Why Japanese Web Design Is So Different

I think it is also hard to be aware that you are in a trend when you are living it. Many of the things that pass as "clean design" at the moment are just a trend, and I promise you that they will look dated soon. This always happens. It happened with 80s hair, with 90s androgyny and it will happen again big text, extreme minimalist, big poetic photo backgrounds and so on.

One of these points is way off the mark. I&#x27;ll add my own two cents.<p><i>Language Barrier - The web and most of the programming languages which drive it were designed by English speakers or western corporations and hence the majority of documentation and educational resources are also in English. Although much gets translated this still causes a delay in new technologies and trends being adopted.</i><p>1. Many of the Japanese coders I&#x27;ve met have put in the effort to learn English. They might not be able to carry fluent geopolitical conversations, but they do tend to have enough chops to read API docs and skim code. Most of the Japanese professionals I&#x27;ve met, in any trade, are <i>ultra professional</i>, and will do whatever it takes to stay on top of their craft, including learning English if needed.<p>2. It&#x27;s easy to forget that some of these programming languages, notably Ruby, are actually from Japan. As recently as a few years ago, some of my favorite resources for Ruby were in Japanese, out in front of English.<p>3. Go to a Japanese bookstore and check out the section for programmers. More recent web languages&#x2F;tech, like node.js, are not well represented. But then look to the next shelf and you&#x27;ll see something like Unity stacked to the ceiling. It could be that Japanese coders would rather work on different kinds of projects, spend their time learning new tech in those domains instead of the web, and only see the web as a means to an end. I wouldn&#x27;t consider this a &quot;language barrier&quot;, but rather a difference in priorities.

There are good points made here. I suspect there&#x27;s also a bit of herding going on.<p>In Germany, for example, it&#x27;s pretty easy to find major websites which are fixed-width, left aligned and looking dated. There&#x27;s no real geographic or historical reason for how it is, other than the fact that their neighbours have a similar style.<p>In a similar vein, many startups have similar designs. Even on the Internet, where you can connect with anyone in the world, there&#x27;s a lot of tending towards those who are closest to you.

It&#x27;s not just Japan or asian websites. The further away you get from the silicon valley bubble, the more sites look like they are from the late 90&#x27;s. It&#x27;s not really even location specific, more how tuned in developers are to the bay area style. You can look at local news papers in the US for example, or even government sites. I think part of the reason is that there&#x27;s a lot of design talent in the bay area, and the further removed one is from being involved, the less people care about things like flat design and having lots of space and less content, etc.

&gt; &quot;Walking around Tokyo, I often get the feeling of being stuck in a 1980′s vision of the future&quot;<p>I&#x27;m British, living in the US, and I&#x27;ve always felt this way about America. I recently heard from an American friend that he felt exactly the same when visiting Britain.<p>Not sure what to make of it, but it&#x27;s interesting!

A few more points:<p>- Compared to English, Japanese text can cram more information into an easily-skimmable space, but typing is slower, so cluttered, link-rich interfaces have an advantage. This may well explain why Yahoo! Japan&#x27;s portal is so much more popular than Google&#x27;s.<p>- I can well imagine that, in the minds of the staid gerontocrats who maintain an iron grip on Japanese corporate life, a website is merely a modern version of those &quot;me! me! me!&quot; brochures that get shoved in my mailbox every day. So it&#x27;s natural that they would expect it to look like one.<p>- Japanese culture is not nearly as minimalist as its made out to be in the West. Minimalism has its place, of course, but in commercial spaces its all about competing for attention, to the point of sensory overload.

Good morning from Tokyo! Sites like Rakuten have more to do with in-house politics than Japanese design trends or a love for information density. <a href="http://bm.straightline.jp" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;bm.straightline.jp</a> is a better guage of where he Japanese web <i>design</i> trends are headed. As you can see, there&#x27;s a lot of echoes of flash heavy sites and flat one page designs, but little which represents the special kind of chaos large bottom up created sites like Yahoo or Rakuten. They&#x27;re more akin to the million dollar website than anything else.

Is there a breakdown somewhere of two distinct groups of human activities:<p>Design where correctness is defined as optimizing some metric goal, like designing an electronic circuit for maximum performance at a fixed price, or the strongest bridge pylon for a fixed cost or perhaps for a fixed concrete volume.<p>vs<p>Design where correctness is defined as a large group of people trying to imitate each other at an optimum distance as close as possible without introducing legal difficulties with accusations of direct copying and not failing at user interaction much worse than anyone else.<p>Web design and most software UI is obviously almost entirely in the latter category.<p>A huge source of disaster and trouble is people using language and attitudes from one category in the other category.<p>I&#x27;m not sure what to google &#x2F; wikipedia for... this must be well trodden ground after a couple millenia of ladies high fashion clothing design, for example.

