世論 What Japan Thinks

MyVoice recently took a look at how Japanese use hotels and other lodgings, in particular what criteria they use for selecting them.

Demographics

Over the first five days of August 2009 13,801 members of the MyVoice internet community completed a private online questionnaire. 54% of the sample were female, 2% in their teens, 16% in their twenties, 33% in their thirties, 29% in their forties, and 20% aged fifty or older.

The last hotel I stayed in was the Westin Awaji, which is a very nice hotel in a great location. One of the criteria we used was me having a point card, and another was being a western-style managed hotel, as the previous night we’d stayed in a Japanese-managed hotel. One big difference was that the Westin had a whole non-smoking floor, the other one had just half a dozen rooms at the far end of one corridor that still had a lingering hint of tobacco clinging to the walls. However, the Westin was disappointing for food, especially the breakfast was not the full buffet one expects from their chains.
Read the rest of this entry »

Following up on beach date FAIL, we have another survey from goo Ranking looking at what people don’t want to see from their partners during travel, for both women discussing their men and men discussing their women.

Demographics

Between the 22nd and 24th of June 2009 1,180 members of the goo Research monitor group completed a private internet-based questionnaire. 58.6% of the sample were female, 10.3% were in their teens, 22.9% in their twenties, 31.5% in their thirties, 19.2% in their forties, 9.6% in their fifties, and 6.4% 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.

My pet hate on holiday is my wife taking far too many photos or videos whenever we visit palaces and the like, photos and videos that we ourselves will never watch again let alone give to someone else. I don’t mind her pinching all the shampoo from the hotel room, but I do mind her rather obsessive behaviour that extends to hiding half-empty bottles so that we’ll get new bottles the next day…

From her point of view, it’s my lack of planning – I’m pretty easy-going when it comes to holidays, so having a schedule makes it seem just a bit too much like work. I don’t know why on earth sleeping with her mouth open figures in the male list!
Read the rest of this entry »

With the Golden Week holidays over today, this will be the final filler ranking survey (they’re always quick and easy to translate!) this time on the holiday theme of what typical Japanese tourist behaviour people end up doing on overseas holidays.

Demographics

Over the 21st and 22nd of March 2008 1,036 people from the goo Research monitor group completed a private internet-based questionnaire. 50.7% were male, 7.0% in their teens, 14.7% in their twenties, 30.1% in their thirties, 27.0% in their forties, 10.9% in their fifties, and 10.2% aged sixty or over. Note that the score in the results refers to the relative number of votes for each option, not a percentage of the total sample.

Although I’ve only done one Japanese group tour to Europe (you have to do it once yourself, just so you know how bad it is!) I think the taking of optional tours was the most common I saw from others. When the tour stopped at Vienna, we’d already ordered tickets for the musical Elizabeth so we went there whilst everyone else headed off on the optional tour.

Even on personal tours, my wife photographs and videos just about everything, which I find immensely dull as we’ll probably never watch the videos again, and seeing the sights through the viewfinder cannot be much fun at all.

The final choice, which I thought might be higher, ordering souvenirs before departure, perhaps needs a little explanation for people who are not so familiar with Japan. Souvenir giving is a highly ritualised event, such that one needs (yes, needs) to buy a small present for just about every friend and acquaintance, often macadamia chocolates, but close friends sometimes actually name what they want. So, rather than fill up one’s suitcase with 20 boxes of nuts or whatever, there are many mail-order catalogues to be had from the travel agent that will deliver the day you return from holiday. I find the whole business extremely impersonal, and would much rather a hand-written postcard that showed me someone took some effort to think of me while they were away, and it’s much more fun for me to write these cards compared to traipsing round airport shops.

Photo from nubui on flickr.
Read the rest of this entry »

Many Japanese hold the dream of retiring overseas (or do they? I must look up data!), so goo Ranking decided to investigate this issue by asking an unspecificed number of the goo Research online monitor group of unspecified ages if they were to retire and move overseas, which country or area would they most like to live in. The fieldwork for this research was conducted on the 22nd and 23rd of May 2007.

Perhaps connected to this, wifey has recently applied to Hilton Grand Vacations Club for us to go along and attend a 90 minute seminar on timeshares in Hawaii in return for 10,000 yen’s worth of food coupons. They are running the seminars every weekend at Tokyo and Osaka, so if you’re particularly bored this summer and don’t mind enduring some hard sell, why not go along and get free cash off them?

If I were to do so, going back to Blighty would seem like the obvious choice, but if we exclude there, New Zealand is the most attractive location, a bit like Scotland only with slightly better weather.

(I’ve just checked my dictionary, and the Antipodes is a rather UK-centric term for Australia and New Zealand)
Read the rest of this entry »

With summer coming up soon and thoughts turning towards travel, NEPRO Japan recently published the results of a survey it conducted on the topic of mobile phones and holidays. Here holidays covers everything from day trips to overseas travel.

Demographics

Over the 10th and 11th of May 2007 3,866 self-selecting users chose to complete a survey made available through the three major mobile menuing systems; NTT DoCoMo’s iMode, SoftBank’s Yahoo! Keitai, and au’s EZweb. 58% of the respondents were female, 3% in their teens, 34% in their twenties, 44% in their thirties, and 19% aged forty or older. As has been noted before for infoPLANT surveys, the self-selecting sample nature tends to attract heavy mobile phone users.

