Surprise surprise! That’s hardly earth-shattering news, but a recent report from MyVoice confirms the fact and discloses a few additional details too. What Japan Thinks summarizes the results of this survey.

For the main question, only 3.7% of Japanese said they disliked chocolate to any extent at all. A full 61% like it a lot and another 26% like it to some extent. That was based on a sample size of 14,628, as the whole survey was.

The favorite types included milk chocolate (48%), fresh chocolate (43%), dark chocolate (41%), chocolate with nuts (34%), and truffles (31%). It’s not clear where Pocky fits into this, but 26% prefer treats like Smarties or M&Ms while 22% prefer enrobing chocolate like Kit-Kats.

11% will eat anything so long as it’s made of chocolate. A famous chef once told me not to worry since dinner guests will eat anything so long as there is whipped cream on it. And he meant anything… Probably the principle is similar.

68% have chocolate as a snack, 63% when tired, 56% when they want something sweet, 32% when they are hungry, and 27% when they want something in their mouth (???) Chocolate is consumed at many other times but those are by far the most common responses.

The most common beverages to have with chocolate were coffee (55%). black tea (28%), and green tea (22%). Although 10% have whiskey or brandy with chocolate (a good match), less than 1% have it with sake (probably disgusting anyway).

With Valentine’s Day coming up (already…) maybe these statistics will prove useful, since 60% of females in Japan will be giving chocolate to someone, which makes for a lot of happy fathers, husbands, boyfriends and would-be-boyfriends, at least according to a Japundit report on Valentine’s Day in Japan.

Another report by alexpappas has further info on both chocolate and Valentine’s Day, and greetings from Hello Kitty and her special chocolates have been offered, although someone commented “You’ve ruined Valentine’s Day with this thread…” But this is premature — there is still over a month to go!

It’s New Year’s Eve! Hope all Japundit readers have a Happy and Prosperous New Year. There are lots of contests and lists and top tens around this time of year, so why not us too? What do you think was the best, most memorable, enlightening, funny, or inspiring post you saw on Japundit this year? Here are some I remember, but you all probably have different ideas:

• Kanji Becoming a Lost Art? that discloses some shocking findings from a survey by the Agency for Cultural Affairs.
• Envy: Don’t Leave Home Without It which quoted a brief passage from Helmut Schoeck’s Envy: A Theory of Social Behavior and stimulated a lot of comment.
• Oyogu Hone — Swimming Bones with disgusting commentary and a video clip of the technique.
• Translating Beauty or Japanese Girls Must Stop Being Kawaii, Marie Mockett’s thoughtful commentary on Riyo Mori’s win in the Miss Universe pagent.
• Step Right Up–You Go First… which elicited a number of comments about the horrors of colonoscopy and worse.
• Toujours Tingo about the new book which draws on more than 300 languages exploring areas where English fails us.
• The Tokyo Yamanote Halloween Train Rides into a Sea of Adversity leads to everything about the legendary and notorious Yamanote Halloween Train.

You might also have a favorite devilishly clever title or witty comment. All the commenters and contributers keep Japundit alive by providing the content that we all come back for — but the editor Edward Chmura deserves a special vote of thanks for always filling in the gaps when commenters and contributors sometimes get busy, or tired, or lazy…

Well — who’s perfect? But all in all, looking back over a year of posts and comments here — there is a lot and a lot of it is really good. We are all to be congratulated! Yay!

Love and Honor (2006) is a great movie that should remind you of Twilight Samurai  – not too much “action” in it — but how it really was. I should say that this is not as good as Twilight Samurai but still pretty good and well worth your 1.5 hours of time.

But, what else is there apart from love and honor? At least not in in jidea geki times… Today it is probably more like “my job and my french fries” or something like that, but in those days was a whole different ball game — especially for the samurai. According to a long-winded but detailed summary in IMDB:

Shinnojo, a low level samurai, lives with his pretty, dutiful and loyal wife Kayo. He has come to find his position in a castle as a food-taster for a feudal lord to be boring and pointless, and talks about opening a kendo school open to boys of all castes where he can teach the use of the sword. Before he can act on his dream he becomes ill with a fever after tasting some sashimi made from shell fish, but an investigation reveals that the poisoning was not due to a human conspiracy, but a poor choice of food out of season. After three days he awakes but finds that the toxin from the food has blinded him. Kayo is summoned by Shinnojo’s family to explain how the couple will survive. His uncle laments that he no longer knows anybody with influence in the castle, and asks Kayo if she knows of anybody. She relates how Toya Shimada, the chief duty officer in the castle and a samurai of high rank, offered to help and they tell her to act upon his offer of assistance. A message from the castle brings the good news that Shinnojo’s stipend of rice will remain the same, and for life but his aunt tells him that Kayo was seen with another man. He has Tohuhei, his faithful servant, follow her. Kayo notices that she is being followed, and although Tokuhei offers to cover for her, she reveals to Shinnojo that Shimada offered to help but with a price, shown when he forced himself upon her. He then solicited two additional trysts by threatening to tell Shinnojo about the first. An enraged Shinnojo divorces her and orders her out of his house. When it is revealed to him that Shimada had nothing to do with maintaining his stipend, but that it came out of gratitude from the lord of the clan himself, Shinnojo seeks to renew his skill with the sword as a blind man to avenge the dishonor of Kayo. Through Tokuhei he sends a message to Shimada to set up a duel, with the additional message to not underestimate him. The two samurai meet at the stables near the river to decide their destinies.