The anecdotal cultural &#x27;explanations&#x27; here are a little ridiculous without some real data to reference.<p>&gt; Logographic-based languages... actually allow Japanese speakers to become comfortable with processing a lot of information in short period of time &#x2F; space<p>not true - article with references: <a href="http://persquaremile.com/2011/12/21/which-reads-faster-chinese-or-english/" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;persquaremile.com&#x2F;2011&#x2F;12&#x2F;21&#x2F;which-reads-faster-chine...</a><p>&gt; Japanese doesn’t have italics or capital letters which limits the opportunities for adding visual punch that you get with latin alphabets<p>Italics and capital letters have little or nothing to do with how &#x27;Western&#x27; web layouts are generally created, and are far from the only way to create emphasis or hierarchy in text.<p>&gt; Language Barrier... Although much gets translated this still causes a delay in new technologies and trends being adopted<p>Is the claim that the Japanese are technologically behind the rest of the world? Why would web development&#x2F;design be different than almost every other technical industry? This sounds much more like surface intuition than considered insight<p>&gt; Risk Avoidance<p>This might help explain why Japanese websites look similar to each other, but not why they look different from &#x27;Western&#x27; websites. You could make a similar claim about big sites like Microsoft and Yahoo that have copied the look an feel of Google, or the mass of slightly-modified Bootstrap-based &#x27;Western&#x27; sites. Risk avoidance&#x2F;copying is universal - it does not explain the difference between Japanese and non-Japanese websites.<p>&gt; Consumer Behaviour - People require a high degree of assurance, by means of lengthy descriptions and technical specifications, before making a purchasing decision<p>Evidence, or is this just a personal observation?<p>&gt; Advertising – Rather than being seen as a tool to enable people Japanese companies often see the web as just another advertising platform to push their message across as loudly as possible<p>Haven&#x27;t Google, MS, Yahoo, Facebook, Twitter, <i>everyone</i> demonstrated that this is the goal of what they&#x27;re doing? It&#x27;s not culturally unique.<p>&gt; Urban Landscape<p>This has some research to back it up - Nisbett, Masuda, Shah, others<p>Other claims also read as casual inductive observations that don&#x27;t hold up to much scrutiny. There probably are very interesting reasons why web design appears to be so culturally influenced, but this article doesn&#x27;t really elucidate much.<p>&#x2F;end rant

Ok, there&#x27;s some truth to this article, I&#x27;m not going to say the author is all wrong, but look at Amazon.com&#x27;s home page and imagine you couldn&#x27;t read English.<p><a href="http://cl.ly/image/2i0r0G091U0P" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;cl.ly&#x2F;image&#x2F;2i0r0G091U0P</a><p>It would look <i>really</i> jumbled, incoherent, and poorly architected. Given that you <i>can</i> speak English, it&#x27;s relatively easy to digest the nav, suggested books, ads, etc.<p>My guess is that there are cultural expectations driving their design choices (particularly in color scheme). But the biggest difference is probably the fact that their type appears impossibly complicated. Nothing more.

I guess the cultural aspect is a big reason here. Everyone who has ever watched japanese television or has seen the nightlife of major japanese cities will be overwhelmed by the amound of screaming, blinking lights and information, it&#x27;s quite different from the western point of view.. :)

Semi-related story. I was doing a fan site for Final Fantasy XIV (mmo from Square Enix). It&#x27;s interesting to see how things have to behave differently when a tech company has to deal with Japanese and English.<p>For tweets from their marketing department, they would write a tweet in Japanese first which would fit into a single tweet, but would spill over between 3 tweets when translated to English.<p>Within the FFXIV game, they had a chat box (like chat in many MMOs). The input field for typing in text only allowed 80 or so characters. This was fine for Japanese, but for English it was extremely limited. They fixed it soon after release, but it was something the dev team didn&#x27;t realize as they were all Japanese.

In the first picture I saw border navigation panels and a main center content area. Why is that &quot;too many columns&quot;? 1998 was a good year, web pages contained more information, not just text boxes super sized freakishly, low content, just large massive items on screens which have shrunk vertically the past several years which is far more of a conundrum to me. Making use of columns seems to make more sense now than it did in 1998. If anything, the Japanese are ahead of the curve. If screen sizes start growing vertically again then I could see your point.

The Japonic devotion to craftmanship does not typically extend into the virtual world. The culture certainly places an emphasis on physical goods.<p>I disagree in general with his statement, but Nobel Prize winner in physics Hideki Yukawa said that &quot;The Japanese mentality is, in most cases, unfit for abstract thinking, and takes interest merely in tangible things&quot;.

