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Why Japanese Web Design Is So Different (2013)

183 points by zdw 5y ago

von_lohengramm 5y ago
> 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. Man, this didn't age well. Or rather, I really hope that it comes true sooner rather than later.
- shadowofneptune 5y ago
  We do appear to be in a quite long-lived moment for graphic design. Looking at past trends, a common theme appears to be alternating between the maximalist and minimalist Technical Limitations → Skeuomorphism → Current "flat" design trends Art Nouveau → Bauhaus and Contemporary → Postmodernism Perhaps we are due for a maximalist wave in five years' time.
- innocenat 5y ago
  Personally, I already find Bootstrap 2 website very dated so there's that.
- toyg 5y ago
  > 90s androgyny I think you meant 70s androgyny, surely - don't make Baby Bowie cry...
ulzeraj 5y ago
> Walking around Tokyo, I often get the feeling of being stuck in a 1980’s vision of the future Osaka is probably where you'll feel most like you're in an 80s cyberpunk movie. Try Doutonbori in Osaka or Shin Sekai at night. There is an outdoor from a Blade Runner scene that's still there intact in Doutonbori (Glico). The atmosphere is very Willian Gibson-y.
suction 5y ago
Let's not beat around the bush: In Japan, "UX" as a discipline is almost non-existent. In Japan, marketing emails are not even required to have an "unsubscribe" link at the bottom. Which all has to do with Japan being barely post-feudal. No Japanese consumer would dare to question or criticise a famous Japanese corporation for their website design or practices. It's only OK for foreign companies like Amazon. It's all top-down, basically. The gerontocratic leadership of these corporations barely think of internet sales as a necessity, they just budgetize it minimally against their will. There are a few exceptions like Uniqlo, Muji, etc. but those are only possible because they also want to do business outside of Japan and therefore are forced to adopt "unjapanese" concepts. Meanwhile the most important device in Japanese households still is not a laptop, but a fax machine.
- KTallguy 5y ago
  There are kernels of truth in here, like the unsubscribe link not required by law. But there are many huge Japanese internet based companies, like Zozotown, that are extremely savvy at their UX experience and are extremely metrics driven. Not to mention the recent surge of internet based cellular providers that don’t have a brick and mortar storefront. Meanwhile the fax machine anecdote is about ten years old at this point. Most Japanese purely rely on mobile devices these days.
  - Tor3 5y ago
    > Meanwhile the fax machine anecdote is about ten years old at this point. Most Japanese purely rely on mobile devices these days. My wife's small business included a fax, but it didn't get much use after around 2014-2015 or so, I think. The next couple of years you could occasionally hear a call to the fax machine but it was always just some random ad spam. We let it all go to /dev/null. Nowadays her work space is rented out to a small service firm and they don't use a fax at all as far as I know. Internet and phone services were super important to get set up though.
- softveda 5y ago
  Funny you say that, but Uniqlo a Japanese owned fashion brand and quite popular in Australia has a fantastic modern e-commerce website.
tudorradubarbu 5y ago
I remember this article! So great!
alpaca128 5y ago
> People require a high degree of assurance, by means of lengthy descriptions and technical specifications, before making a purchasing decision I'd say it's astounding that this is not considered normal and people put up with this extremely low standard of inconsistent product descriptions that apparently made multiple passes through translation software and are riddled with errors. I don't think it's unreasonable that I want to know what I'm buying.
johnnyanmac 5y ago
>*Consumer Behaviour* – People require a high degree of assurance, by means of lengthy descriptions and technical specifications, before making a purchasing decision – they are not going to be easily swayed by a catchy headline or a pretty image. The adage of “less is more” doesn’t really apply here. >*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. Websites ends up being about the maximal concentration of information into the smallest space akin to a pamphlet rather than an interactive tool. I think these cultural differences (if true) are a very interesting a -> b situation. adverts seem to work almost too well in western cultures so the focus revolved around removing them from view (adblock), and the battle became about ways to go around these technologies. If this is truly a trend, it sounds like asian cultures just create a natural filter, and their language allows ads to just... advertise their entire pitch instead. Get straight to the punch instead of clickbaiting. Completely tangential, but this does explain the phenomenon of media in japan where the title just seems to be a plot summary instead of a title. If you can fit the synopsis on the spine of a book or on a ticker board, why not?
