Polling Japanese Students #2: What’s your favorite country in Asia (aside from Japan)?

In this latest edition of Polling Japanese Students, the feature in which I exploit my position as an assistant English teacher to force Japanese junior high schoolers to take a survey, myself and another American asked 25 students to rank 5 Asian countries. The survey was based on a request in the comments section of my previous survey from reader Aekutopia, who wanted me to ask the kids to name their top 5 Asian countries. I had originally planned to simply ask each student to name his/her personal top 5, but since the first few kids I surveyed were incapable of naming any Asian countries beyond China, Korea and Taiwan, I decided I would give the kids a list of countries to rank. After asking a social studies teacher about what countries the kids would be most familiar with, five countries were decided upon: China, S. Korea, India, Taiwan, and Thailand. Here are the results(11 girls and 14 boys):

Graph 1: Number one countries named by the students

Notes: Nobody picked Taiwan or Thailand as their top country. Kids were asked why they liked their top country; [China: food, history, celebrity] [Korea: food (particularly nori and kimchi)] [India: Curry]

Graph 2: Point totals for each country

Notes: Points were added up as follows – 5 points for a 1st, 4 points for 2nd, 3 poinds for a 3rd, 2 points for a 4th, and 1 point for a 5th place ranking. The total doesn’t add up to 375 because a couple kids gave incomplete answers.

Concluding thoughts:
It would appear that in the mind of Japanese junior high school students, countries are represented by their native foods. Since they love Chinese food and Indian curry, those two countries were very popular. Korean food is also well-liked in Japan as well. Nobody chose Taiwan or Thailand, which I can only guess is because not much comes to mind when the kids hear the names of those countries. They probably associated all the Chinese food/history stuff with the mainland and not Taiwan. Thai food is nowhere near as popular as Chinese, Korean and Indian food in Japan, so Thailand and Taiwan were fighting for last place on most kids’ lists. I imagine I would have probably got the same result if I have put the name of any obscure country in place of Thailand or Taiwan. I didn’t separate the results between boys and girls because there was simply no noticable difference between the results I got from both.

Any suggestions for some new survey questions to ask the kids? Please keep in mind that questions about dating are likely to embarass the kids or get ‘yuck, cooties!’ responses from a lot of the kids, and complex questions that start with “why” are probably not going to go over well.

(I’ve already got the results of the Wii vs. Playstation 3 survey, which I will be posting this week.)