I feel like the author wrote this article with a bias that Western websites are better and more aesthetically pleasing because it&#x27;s simpler. But those are all subjective matters and Asian users probably prefer what they have. I come from a Korean background and I visit many different Korean and American websites daily, including the ones mentioned in the article. While some of the reasons given may seem plausible, non of them were actually convincing. There isn&#x27;t really a solid reason why Asian websites look like that. That&#x27;s just how it was and users are familiar with it. Some people like Hacker News because it&#x27;s simple, while some people don&#x27;t like it because it&#x27;s too simple. There&#x27;s no better or worse, it&#x27;s just a preference.<p>Also, those patterns are not unique to Asian websites. If you go to cnn.com or msn.com, they&#x27;re not that different either.

I&#x27;m surprised this article got so many upvotes. It&#x27;s a lot of anecdotal evidence, and even the anecdotes and websites they pointed out don&#x27;t support the point that much.<p><a href="http://yahoo.com" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;yahoo.com</a> and <a href="http://yahoo.co.jp" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;yahoo.co.jp</a> both have similar, tight aesthetic with a lot going on.<p><a href="http://youtube.com" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;youtube.com</a> (view in incognito if you are signed into an account <a href="http://nicovideo.jp" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;nicovideo.jp</a> are very similarly information-dense. I&#x27;d say Youtube&#x27;s layout is even more jumbled with all the different column widths as you go down the page.<p><a href="http://www.yomiuri.co.jp/" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.yomiuri.co.jp&#x2F;</a> and <a href="http://newyorktimes.com" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;newyorktimes.com</a> are both very information-dense, with a lot of text on the page.<p>And these are the cherry-picked examples that <i>this very article</i> chose.<p>Here are some other sites that are among the most popular in Japan:<p>- <a href="http://naver.jp" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;naver.jp</a> - Clean, Google-like simplicity<p>- <a href="http://www.ameba.jp/" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.ameba.jp&#x2F;</a> - Very common splash page style front page, and inside is a very busy social-network-like page, but not really that much different from Facebook, except the ads are a bit more tastefully done.<p>- <a href="http://www.nifty.com/" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.nifty.com&#x2F;</a> - Yahoo-like portal<p>Do these sites really look that different to you? If your answer is yes, I&#x27;m going to guess that you probably don&#x27;t read Japanese, and that it being an unfamiliar jumble of characters is what makes it look weird&#x2F;different&#x2F;intimidating. Look past that, though, and you&#x27;ll see that the similar sites ended up at a similar conclusion, even if aren&#x27;t mirror images.

Even though there may be a cultural difference, it&#x27;s not enough. Look at Modern Japanese architecture. There are tons of different styles. Some clean and minimal, others maximal and extremely busy.<p>Japan is a very pluralistic country and there are going to be all kinds of different styles and personalities there in any field you choose.<p>My feeling is that big companies take a long time to change design. In the US, sites like the new york times, Dell, yahoo, Ebay, Techcrunch, zappos all had, at one point recently, really old-looking or just plain bad websites.<p>Even amazon is busted. Try searching for something and navigating to the 10th page of your search results. amazon is a wasteland in terms of usability and design.

There&#x27;s actually some truth to this that is missing in the article. I had lived in China for awhile and it was so incredibly difficult to navigate Chinese websites. I&#x27;m using China as an example because the web designs are similar.<p>There was some study done awhile ago within China that I can&#x27;t find the link to that compared the designs of a complicated site like sina.com.cn with text and images all over the place and compared it with a much simpler design that practiced white space and minimalism. It showed that the Chinese actually preferred complicated designs over simple designs. Having lived in China, this makes sense to me because of the culture. Simplicity and white space is not very well practiced. The &quot;East Meets West&quot; graphic by Yang Liu is probably a good example of some of the cultural differences.

&quot;Different&quot; is a very diplomatic way of saying it. Probably better to just call it what it is: wrong. The link seems to be dead so I haven&#x27;t even read the article but I do have some personal experience in the matter.<p>While there are a bunch of reasons for why it is the way it is, I think a big part of it is the goddamned Keitai. For a lot of Japanese, the only way they ever accessed the web was via their mobile phone. Until smartphones, this meant a very very dumbed down experience. Sadly, even now that smartphones are prevalent, there&#x27;s still an attitude of &quot;Let&#x27;s wait and see if this smartphone fad keeps up for a while...&quot;

Most of this simply has to do with lack of disruption. Almost all sites tend to add clutter over time because new things need to be added and some stakeholders don&#x27;t want old things removed. Sometimes the only way to get clean new design is to start over. My guess is that competition has been less fierce and&#x2F;or has been won (rigged?) by incumbents more often than it has been in the US, leading to slower iteration and acceptance of less-than-ideal design by consumers.<p>Enterprise versus consumer apps is the same story - lack of disruption and consumer choice leads to decisions that make sense only to the middlemen.

