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My dear fellow Johnny’s fans,

my heartfelt thank you goes out to all of you, or at least the 4,077 of you who were kind enough to sacrifice a few minutes of their time to take part in the Johnny’s Fandom 2009 Year End Survey. It was a great experience for me, not only because I learned a whole lot about the Johnny’s fandom, but also because I learned a lot about how to conduct a survey. A lot depends not only on the questions you ask, but also on how you ask them. I’m sure I’ve made a mistake or two, and there are a couple of things I’d do differently if I had to devise that same survey again. But overall I think it was a huge success, and there are a couple of results that I’m sure a lot of you will find rather interesting. So let’s have a look at them.

Who got you first interested in Johnny’s?

Now here’s a great example of how the way you ask a question can totally screw up your results. There are probably as many ways one could get into the Johnny’s fandom as there are Johnny’s fans, and the question “who?” can be answered in many more ways than the 12 the poll offered. If it was Ya-Ya-yah who first sparked your interest would your answer be “a Johnny’s Jr group or individual” or would you choose “other” and type in “Ya-Ya-yah”? And to make things worse, the “who?” question could also be answered by saying “a friend in 5th grade” or “my aunt who lives in Japan”.

Apparently a lot of people got confused by this. 196 chose the “other” option and typed “Ya-Ya-yah”. But technically Ya-Ya-yah was a Junior groups so it’s probably safe to say that a lot of the 185 “Junior group or individual” replies were also people that would have voted for Ya-Ya-yah if that had been an option.

Anyway, here are the detailed results:

*other answers include: Ya-Ya-yah (29), Ikuta Toma (25), Yamashita Tomohisa (22), Shuji & Akira (19), Hey!Say!7 (15), various TV dramas (14), and a number of individuals (between 1 and 6 votes each).

Which is your favorite Johnny’s Jr. group?

First big surprise here: a huge number of people doesn’t give a rat’s ass about the next generation. D:

*other answers include: whichever group Kyomoto is currently in (78), Ya-Ya-yah (36), FiVe (22), Musical Academy (14), M.A.D (12), Veteran (10), Hip Hop Jump (7), and a number of strange answers like KinKi Kids, Arashi, NYC boys, and NEWS. Ikuta Toma is also going strong in this category – even though he’s not a Junior group - with 9 votes.

How do you usually get your Johnny’s stuff?

It’s a rather pleasant surprise (I think) to see that the vast majority of fans (77%) actually support their favorite artists by buying stuff at least every once in a while. ^^

If you buy Johnny’s stuff, where do you buy? (check all that apply)

Another surprise for me here as I was pretty sure that CDJapan was way more popular than YesAsia. I guess I was wrong.

*other answers include Play-Asia (37), and a vast number of answers like friends / relatives in Japan, and very many people buy their stuff directly from Johnny’s Shop or other places whenever they’re in Japan.

One other answer was “CD Japan because it’s Oricon approved (unlike YesAsia)”.

Apparently that’s still a very common misconception. Both CD Japan and YesAsia count towards the Oricon charts as they state on their websites:

And if you don’t believe them check Oricon. They should know best.

Where do you live?

Not a lot of surprises here I guess.

Have you ever been to Japan?

Almost three quarters of us haven’t.

Have you ever attended a Johnny’s event (play, musical, concert etc.)?

For this question I think it’s more interesting to look at the total numbers than the percentages. 12% doesn’t sound like much, but 462 is a pretty decent amount of people (at least if you imagine them all in one place). Back in 2005 I was at a Ya-Ya-yah concert at Yokohama Arena, and even though I didn’t personally check all 15,000 people there I think it’s safe to say that I was the only gaijin. If you go to any kind of Johnny’s concert nowadays you will probably run into lots and lots of foreign fans. Times are changing, and that’s good.

How old are you?

I know that a lot of people think that thanks to Hey!Say!JUMP there must be a huge number of 12-year-olds in the Johnny’s fandom. Well, think again. 52% of the fandom are between 15 and 20 years old, only 8% are younger, and 40% are older. Like Johnny’s idols themselves Johnny’s fans appear younger than they are. >.o

How many years have you been in the Johnny’s fandom?

This is probably one of the biggest surprises of the whole survey. More than half of the people out there have been fans for 2 years or less, and three quarters have been fans for 3 years or less. Amazing.

When I first looked at these figures I thought that can’t be right, can it? But it can. Johnny’s as a whole is gaining new fans at an alarming rate. You can see it if you look at the number of members the big LJ communities have. Unfortunately I have only one reference number that goes back 20 months. Back in April 2008 I wrote a blog post titled The Good Mayor (a parable on the Johnny’s fandom, a very good one if I may say so myself, you should go and read it), for which I looked up the number of members kattunlove had at the time. It was 6,618. That number has almost doubled to a little over 13,000 now. But even in the few days since I posted this survey the LJ communities of the 5 most popular groups gained a total of more than 500 new members. So yeah, the international Johnny’s fandom has virtually been exploding in the last 2 years or so, and I think that’s great.

What is your gender?

This result is rather strange because a couple of months ago I asked that very same question to the readers of my blog. Back then we had 10% boys (97 votes), and I would have thought that the result would be similar if you look at the entire fandom. Or could it be that all Johnny’s fanboys except 3 read my blog? o.O

So you like Johnny’s. But do you like Johnny?

I do realise that this is a very black-and-white question and that life isn’t all black and white. Some people may not have an opinion about Mr Johnny-san because they don’t know enough about the guy or because they simply don’t care. But if pressed for an answer it seems that the fandom is… pretty much split in half.

Note to self: make a more detailed survey one day that’s all about Johnny Kitagawa and people’s perception of him

Which is your favorite debuted Johnny’s group?

This poll received the most votes of them all, and while the #1 spot was pretty much a no-brainer it was only 31 votes (0.76%) that made the difference between #2 and #3.

*other answers include Tegomass (6), Nakayama Yuma with B.I.Shadow (2), Hikaru Genji (1), Shonentai (1), Ya-Ya-yah (1), Nishikido Ryo (who isn’t really a group all by himself) (1), Domoto Tsuyoshi solo (1), and 6 votes from people who couldn’t make up their mind.

I know what you’re thinking. You’re thinking “Hey!Say!JUMP are so strong because all of Kamichan’s readers voted for them“. I beg to differ, if I may. If all my readers would have voted for Hey!Say!JUMP they would have beaten Arashi by several hundred votes.

You see, I posted this survey to the 10 most popular Johnny’s communities on LiveJournal a full 12 hours before I even mentioned it to the readers of my blog. Almost exactly half of the ~4,000 votes came in in these first 12 hours, and to be honest I could have closed the polls at that point because all votes  that came in after that only affected the total numbers, but not the percentages. So yeah, why do NEWS get only 576 votes even though their LJ community has some 14,000 members (over 3,300 more than Arashi‘s)? I don’t know. But I’m open to suggestions.

Anyway, that’s it for now. Thanks again to everyone who took part in this survey. I hope you enjoyed it every bit as much as I did.

Again, please read my blog post The Good Mayor, especially if you’re interested in fandom politics. Or just have a look around and browse through my ~2,000 other posts, and if you like this place (for whatever reason) please subscribe.

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