In June 2001, we sent questionnaires to about 5000 people who were registered in the category of Japan of our pen pal service, and who indicated that they are willing to participate in surveys. We received 805 valid responses from Japanese people who live in Japan. As always, over two thirds of the respondents were below the age of thirty, i.e. this survey is in no way representative for the whole Japanese population. However, it shows the trends among the younger Japanese generations.
According to our survey results, there are 2.4 televisions per household. Less than 2 percent of the survey respondents indicated not to own a television at all, while on the other extreme, nearly 20 percent indicated to have four or more televisions at home. A majority of 54 percent responded to have either one or two TVs in their household.
Next, we wanted to find out, how much time the average person watches TV per day. Our results suggest that women spend more time in front of the TV with an average of 112 minutes per day, while men averaged only 90 minutes. As many as 17 percent of female survey respondents indicated to watch more than three hours of television per day compared to only 9 percent among men. The survey results also show that students (average 105 minutes) tend to watch more television than company workers (average 95 minutes).
The most popular time to watch television is, as expected, the evening: 85 percent of survey participants indicated to watch TV regularly in the evenings. About a third of respondents also indicated to regularly watch television in the mornings. While the percentages are slightly higher among women than men for the evenings and mornings, the situation is opposite for the nights: 21.4 percent of men responded to regularly watch television after midnight compared to only 17.6 percent of women. In the afternoon, less than 8 percent of respondents watch television regularly.
Finally, we investigated which programs are most popular: According to the survey results, 77 percent of people regularly watch news, making it clearly the most regularly watched type of program. Variety shows ranked second with 51.8 percent regular viewers, followed by movies (50%), drama series (42%), documentaries (37%), sports (35%), music programs (34%), wide shows (15%) and animation (11%).
Again certain different tendencies between the genders could be observed: sports programs, for example, are clearly more popular among men (49%) than women (21%). Also news programs tend to be more popular among men (82%) than among women (73%). On the other hand, drama series, music programs and wide shows are clearly more popular among women.
Similarly, the results show that entertainment related programs such as music and variety shows are especially popular among students while information related programs such as news and documentaries received much higher percentages among company workers.