marcodiego 5y ago
You think Japanese web design is different? Take a look at their TV shows: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qaxG-Wc8kCU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qaxG-Wc8kCU
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- crooked-v 5y ago
  The one at 7m30s looks basically identical to a bit that shows up on Jimmy Fallon pretty regularly with celebrity guests.
bitwize 5y ago
I freakin' love Japanese web design. I think the Japanese just favor the old "info dump" style of web page, as opposed to here where web pages are supposed to function as either advertisements or substrates for advertisements. For an example of what this looks like in English, check out Hitoshi Doi's web pages, which are still up in more or less their original form from the mid-late 90s. I learned basically everything I know about Sailor Moon from him back in the day: http://www.usagi.org/doi/ http://www.usagi.org/doi/
- bombcar 5y ago
  I wonder if prolonged experience with a written language that can condense quite well (and go in other directions that just left to right) is a factor. I prefer old “data dump” websites even in English - much better than whatever the current “hero image” design we have now where we do about five words per ten inches it seems.
  - oefrha 5y ago
    Gosh I hate hero images so much. Wasting anywhere between 30%-100% of the above-the-fold space on an often completely meaningless stock photo or illustration with a loose connection to a keyword — who the fuck likes that?
    - RuleOfBirds 5y ago
      Users do. I spent a whole summer A/B testing an app's landing page to get 10+% more conversions. Over 50 experiments, the biggest win was having a hero image. Its actual content didn't matter as long as it was a photo and featured humans. And the more screen space it took the better. Probably different for different markets and apps, but yeah from my experience users love em.
      - oefrha 5y ago
        I'm talking about content websites, e.g. news sites, not marketing sites like app landing pages.
makeitdouble 5y ago
Comparing apples to apples, Rakuten pages don't seem much different to me than Amazon or eBay, or AliExpress for instance: - https://event.rakuten.co.jp/campaign/supersale/?l-id=search_browse_pc_header_top https://event.rakuten.co.jp/campaign/supersale/?l-id=search_... - https://www.amazon.com/gp/goldbox?ref_=nav_cs_gb https://www.amazon.com/gp/goldbox?ref_=nav_cs_gb - https://www.ebay.com/e/row/shotime-ohtani https://www.ebay.com/e/row/shotime-ohtani Japanese design can be wild and very different, but for anything with a very clear purpose, it will usually end up looking a lot like any other European or US page serving the same purpose.
- lmm 5y ago
  Big companies' web design seems to have gotten a bit westernized lately, but I think there's still a higher density on Japanese pages. E.g. compare https://www.kuronekoyamato.co.jp/ytc/customer/ https://www.kuronekoyamato.co.jp/ytc/customer/ with the same company's same page in English https://www.kuronekoyamato.co.jp/ytc/en/ https://www.kuronekoyamato.co.jp/ytc/en/ . Or compare https://www.nta.go.jp/ https://www.nta.go.jp/ with https://www.irs.gov/ https://www.irs.gov/ .
  - tecleandor 5y ago
    Yeah, while some designs have softened a bit seems like in a lot of the great sites the classic Japanese design remains. In the C2C second hand market, Mercari is a somewhat modernized design: https://jp.mercari.com/ https://jp.mercari.com/ while the classic Kakaku is a great info dump that I love specially because it isn't banner heavy: https://kakaku.com/ https://kakaku.com/ The thing I hated from a lot of Japanese web sites is they relied a lot in images for formatting and lay out, and put a lot of text in those images, difficulting the reading or translation of those sites for foreigns and people with visual impairment. But also Yahoo is quite different there ( https://auctions.yahoo.co.jp https://auctions.yahoo.co.jp https://www.yahoo.co.jp/ https://www.yahoo.co.jp/ ) and major electronics retailers still keep very dense designs ( https://www.biccamera.com/bc/main/ https://www.biccamera.com/bc/main/ https://www.yodobashi.com/ https://www.yodobashi.com/ )
