newZjapan

I have to say, Japan being listed as the top blogging country in the world is a little crazy. I can only imagine that the unnamed American company that did the survey knows nothing about Japan and worded the question poorly enough to construe the results.

I’m not trying to detract too much, but you see if you read the description of the types of blogs involved, you’ll read that:

• 30.9 percent like diaries listing daily events
• 25.7 percent were community types in which people were looking for acquaintances with similar interests
• 25% were also hobby or interest related blogs

It sounds to me that a lot of people listed their MIXI diaries as “blogs”, or even their activity on mixi or other communities as “blogging”. I would really love to see the Japanese wording of the questions they used in the surveys. Part of me thinks they may not have even used the word “burogu” for blog, but “nikki” (diary) instead. I’d like to have a little more information about this survey.

Calling Japan the top internet blogging company becomes even dicier when you look at the other facts listed in the article:

• under 20% of blogs (or about 3 million blogs) were updated at least once a month

(that means over 80% of this incredible number of blogs are updated less than once a month, right?)

• 12% of the updated blogs were spam blogs

(meaning that 2.4% of the total blogs or hundreds of thousands of blogs were spam blogs)

Now we have that maybe 17% of all blogs in Japan are active, meaning posting at least one time per month. 30.9% of those seem to be mixi diaries, and another 25% seem to be community based (if we can trust this unnamed American company’s data.

(Not that they would falsify, but just that the questions, methods, sample are not described so it’s hard to be sure how accurate the research is. We don’t even have a standard of deviation for these percentages.)

So what does this give us? It seems to show that Japanese people may not be blogging any significant amount more than people in any other country. Certainly blogging as a profession has not progressed as far as it has in the United States.

If we start with assumptions of technological savvy, it’s easy to jump from there to conclusions of technological expertise or even superiority. The problem lies in differences in the way the internet is used and thought of in the US and Japan.

As someone who has to do research on a variety of topics in both languages everyday, I have to say that there are tons more useful information in English than in Japanese. Someone might say that’s obvious, but the data in this article seems to indicate that Japanese is one of the dominant languages on the net. I say there is a large Japanese presence, but it’s generally business related and doesn’t really provide users with much useful information. This is something that we Japanese language bloggers have to work on in order to move the Japanese language portion of the net onward and upward.

Technoratiのタグ blogging in japan, blogs in japan, japanese blogging

Today’s commentary is inspired by an article about use of Nintendo DS in eSchool News. The article talks about a Nintendo DS tie in to a textbook being used at Tokyo’s Joshi Gakuen (sic). Here is the story as presented by Reuters.

Tokyo Joshi Gakuen should be commended for trying some new things, but the part that troubles me most is that they are doing the drills with Nintendo in the classroom.

I love the idea of using new and fun technologies in the classroom. However, it needs to be balanced with real teaching, and a human touch. I think the best thing teachers can do with technologies such as Nintendo DS is use them to get students using English outside of the classroom. If all the kids have a Nintendo, and enjoy using the technology, what better way could there be to get them studying at home?

One of the great dangers presented by technology in the classroom is for teachers to rely on the software to be the teacher. Japanese education is way too textbook reliant as it is. Now the teacher can stand at the front of class and say, do Level 2 and I’ll give you a sticker.

Because the start up screen will show what levels a student has accomplished, the Nintendo work can be given at home as a supplement to the actual classroom teaching. When students come in, they can show their teacher the levels they’ve accomplished in just a minute or two. Allowing the teacher to interact with them and actually TEACH for a while.

There are also some really great Nintendo DS programs for pre-schoolers looking to learn English or improve their Hiragana skills like the Anpanman Hiragana Classroom or the Thomas the Tank Engine Japanese, Math, and English.

The point is that I worry that the technology being used here is just going to be another way to keep kids busy while not teaching them.

Technoratiのタグ Nintendo DS, teaching English in Japan, TESOL

At about 5:35 pm, in Niigata a snake caused a black out in about 1,190 locations for as long as 2 hours in some places. The snake died of electrocution related injuries.

A representative from the Tohoku Electric Company commented that the snake, which had worked its way into a plastic safety covering on the wires was probably looking for some food.

Around 2:55 pm on June 30th, trains in Ibaraki were halted for nearly two hours.　Some trains were as much as an hour and forty-five minutes late affecting approximately 2,600 communters.

The reason? Snakes. A 1 meter long dead snake was found in the overhead wiring. In the same station another snake caused a 2 hour blackout.

A representative from JR East was reported as saying that they weren’t sure if there was a nest of snakes somewhere in the station, but because there have been blackouts on consecutive days, they were going to have to think of something to do about it.

The culprit was a Japanese rat snake similar to the one shown above.

A poll done by Nepro Japan, a huge mobile products company, shows that 88% of people in Japan use their cell phones while in transit.

Here is a link to the Japanese description of the poll (pdf).

The sample of 4,614 people consisted of 41% male and 59% female respondents. 42% of the total were in their 20s, 37% were in their 30s.

The report asked whether people used their mobile phones while in transit. The sum of the positive answers showed that 88% of people used their cell phones while on the move. The majority of positive answers were “sometimes” and “it depends”.

When asked when they most often use their cell phones the breakdown was:

• 32% walking
• 29% while driving their personal car
• 13% on the train
• 6% on their bicycle.
• 3% in a taxi
• 3% miscellaneous
• 2% on the bus

• just under 13% responded that they don’t use their cell phones while in transit

Bear in mind that this question was “When using your cell phone in transit, when do you use it most often?”, so most of the people probably use their cell phones in more than one of the above situations.

When asked what they are most often doing on their cell phones in transit,

• 38% said talking on the phone
• 29% said email or text messaging
• 5% said looking at the time
• 5% said internet news, weather, and traffic information
• 3% said blogs or mixi
• 3% said games
• 2% said other

• to this question 12% responded that they do not use their phones in transit

The poll also covered current laws. There are laws that use of a cell phone while driving is punishable with fines up to 50,000 yen ($500 or so). This poll asked whether there should be　bylaws calling for fines for use of cell phones while riding a bicycle.

• 44% responded that they strongly agree
• 20% that they agree
• 14% somewhat agree
• 11% don’t care either way
• 3% somewhat disagree
• 2% strongly disagree
• 1% disagree
• 5% said they were unaware that bylaws could be made

When asked what people thought about laws pertaining to mobile phone use in transit,

• 32% responded that laws should be slightly more strict
• 31% said that laws should be strict
• 29% said the current laws are sufficient
• 5% said that they are a little too strict
• 2% said that the laws were unneccessary
• 1% said tha the laws were much too strict

I love it when a society breaks existing laws while saying that the laws are just and should in fact be even stricter. This poll done by Nepro Japan, by the way was excellently done. Even if you don’t read Japanese please feel free to take a look at the pdf of the report on their homepage. It’s really well done, in fact it’s one of the best done polls I’ve seen in Japan. Easy to read, easy to understand, so good job to you Nepro IT and Nepro Japan.

This yet further evidence that facebook needs a mobile presence to compete with mixi. Mobile apps on facebook might even be the deciding factor if kids could play games with each other through facebook on their cell phones while chatting you might have something. I’m pretty sure this is possible because some of the new cell phones allow users to watch one-seg tv while doing email or surfing the internet. Pretty amazing stuff.

Full disclosure, the cell phone in the pictures is the one I use, the W52T Toshiba cell phone for AU KDDI. It’s an older model now, but I have no complaints about it at all!

Technoratiのタグ mobile phone use in japan, nepro japan, mobile phone traffic laws