世論 What Japan Thinks

Come examination time, many Japanese students seem keen to follow superstitions to bring them a pass; finding out the most popular was the subject of a recent survey from goo Ranking.

Demographics

Over the 20th and 21st of December 2010 1,128 members of the goo Research online monitor group completed a private internet-based questionnaire. 65.4% of the sample were female, 11.9% in their teens, 17.2% in their twenties, 30.2% in their thirties, 23.2% in their forties, 10.0% in their fifties, and 7.4% aged sixty or older. Note that the score in the results refers to the relative number of votes for each option, not a percentage of the total sample.

Come exam time and the shops are filled with sweets with good luck-related themes. Kit-Kats are a perennial favourite as their name sounds like “Definite Win”; corn snacks called Carl become U-Carl, as it sounds like “to pass an exam”; Mr Donut this year had five-sided (sounds like “to pass an exam”) doughnuts with rather corny puns, and so on.

Picture from Fluoride’s memories on flickr.
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DISMDRIVE Research released their 81st Ranking Research results, and one of these was a look at what folklore or superstitions people worry about. 4,597 people replied with the single (I think) superstition that they pay most attention to. 2,383 of the respondents, or 51.8%, were male.

This is a fun one for me, as the folk traditions here are often very different from home; I have never heard here of walking under a ladder being unlucky (probably because all ladders get coned off and have two guys waving batons to steer you round the obstacle), urinating on a bee sting seems a very popular (but totally ineffective) antidote, and PET bottles lined up outside houses to scare off cats don’t work.

Note that effect of black cats crossing your path is…umm, I’m not sure any more! Back home in Scotland it was good luck (I think – my memory’s going!) but in Japan it’s bad luck, according to this survey. I remember the Tom and Jerry cartoons where they’d have a black cat causing bad luck, so perhaps that’s the American belief. This random web page says that Japan is good luck, so I am now totally confused!
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