  - makeitdouble 5y ago
contextfree 5y ago
My impression is also that the American web design trends from the late 00s~early 10s are a lot more prevalent in Japan these days than they were in 2013, look at note.com for example: https://note.com/ https://note.com/
LeoPanthera 5y ago
An interesting distinction is that all Japanese (and Chinese, and Korean) fonts are monospace. Unlike western writing, all Japanese characters are exactly the same width. This is the reason for the so-called "full width" characters, to fit western writing into the same character boxes as Japanese characters. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Halfwidth_and_fullwidth_forms https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Halfwidth_and_fullwidth_forms
- mushyhammer 5y ago
  Korean uses non-monospaced punctuation, spaces and numbers though, it’s not fully-monospaced like Chinese and Japanese https://ko.wikipedia.org/wiki/%EC%9C%84%ED%82%A4%EB%B0%B1%EA%B3%BC:%EB%8C%80%EB%AC%B8 https://ko.wikipedia.org/wiki/%EC%9C%84%ED%82%A4%EB%B0%B1%EA... Japanese also has monospaced numbers but maybe they’re not super common. https://ja.wikipedia.org/wiki/%E3%83%A1%E3%82%A4%E3%83%B3%E3%83%9A%E3%83%BC%E3%82%B8 https://ja.wikipedia.org/wiki/%E3%83%A1%E3%82%A4%E3%83%B3%E3...
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
- level3 5y ago
  Not all fonts are monospace. For example, on Windows you have MS PGothic and MS PMincho, which are the proportional versions of MS Gothic and MS Mincho.
- throwaway984393 5y ago
  I came here just to talk about how much Chinese and Korean fonts are not nearly as uniform as Japanese. Go into a 7-11 in China or Korea, and the prices are often written by hand. In Japan, they're the same printed font everywhere. In China and Korea, there may be those "On Sale! Only 5 yuan this week!" kind of add-on signs with different colors and fonts/sizes. In Japan, it's just the item name and price, black and white, one size. As a foreign traveler, Japan makes everything uniform and easy; even if things are different (and they often are) they're very approachable. China and Korea do not have the same approachable-ness for a random Westerner.
dang 5y ago
Related: Why Japanese web design is so different (2013) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25148942 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25148942 - Nov 2020 (207 comments) Why Japanese web design is so different (2013) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16254569 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16254569 - Jan 2018 (153 comments) Why Japanese web design is so different - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8975735 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8975735 - Jan 2015 (6 comments) Why Japanese Web Design Is So Different - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6718067 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6718067 - Nov 2013 (129 comments)
- foxhop 5y ago
JetAlone 5y ago
I love that Shimadzu ad with the DeLorean in the Edo period later into the article. https://randomwire.com/wp-content/uploads/japan-back-to-the-future.jpeg https://randomwire.com/wp-content/uploads/japan-back-to-the-... 江戸時代から科学の子ども。 "From the Edo period, science's children." My translation here may not be super great - it's backed up by looking up and seeing that the Shimadzu Corporation has always made instruments for educational scientific measurement and was founded in the Meiji, 1875, which is only in the decade after the end of the Edo period.
- lmm 5y ago
  科学 is science, not tuition.
  - JetAlone 5y ago
    Ah, I misrecognized the Kanji 「科」as「料」, sorry. Editing now. Makes a lot more sense this way. 「料学」gets translated to "fees" which I took to be "tuition".
    - malikolivier 5y ago
      Never heard such a word as 料学. Tuition is usually called 学費.
      - JetAlone 5y ago
        You're right, 学費 is a better word than the one I mis-recognized. In my defense, there is a book titled "やさしい料学", and I found a small handful of other instances through a search.
        deleted 5y ago
        [deleted]
        whym 5y ago
        > やさしい料学 It seems like that's also a typo or scanno of 科学. Aside from the one letter, everything else about that book matches the bibliographic information of another book whose alternative title (or subtitle) is "やさしい科学": http://webcatplus.nii.ac.jp/webcatplus/details/book/isbn/9784384160154.html?txt_isbn=9784384160154 http://webcatplus.nii.ac.jp/webcatplus/details/book/isbn/978...
Lamad123 5y ago
Looks like Yahoo from 2003!
foxhop 5y ago
Hey zdw great post, somebody os going g to need to create me an executive cheat sheet of it. u know less is more in zen. <3