I see it like this:<p>I regularly used a fax machine at my job in Japan, and personal computers were not prevalent in my workplace. Businesses are very conservative and don&#x27;t want to stand out.<p>In Japan, print is still the dominant way of spreading information. I always figured that the best designers ended up as print designers—and my web developer friends used Dreamweaver.<p>Not only that, CSS is very inconsistent with its english: &quot;visibility: visible&quot; OK! so then the opposite is &quot;visibility: invisible&quot; right? No. It&#x27;s hidden.

Try searching .io domains regionally. You&#x27;ll find Japan has modern designs out there.<p><a href="https://www.google.com/search?as_q=&amp;as_epq=&amp;as_oq=&amp;as_eq=&amp;as_nlo=&amp;as_nhi=&amp;lr=lang_ja&amp;cr=countryJP&amp;as_qdr=all&amp;as_sitesearch=.io&amp;as_occt=any&amp;safe=images&amp;tbs=&amp;as_filetype=&amp;as_rights=" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.google.com&#x2F;search?as_q=&amp;as_epq=&amp;as_oq=&amp;as_eq=&amp;as...</a>

So I don&#x27;t know what to make of <a href="http://apple.com/jp" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;apple.com&#x2F;jp</a><p>Is it just cultural ignorance on Apple&#x27;s behalf or do Japanese people secretly appreciate this design style (given the popularity of Apple products in Japan)?

To disagree with one of the smaller points in the article: Uniqlo&#x27;s website is not a great counterpoint to the trend of bad&#x2F;outdated web design. I like their clothing, but their website (although modern looking) is one of the worst user experiences out there.<p>Search is an afterthought, and if you want to get to something at the bottom of a category page, have fun wading through several dynamic sub-category load times.

To my knowledge, there isn&#x27;t just a mobile <i>legacy</i>- the majority of Japanese still use a phone as their primary internet access device.

One of my guess is that &quot;applization&quot;(I mean a web service becomes more and more like an app) has its role to play in current simple&#x2F;clean&#x2F;flat web design trend. A more app-like web service is more likely to require the app visual design. So this could be an interesting perspective to examine the development status of web design in different parts of the world.

404 - HN Effect :(<p>&quot;Apache&#x2F;2.2.8 (Ubuntu) mod_jk&#x2F;1.2.25 mod_python&#x2F;3.3.1 Python&#x2F;2.5.2 PHP&#x2F;5.2.4-2ubuntu5.27 with Suhosin-Patch mod_ssl&#x2F;2.2.8 OpenSSL&#x2F;0.9.8g mod_perl&#x2F;2.0.3 Perl&#x2F;v5.8.8 Server at randomwire.com Port 80&quot;<p>If this is your server, you shouldn&#x27;t be giving so much information away. Make would-be attackers work a be at enumerating you.

Japanese web design tends to be broadly reflective of Japanese product packaging: cram as much textual info as will fit into limited space.<p>They have a U.S.-sized population and nearly U.S.-sized industrial base running inside a California-sized archipelago. They&#x27;ve gotten good at making the most of space.

Bakemonogatari, watch an episode of that and you&#x27;ll see how creative Japanese text and design can be. Unfortunately the websites don&#x27;t follow that trend, and anime is certainly a creative outlet with significant freedoms. Would be nice to see a renaissance over there.

I find it interesting that a site that is posting about cultural trends is itself following one of the current western web site trends:narrow central column of text with tons and tons of empty white space on either side...

Well, their adult content is also pretty different. Think about it.

Interesting article. I really like Microsoft&#x27;s metro design language but i often wonder how well it works out for asian languages.

I would just like to say that Xelom &amp; j03w make the best argumets in this entire thread...

Wow. So ethnocentrism. Much condescent.

<i>&gt;Windows XP &amp; IE 6 – although the number of people using ancient Microsoft software is rapidly decreasing there are still a fair number of people using these dinosaurs, especially in corporate environments. Enough said.</i><p>Wow, this is like saying their clothes look different from ours because their sowing machines are too old. Their hair styles are different because their scissors have longer blades, their food is different because they use chopsticks - ETC.<p>Their web design is different because they are different culturally. Their tastes and preferences are stylistically different. just because their gardens are liked in the west, does not mean we like all of their stylistic preferences. This blog post is completely wrong IMO. &quot;Enough said&quot;.

From that one screen shot he provides it looks like the reason the Japanese do it differently is because they don&#x27;t assume their visitors are driven off by masses of text. I wish more websites I use were stuffed full of information (or what I assume is information) like that.