What will happen! This YouTube trailer doesn’t appear to be EXACTLY accurate and involves puppets, but is not a bad summary anyways. You can view the whole thing (including the thrilling conclusion and whether or not Kayo ever comes back again — I’m hoping she will…) on Crunchyroll:

That isn’t engrish–that’s what director Gen Sekiguchi called this 2004 movie. And it stars Tadanobu Asano, Sonny Chiba and Vinnie Jones! The producers describe it like this: “A wacked-out surrealist comedy from the farthest reaches of the imagination, the film almost defies description, coming on like a fantastical version of Pulp Fiction if directed by Takashi Miike while tripping on acid.” This is what amazon.com had to say:

Survive Style 5+ is the kind of film that is rarely made because it is so out of the box that producers and financiers have no interest in taking a chance on it. It’s difficult, in fact, to even categorize this film into a genre. It contains dark comedy, but also elements found in action, horror, science fiction, and drama. In this bizarre film, five seemingly independent stories somehow come together: A man kills and buries his wife only to find her quite alive when he arrives home–over and over again; A salaryman, with a wife and two kids, sees a famous hypnotist only to be permanently turned into a man who thinks he’s a chicken; An advertising executive loses it and comes up with some of the most vulgar commercials ever seen; A gang of young criminals find out they have homosexual tendencies; An English assassin (played wonderfully by British soccer player Vinnie Jones) looks for new clients.

You can watch this with subtitles at Crunchyroll, or buy it at amazon.com (where the same customers also tended to buy Ichi the Killer and Oldboy) or probably rent it somewhere. In any case, I would say this is a must-see–I enjoyed it a lot! Here is a trailer from YouTube:

Did you think that you can get practically anything you want from vending machines in Japan? Well just about. According to What Japan Thinks, “Vending machines in Japan serve many purposes; not just the obvious machine-based vending of items, but also some collect money for charity, others provide free drinks in the event of an earthquake, and even help you escape from crime!”

But not everything is currently available in vending machines. A goo Ranking survey disclosed what things Japanese would most like to try once if there was such a vending machine close at hand.

The unanimous favorite was stamps at 100%, followed by medicines (65%), umbrellas (56%), fried potatoes (54%), and sanuki udon (53%). Other popular items included supplements (48%), nuts and other beer snacks (47%), pizza (46%), bento lunch boxes (46%), and sushi (46%).

Some other items that Japanese consumers would like to see in vending machines include mobile phone chargers ((42%), hot spring water (40%), mangas (36%), miso soup and rice (29%), toast (27%), fresh flowers (17%), business cards (15%), and o-higen supplies (14%).

Some of these machines seem to exist already, like the toast machine below, but maybe are not numerous or handy enough. But there must be many ideas for marketers in this survey?

Japan.internet.com reported on a survey conducted by Cross Marketing into Internet scariness. According to What Japan Thinks, over three-quarters of Japanese (77%) find Internet either “scary to some degree” (69%) or “very scary” (8%).

The main reasons for finding Internet scary include Viruses, hacking, and other attacks (81%) and Leaking of personal data (81%) followed by Libel (51%) and Internet addiction (19%). The Internet scariness situation seem to be worsening, since 66% find it as scary as ever and 20% even scarier than last year.

While terror related to leaking of personal data and especially libel seem a bit anal, worry about viruses is pretty commonplace. But as they say: “With decent virus software and just a little common sense, viruses can be almost completely avoided, although running things like Explorer and Outlook does make life a little more interesting on line…”

In fact, just using Firefox, Gmail, and OpenOffice, along with one of the many free virus programs, would make Internet a lot less scary place?

“Dentistry in the uncanny valley” is what Pink Tentacle calls its report on Simroid — a robotic dental patient with an eerily realistic appearance. And that’s pretty accurate. Well, a trip to the dentist can be like descending into the uncanny valley anyways, but this is worse.