Hardik_Shah 5y ago
Densely packed text, a busy layout, tiny low-resolution images, cute characters, and the use of flash animation are some of the distinguishing features of a Japanese web page. These features that distinguish Japanese websites are due to a variety of factors that are linguistic, cultural, and technical in nature.
- fouc 5y ago
  I always wondered if part of it was due to japanese smartphones.
  - selcuka 5y ago
    That is discussed in the article.
friedturkey 5y ago
I’ve come to prefer Japanese web design over western design in general. It can be messy at times, but you don’t have endless pop ups asking you to sign up for their “newsletter” ad spam that is sold off to third parties(nobody reads those—your stats are fraudulent and people only register because they think it’ll end the pop ups), endless cookie pop ups, random bot support chats for things that would never need it, “Take me to the new design!” pop ups that lead away from a functional page to absolute garbage, h u g e white space for zero reason, random “login with Google!” pop ups for a basic-ass text page, social media buttons, and so on. Japanese web design feels like walking into a casino, but western design feels like having a dump truck emptied on you.
- 5350-uiop-1130 5y ago
  >Japanese web design feels like walking into a casino, but western design feels like having a dump truck emptied on you. perfect analogy i think in general they have more of a "if its not broken dont fix it" mentality whereas in the west we seem to be "move fast and break things"
- tsss 5y ago
  As someone who works on newsletter popups I can tell you that they do, unfortunately, work quite well. Hardly any other measure translates so easily to increased sales.
  - astura 5y ago
    Same with asking for upvotes and subscriptions on YouTube. It's so annoying but it works so well.
- granshaw 5y ago
  Umm, those things have nothing to do with web _design_, but are rather a function of market dynamics
  - friedturkey 5y ago
    White space and pop ups aren’t part of design? That’s a very strict definition. Design is also merely a function of market dynamics, hence why it changes with trends and not to improve function.
judge2020 5y ago
Some of their examples have changed since this was written in 2013, for example Niconico is effectively a bunch of flexbox now[0], the only remnant possibly being the search bar being separate from the navigation bar. Rakuten[1] is arguably less cluttered than Amazon's front page. Yomiuri[2] looks like msn.com but in Japanese. 0: https://www.nicovideo.jp/ https://www.nicovideo.jp/ 1: https://www.rakuten.co.jp/ https://www.rakuten.co.jp/ 2: https://www.yomiuri.co.jp/ https://www.yomiuri.co.jp/
franklampard 5y ago
……They are just behind on UIUX
- fouc 5y ago
  I think UIUX is culture & context & device dependent. For example, Japanese had smartphones long before iPhone/Android phones got any significant market share.
  - franklampard 5y ago
    just look at most of the mentioned websites now. Most of them resemble US counterparts now.
bryanrasmussen 5y ago
That first image reminds me of a lot of ecommerce sites in 2004. And even so I think I can find lots today that probably still look like that, although with some Western language and not Japanese. Maybe color scheme a bit different. What I'm saying is, the first image covering the screen when reading why Japanese web design is so different looks like a lot of web design I have seen that was not Japanese.
usrbinbash 5y ago
Compared to the over-crufted, over engineered, designed-for-phone, low-information-density, cr4p I get served on many "western" websites, where I am happily invited to download a gazilion MiB of adware and feel my phones battery running hot just to access a website, I prefer the asian design philosophy.
- suction 5y ago
  Where exactly do you see "Asian design philosophy" on Japanese major websites? Also, what exactly do you think of as "Asian design philosophy" in the first place?
- Tor3 5y ago
  I'm reading a few Japanese newspapers online these days (their English sections, mostly), and it's so much easier to read than nearly all of the online newspapers in my own country. No narrow fixed-size space in the middle of the page (is this meant to be read only on phones, portrait mode, by youngsters able to read with their nose pressed into the screen?). Proper pages, no endless scrolling. Flows nicely to fill out my browser window. No clutter. Easy to read, and easy to come back to and re-read something. In Europe a lot of the online news web pages makes me feel I'm reading a low-quality low-cost dirty mag from the seventies sold from under the counter, as far as design is concerned.