This is a rather disappointing study as a number of questions that I think should be multiple choice are asked as single answer ones, for instance. When we’ve been on domestic travel, we’ve never used our mobiles for anything other than just email or photographs, and international travel packet charges are too high to even contemplate taking a live mobile along, although wifey does take hers as an address book.
Read the rest of this entry »

With Japan’s Golden Week holidays almost upon us, and with the submission deadline for the April Japan Blog Matsuri just 10 days away, I would like to present my entry, another slightly strange from a Western point of view ranking survey from goo Ranking on what people would most like to eat after returning from a foreign holiday. The survey was conducted between the 20th and 22nd of March 2007.

One may note that a number of the entries in the list are actually recently-imported dishes: number 9, curry, is the first obvious one, but Japanese “curry” (stew with a hint of spice, usually) and sticky rice is quite a different experience from a real curry such as one might find in the UK.

This survey might also go some way to explaining why so many Japanese, even those going as far as the International Space Station, find they need to pack a few Cup Noodles in their suitcases.
Read the rest of this entry »

As a sort-of follow-up to yesterday’s survey on holidays involving overnight stays, this time we’ll look at a survey by infoPLANT into both overnight and day return trips. The fieldwork was carried out over a period of six days in the middle of January. Note that the full paid-for survey contains many more questions.

Demographics

1,500 members of the infoPLANT questionnaire panel responded to the survey. The sample was balanced 50:50 male and female in each age group, and exactly 20% in their twenties, thirties, forties, fifties and sixties or older.

I’m surprised (actually, I’m not surprised, really) by the top holiday information source being television travel programs. I remember back in the UK the travel programs would have the staff joining a standard tour, sometimes with family, often staying in middle-of-the-road hotels, and participating in the usual activities that the average holidaymaker might take part in, resulting in a review that I personally could trust; here in Japan the traveller gets the best room, professionaly lit to highlight everything, eat off the top of the menu with the chef or owner hovering over the table, and get the one-on-one guided tour of the sites, declaring everything to be absolutely wonderful, including, no doubt, the brown envelopes filled with unmarked bills from the featured businesses. I know of no travel shows that make any attempt to appear genuine.
Read the rest of this entry »

goo Research recently published the results of a survey they conducted into people’s plans for holidays this year. Over five days in the middle of January 1,082 people from their online monitor group successfully completed a private internet-based questionnaire.

Demographics

The sample was 49.9% male, with 21.0% in their twenties, 18.8% in their thirties, 21.5% in their forties, 17.6% in their fifties, and 21.1% aged sixty or older. It’s good to see a large sample of older people, as I suspect that retired people travel disproportionately often.

I’m off to Europe too this summer, but I’m not sure what will happen regarding the blog; perhaps I’ll just stick it on autopilot summarising or reposting last year’s news? I have zero intention of blogging from abroad, and I doubt if I’ll even bother reading my mail. For domestic travel, I’d love to know how many people plan spending a night in their home prefecture. Wifey and I spend a night a few times a year in Kobe and Osaka (at a proper hotel, not the by-the-hour type!) for no particular reason other than we get a good offer, with both cities within 40 minutes travel time from home. In fact, last month we stayed at Hotel Piena in Kobe on a full board including five course room service deal with quite amazingly good food, especially considering they whipped up some veggie dishes for me at very short notice. We had a small complaint about noise from upstairs, and the manager sent me a nice letter of apology and three 20% off discount tickets!
Read the rest of this entry »

japan.internet.com carried out a survey amongst 1,094 members of the goo monitor group (the split by sex is not recorded, but the text implies that it was all female) to find out how people use internet hotel reservation services. In the surveyed group, 2.1% were teenagers, 25.2% were in their twenties, 39.5% were in their thirties, 24.3% were in their forties, and 8.9% were in their fifties.

According to an as-yet untranslated by me survey last September on how women obtain word-of-mouth (or should that really be word-of-fingertips?) information from the internet, their top genres for picking up the buzz off the internet were make-up, dining, travel and clothes sites in that order, although four in five never added their own two yen to these sites, and just two percent regularly chimed in.
Read the rest of this entry »

I got the following message through another mailing list, so I’ll pass this on to anyone interested out there.

There is a questionnaire that has been authored by Katrin Kalb, a German Master Thesis student of Sophia University. The results of the thesis will be made available to the Japan National Tourist Organization (JNTO) to improve travel and tourism in Japan.

This is YOUR chance to make a difference for future travellers (including you) Make your observations and concerns heard. For a meaningful statistical evaluation, the student needs at least 300 responses, so please help by filling it out (will take 10 minutes) and forward it to people who you think can answer the questions.

Unfortunately the group of people being questioned is somewhat limited: western foreigners living for duration of at least 7 months in Japan (where at least three months should have been passed when completing the
questionnaire). You, or your partner should have a salaried (that is stable) income.

http://www.befrager.de/befragung.aspx?projekt=306

The URL is German, but the questionnaire is in English.

Note that there is also a German version of the questionnaire available. There does seem to be a small prize draw if you leave your email address after completing the survey.