Making her debut at the 2007 International Robot Exhibition in Tokyo, Simroid is actually a sister of Actroid (who has got somewhat better than when first invented a few years ago). Here is part of Pink Tentacle’s description and some video of Simroid in action along with other inhuman participants at the exhibition:

Designed primarily as a training tool for dentists, the fembot patient can follow spoken instructions, closely monitor a dentist’s performance during mock treatments, and react in a human-like way to mouth pain. Because Simroid’s realistic appearance and behavior motivate people to treat her like a human being, as opposed to an object, she helps dental trainees learn how to better communicate with patients … she has something the Actroid does not — sensitive teeth. Thanks to a mouth loaded with sensors, she knows when her dentist-in-training makes a mistake. And to express her pain, she grimaces, moves her hands and eyes, and says, “That hurts.”

Which next-generation DVD format are you planning to buy asks a recent survey summarized by What Japan Thinks? It’s a vexed question, since this is the next generation and everyone is going to want to buy new TVs, players, and DVDs to get that “high definition” experience–aren’t they?

There is much confusion between the standards, Blu-ray vs HD DVD, with consumers delaying their purchases to avoid being stuck with another Betamax. The jury is still out and a bit has been written about this on Japundit with a lot elsewhere (like here, here, and here). What does the average Japanese consumer think?

Well, 8.2% have already bought into HD DVD and 4.7% Blu-ray — but 87.1% are still sitting on the fence. In fact, 63% haven’t decided yet which format they will buy. But 28% have already decided on Blu-ray and only 9% HD DVD.

While HD DVD was the early leader, it looks like Blu-ray will finally prove to be the winner–this is about what most of us anticipated. In fact, 28% of those surveyed think so too, compared to 9% who are still rooting for HD DVD. Still, 60% say they don’t know which format will preval.

The big criteria that will be used to inform upcoming purchases of high definition gadgets include price (70%), features (48%), title selection (40%), and hardware selection (35%). Title selection is probably more important than they think, since you will recall that Betamax died because there were no movie titles to play on it.

Right now the major studios are lining up on each side–mostly Blu-ray’s side and Blu-ray is a Sony project so guess what format most of the new movies are going to be in (exclusively in most cases)?

This 2004 Thai movie is technically within the scope of Japundit but definitely relevant (maybe) because it reminds me of Gozu for some reason. Probably a far-fetched reason. But I saw this the other day and was greatly impressed. You will like it!

Movies from Thailand used to be kind of ho-hum but the director Wisit Sasanatieng is obviously a genius and Ong Bak I and II were OK weren’t they? I am still brought to tears when thinking about the poor mama elephant eaten by yuppies and turned into jewelry. Crunchyroll (where you can view this one free) says this about it, via IMDB:

Pod is a man without a dream. He’s a country bumpkin who comes to work at a tinned sardine factory in Bangkok. One day, Pod chops off his finger and packs it in the can, prompting him to go around looking for his lost finger at various supermarkets. The incident convinces him to change his job, and Pod becomes a security guard at a large company. There he meets Jin, a lanky maid who carries a mysterious white book around even though she cannot read a single word written in it. The aimless Pod has a crush on Jin, a dreamy girl who dreams that one day she’ll be able to decipher the meaning of the white book. In this bright, colour-splashed world of director Wisit Sasanatieng, Bangkokians can grow tails and a dead grandmother can come back as a chatty gecko to deliver a few life lessons to her grandson. It’s a world where innocence is so precious and yet impossible to preserve. The unusual love story between Pod and Jin is set against the playfully ironic portrait of Bangkok, the city that offers false dreams and real disillusionment.

Remember to click “Bigger” to get a larger (although slower, picture). Good movie! It has a nice happy ending after much uncertainty and weirdness. Here is the trailer:

Japundit has drawn reference to this site before. But if no one is looking at Japanese and other Asian movies (I saw The Maid the other day there…) on the Crunchyroll site, then that is a shame. It’s free and if you choose “bigger” the streaming video will be about twice as big as YouTube and quite good.

The cadillac solution is to pay them about $4/month to be a member and the extra bandwidth and size is definitely worth it. After all–what does it cost to go to the movies downtown? I don’t think Crunchyroll is getting rich, but they do have bills to pay.

Veoh.com is a good alternative but there you must join formally and download their Veoh player–maybe it’s worth it though–but there are lots of good Asian movies on that site.

As always, you find some things on one or the other–like this gem on YouTube. Still, the best montage of Studio Ghibli stuff with Beatles soundtrack is only on Veoh.com. Multiple sources is best.

But for an example here is a Crunchyroll rock video by Chage and Aska from Ghibli Studios about their angel movie–which sadly I have not seen and don’t even know what its title is. But you can figure out the story pretty well from this vid. I must say I didn’t like this video at first and found it repetitive–but it kind of grows on you. Be sure to click “bigger” to start!

Anyway–there are lots more great movies and anime on the Crunchyroll site so do check it (them) out!