183 points by zdw 5y ago

> 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. Man, this didn't age well. Or rather, I really hope that it comes true sooner rather than later.

shadowofneptune 5y ago
We do appear to be in a quite long-lived moment for graphic design. Looking at past trends, a common theme appears to be alternating between the maximalist and minimalist Technical Limitations → Skeuomorphism → Current "flat" design trends Art Nouveau → Bauhaus and Contemporary → Postmodernism Perhaps we are due for a maximalist wave in five years' time.
innocenat 5y ago
Personally, I already find Bootstrap 2 website very dated so there's that.
toyg 5y ago
> 90s androgyny I think you meant 70s androgyny, surely - don't make Baby Bowie cry...

ulzeraj 5y ago

> Walking around Tokyo, I often get the feeling of being stuck in a 1980’s vision of the future Osaka is probably where you'll feel most like you're in an 80s cyberpunk movie. Try Doutonbori in Osaka or Shin Sekai at night. There is an outdoor from a Blade Runner scene that's still there intact in Doutonbori (Glico). The atmosphere is very Willian Gibson-y.

suction 5y ago

Let's not beat around the bush: In Japan, "UX" as a discipline is almost non-existent. In Japan, marketing emails are not even required to have an "unsubscribe" link at the bottom. Which all has to do with Japan being barely post-feudal. No Japanese consumer would dare to question or criticise a famous Japanese corporation for their website design or practices. It's only OK for foreign companies like Amazon. It's all top-down, basically. The gerontocratic leadership of these corporations barely think of internet sales as a necessity, they just budgetize it minimally against their will. There are a few exceptions like Uniqlo, Muji, etc. but those are only possible because they also want to do business outside of Japan and therefore are forced to adopt "unjapanese" concepts. Meanwhile the most important device in Japanese households still is not a laptop, but a fax machine.

KTallguy 5y ago
There are kernels of truth in here, like the unsubscribe link not required by law. But there are many huge Japanese internet based companies, like Zozotown, that are extremely savvy at their UX experience and are extremely metrics driven. Not to mention the recent surge of internet based cellular providers that don’t have a brick and mortar storefront. Meanwhile the fax machine anecdote is about ten years old at this point. Most Japanese purely rely on mobile devices these days.
- Tor3 5y ago
  > Meanwhile the fax machine anecdote is about ten years old at this point. Most Japanese purely rely on mobile devices these days. My wife's small business included a fax, but it didn't get much use after around 2014-2015 or so, I think. The next couple of years you could occasionally hear a call to the fax machine but it was always just some random ad spam. We let it all go to /dev/null. Nowadays her work space is rented out to a small service firm and they don't use a fax at all as far as I know. Internet and phone services were super important to get set up though.
softveda 5y ago
Funny you say that, but Uniqlo a Japanese owned fashion brand and quite popular in Australia has a fantastic modern e-commerce website.

tudorradubarbu 5y ago

I remember this article! So great!

alpaca128 5y ago

> People require a high degree of assurance, by means of lengthy descriptions and technical specifications, before making a purchasing decision I'd say it's astounding that this is not considered normal and people put up with this extremely low standard of inconsistent product descriptions that apparently made multiple passes through translation software and are riddled with errors. I don't think it's unreasonable that I want to know what I'm buying.

johnnyanmac 5y ago

>*Consumer Behaviour* – People require a high degree of assurance, by means of lengthy descriptions and technical specifications, before making a purchasing decision – they are not going to be easily swayed by a catchy headline or a pretty image. The adage of “less is more” doesn’t really apply here. >*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. Websites ends up being about the maximal concentration of information into the smallest space akin to a pamphlet rather than an interactive tool. I think these cultural differences (if true) are a very interesting a -> b situation. adverts seem to work almost too well in western cultures so the focus revolved around removing them from view (adblock), and the battle became about ways to go around these technologies. If this is truly a trend, it sounds like asian cultures just create a natural filter, and their language allows ads to just... advertise their entire pitch instead. Get straight to the punch instead of clickbaiting. Completely tangential, but this does explain the phenomenon of media in japan where the title just seems to be a plot summary instead of a title. If you can fit the synopsis on the spine of a book or on a ticker board, why not?

