Polling Japanese Students #4: What foreign country would you like to visit?

For this edition of Polling Japanese Students I asked 46 second year junior high school students the following question: “What foreign country would you like to visit?”

Here are the results:

Boys

Girls

All Students

I was very impressed by the variation of responses. I had expected culturally dominant English-speaking nations to do pretty well, and America/UK/Australia got a fair share of responses. However, I was very suprised to find that Italy was very popular. I was trying to get as many responses to the survey as possible, so I didn’t have time to ask each student their reasons behind their selection. I did have time to ask the last few kids for their reasons, which were the following: Major League Baseball/wanting to see New York/Disney World for the USA, interested in Rome/seeing the world’s smallest country(Vatican City) for Italy, and the pyramids for Egypt. What could be the other reasons for Italy’s popularity? The Da Vinci Code? Soccer Teams? A desire to eat pizza without corn and mayonaise on it? Anyone care to offer some insight into why Japanese kids are interested in Italy?

[Previous editions of Polling Japanese Students:
-Polling Japanese Students #3: PlayStation 3 vs. Nintendo Wii
-Polling Japanese Students #2: What’s your favorite country in Asia (aside from Japan)?
-Polling Japanese Students #1: PSP or DS? China or South Korea?]

As always, I am looking for new questions to ask the students, so please post some ideas in the comments section! Since I have to keep each conversation to about 30 seconds to a minute to allow as many students as possible to get their mandatory English conversation points for the day, short simple questions are the best (Yes/No, X or Y, multiple choice would work out well). Stay tuned for Polling Japanese Students #5, in which I will post the results of a surprise geography quiz I gave the kids!