Japanese cities have become a haven for people who don’t feel comfortable shopping in malls or malls themselves.
But not everyone is happy with the new norm, as a recent survey found that 70% of Japanese were unhappy with shopping in places where they didn’t feel safe.
In a survey conducted by the Tokyo-based Japanese retail firm Mizuho, about a quarter of respondents said they felt uncomfortable walking into malls where they did not feel safe, while 28% said they were more worried about the safety of the store than their own.
Mizuho has conducted the survey in Japan since December.
It is the latest to look at the feelings of Japanese people about shopping in cities such as Tokyo, Osaka, Fukuoka and Yokohama.
The survey asked 1,000 people in a wide range of industries how they felt about the shopping environment in their own cities.
The survey included questions about how people felt about how much money people were spending at shopping centers and how many shops there were.
The top five cities in the survey were:Tokyo, with nearly 1.5 million people;Osaka, with 985,000;Kobe, with 890,000, and Nagoya, with 615,000.
The bottom five were:Osaka and Fukuoku, with 535,000 and 508,000 respectively.
“The shopping experience is better in Tokyo, where people tend to have less problems,” Mizuhos president, Hirotaka Yamamoto, told the Wall Street Journal.
“In Osaka, there are more problems.”
In Tokyo, nearly half of respondents felt that the shopping experience in shopping centers was “good” or “excellent” and about a third felt that it was “not bad”.
In Osaka and Fukuzoku, about three-quarters of respondents indicated that they were satisfied with the shopping area.
In Fukuoshi, only 28% of respondents rated shopping in shopping malls as “good”, while in Tokyo nearly 60% of the respondents felt the same.
In Nagoya and Osaka, only 35% of those surveyed said shopping in the shopping center was “bad”, compared with 60% in Fukuori and Fukukura.
The study found that the Japanese are very concerned about the possibility of the country’s future as a global leader, with more than half of those polled saying that they felt that a world power would not have the best future.
“I think there is a sense of unease that we will be in a position where we can’t be confident in our own security,” said Tomoaki Nakashima, head of research at Mizuhoi.
“We can’t just rely on the system and we will always be vulnerable,” he added.