marcodiego 5y ago

You think Japanese web design is different? Take a look at their TV shows: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qaxG-Wc8kCU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qaxG-Wc8kCU

deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
crooked-v 5y ago
The one at 7m30s looks basically identical to a bit that shows up on Jimmy Fallon pretty regularly with celebrity guests.

bitwize 5y ago

I freakin' love Japanese web design. I think the Japanese just favor the old "info dump" style of web page, as opposed to here where web pages are supposed to function as either advertisements or substrates for advertisements. For an example of what this looks like in English, check out Hitoshi Doi's web pages, which are still up in more or less their original form from the mid-late 90s. I learned basically everything I know about Sailor Moon from him back in the day: http://www.usagi.org/doi/ http://www.usagi.org/doi/

bombcar 5y ago
I wonder if prolonged experience with a written language that can condense quite well (and go in other directions that just left to right) is a factor. I prefer old “data dump” websites even in English - much better than whatever the current “hero image” design we have now where we do about five words per ten inches it seems.
- oefrha 5y ago
  Gosh I hate hero images so much. Wasting anywhere between 30%-100% of the above-the-fold space on an often completely meaningless stock photo or illustration with a loose connection to a keyword — who the fuck likes that?
  - RuleOfBirds 5y ago
    Users do. I spent a whole summer A/B testing an app's landing page to get 10+% more conversions. Over 50 experiments, the biggest win was having a hero image. Its actual content didn't matter as long as it was a photo and featured humans. And the more screen space it took the better. Probably different for different markets and apps, but yeah from my experience users love em.
    - oefrha 5y ago
      I'm talking about content websites, e.g. news sites, not marketing sites like app landing pages.

makeitdouble 5y ago

Comparing apples to apples, Rakuten pages don't seem much different to me than Amazon or eBay, or AliExpress for instance: - https://event.rakuten.co.jp/campaign/supersale/?l-id=search_browse_pc_header_top https://event.rakuten.co.jp/campaign/supersale/?l-id=search_... - https://www.amazon.com/gp/goldbox?ref_=nav_cs_gb https://www.amazon.com/gp/goldbox?ref_=nav_cs_gb - https://www.ebay.com/e/row/shotime-ohtani https://www.ebay.com/e/row/shotime-ohtani Japanese design can be wild and very different, but for anything with a very clear purpose, it will usually end up looking a lot like any other European or US page serving the same purpose.

lmm 5y ago
Big companies' web design seems to have gotten a bit westernized lately, but I think there's still a higher density on Japanese pages. E.g. compare https://www.kuronekoyamato.co.jp/ytc/customer/ https://www.kuronekoyamato.co.jp/ytc/customer/ with the same company's same page in English https://www.kuronekoyamato.co.jp/ytc/en/ https://www.kuronekoyamato.co.jp/ytc/en/ . Or compare https://www.nta.go.jp/ https://www.nta.go.jp/ with https://www.irs.gov/ https://www.irs.gov/ .
- tecleandor 5y ago
  Yeah, while some designs have softened a bit seems like in a lot of the great sites the classic Japanese design remains. In the C2C second hand market, Mercari is a somewhat modernized design: https://jp.mercari.com/ https://jp.mercari.com/ while the classic Kakaku is a great info dump that I love specially because it isn't banner heavy: https://kakaku.com/ https://kakaku.com/ The thing I hated from a lot of Japanese web sites is they relied a lot in images for formatting and lay out, and put a lot of text in those images, difficulting the reading or translation of those sites for foreigns and people with visual impairment. But also Yahoo is quite different there ( https://auctions.yahoo.co.jp https://auctions.yahoo.co.jp https://www.yahoo.co.jp/ https://www.yahoo.co.jp/ ) and major electronics retailers still keep very dense designs ( https://www.biccamera.com/bc/main/ https://www.biccamera.com/bc/main/ https://www.yodobashi.com/ https://www.yodobashi.com/ )
- makeitdouble 5y ago

contextfree 5y ago

My impression is also that the American web design trends from the late 00s~early 10s are a lot more prevalent in Japan these days than they were in 2013, look at note.com for example: https://note.com/ https://note.com/

