of the word, even when they were describing middle-aged men.

Mixi is one of the most popular invite only Social Networking Service (SNS) in Japan, apparently, like Friendster et al. in the USA. They are not my cup of tea (just like I’m not really into all this blogrolling and incestuous linking here), but obviously other people like them. There was a report from a workshop at the Social Infomatics Fair 2005 at Kyoto University containing some interesting statistics on the social webs that had built up.

In February of this year, the number of users stood at around 360,000. Note it seems to be over a million now. The purpose of the research was to try to identify what sort of network of relationships had built up between users.

“My Mix” (in Japanese it’s pronounced closer to “My Mick”) is the slang term used to indicate the number of direct friends someone has registered; this would be roughly analogous to one’s blogroll in the blogging world.

According to a researcher named Kikuo YUTA from the Network Informatics Laboratories, 50.8% of the users have four or less people in their My Mix; 23.6% have but a solitary soul (perhaps just the person that invited them?) as a friend. On the other hand, the average length of a My Mix is just under 21.

For people with five or more names in their My Mix, the numbers stack up as follows:

5 to 11 friends	17.1%
12 to 25 friends	24.3%
26 to 40 friends	15.4%
41 to 87 friends	20.6%
88 to 197 friends	10.1%
198 to 1301 friends	2.9%

This adds up to 90.4% – what happened to the other 9.6%, you may very well ask. Well, here the story write-up is very vague (or I don’t understand it, of course), but what has happened is that the above table represents the share of the total number of links for each of the population sizes. This is explained further in the next paragraph.

A large minority of the My Mixers were very tightly intertwined, making them hubs for all the human relationships. Those with over 41 people in their My Mix list made up only 4.8% of the population, but accounted for 33.6% of the links. On the other hand, those with less than five in their My Mix (50.9%) had just 9.5% of the links.

Hmm, isn’t this just data simply derived from the population distribution, or is there a deeper meaning I am missing?

Kikuo YUTA also said that the high density of links in mixi was very rare – usually structure develops over time, but here it came into being almost right from the beginning. “It is the first time in the world such a unique structure has been found”, he said.

Maybe I’m missing something, but I would think that anything invitation-based would tend to have the sort of tight structure that they are describing? Being in Japanese limits the scope for spreading into disparate groups, I would think. Japanese just love being unique, however. Reading ahead I see more explanation… The rest of the article talked about other human aspects of the network, and whilst very interesting, is getting away from the main purpose of this blog, polls and surveys, so I’ll not translate. Also, the Japanese was getting rather hard!