If anything I think Rakuten and Yahoo.co.jp are the outliers. They look more or less the same as they did years ago. I think they stay the same because they don

If anything I think Rakuten and Yahoo.co.jp are the outliers. They look more or less the same as they did years ago. I think they stay the same because they don't want to upset longtime users. Maybe like how Craigslist keeps the same old school layout because people are familiar with it. My argument is that, if all this stuff about Japanese people liking information density were so true, then why do new websites not look like Yahoo.co.jp? Nobody is making web portals anymore. Those sites are relics of the past. Also, I can find plenty examples of modern webpages besides the two I linked. How about Mericari, who have taken over the second hand goods market from Yahoo Auctions (http://www.mercari.com http://www.mercari.com)? How about Gunosy, a news aggregator who have no doubt stolen tons of traffic from Yahoo (https://gunosy.com https://gunosy.com)? How about the bank AEON (http://www.aeon.co.jp http://www.aeon.co.jp)? How about the Post Office (http://www.post.japanpost.jp/index.html http://www.post.japanpost.jp/index.html)? The Yelp of Japan, Tabelog, looks almost exactly like Yelp.com (https://tabelog.com/ https://tabelog.com/ - the English version looks less modern, click on 日本語 if you get redirected). Edit: Consider also that Yahoo.co.jp and Rakuten are an amalgamation of like 100 different services. Yahoo has news, weather, train info, maps, games, forums... If you look at the subsections, they don't have that 90s Web Portal kind of feel: https://games.yahoo.co.jp https://games.yahoo.co.jp