LeoPanthera 5y ago

An interesting distinction is that all Japanese (and Chinese, and Korean) fonts are monospace. Unlike western writing, all Japanese characters are exactly the same width. This is the reason for the so-called "full width" characters, to fit western writing into the same character boxes as Japanese characters. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Halfwidth_and_fullwidth_forms https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Halfwidth_and_fullwidth_forms

mushyhammer 5y ago
Korean uses non-monospaced punctuation, spaces and numbers though, it’s not fully-monospaced like Chinese and Japanese https://ko.wikipedia.org/wiki/%EC%9C%84%ED%82%A4%EB%B0%B1%EA%B3%BC:%EB%8C%80%EB%AC%B8 https://ko.wikipedia.org/wiki/%EC%9C%84%ED%82%A4%EB%B0%B1%EA... Japanese also has monospaced numbers but maybe they’re not super common. https://ja.wikipedia.org/wiki/%E3%83%A1%E3%82%A4%E3%83%B3%E3%83%9A%E3%83%BC%E3%82%B8 https://ja.wikipedia.org/wiki/%E3%83%A1%E3%82%A4%E3%83%B3%E3...
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
level3 5y ago
Not all fonts are monospace. For example, on Windows you have MS PGothic and MS PMincho, which are the proportional versions of MS Gothic and MS Mincho.
throwaway984393 5y ago
I came here just to talk about how much Chinese and Korean fonts are not nearly as uniform as Japanese. Go into a 7-11 in China or Korea, and the prices are often written by hand. In Japan, they're the same printed font everywhere. In China and Korea, there may be those "On Sale! Only 5 yuan this week!" kind of add-on signs with different colors and fonts/sizes. In Japan, it's just the item name and price, black and white, one size. As a foreign traveler, Japan makes everything uniform and easy; even if things are different (and they often are) they're very approachable. China and Korea do not have the same approachable-ness for a random Westerner.

dang 5y ago

Related: Why Japanese web design is so different (2013) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25148942 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25148942 - Nov 2020 (207 comments) Why Japanese web design is so different (2013) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16254569 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16254569 - Jan 2018 (153 comments) Why Japanese web design is so different - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8975735 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8975735 - Jan 2015 (6 comments) Why Japanese Web Design Is So Different - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6718067 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6718067 - Nov 2013 (129 comments)

foxhop 5y ago

JetAlone 5y ago

I love that Shimadzu ad with the DeLorean in the Edo period later into the article. https://randomwire.com/wp-content/uploads/japan-back-to-the-future.jpeg https://randomwire.com/wp-content/uploads/japan-back-to-the-... 江戸時代から科学の子ども。 "From the Edo period, science's children." My translation here may not be super great - it's backed up by looking up and seeing that the Shimadzu Corporation has always made instruments for educational scientific measurement and was founded in the Meiji, 1875, which is only in the decade after the end of the Edo period.

lmm 5y ago
科学 is science, not tuition.
- JetAlone 5y ago
  Ah, I misrecognized the Kanji 「科」as「料」, sorry. Editing now. Makes a lot more sense this way. 「料学」gets translated to "fees" which I took to be "tuition".
  - malikolivier 5y ago
    Never heard such a word as 料学. Tuition is usually called 学費.
    - JetAlone 5y ago
      You're right, 学費 is a better word than the one I mis-recognized. In my defense, there is a book titled "やさしい料学", and I found a small handful of other instances through a search.
      - deleted 5y ago
        [deleted]
      - whym 5y ago
        > やさしい料学 It seems like that's also a typo or scanno of 科学. Aside from the one letter, everything else about that book matches the bibliographic information of another book whose alternative title (or subtitle) is "やさしい科学": http://webcatplus.nii.ac.jp/webcatplus/details/book/isbn/9784384160154.html?txt_isbn=9784384160154 http://webcatplus.nii.ac.jp/webcatplus/details/book/isbn/978...

Lamad123 5y ago

Looks like Yahoo from 2003!

foxhop 5y ago

Hey zdw great post, somebody os going g to need to create me an executive cheat sheet of it. u know less is more in zen. <3

Hardik_Shah 5y ago

Densely packed text, a busy layout, tiny low-resolution images, cute characters, and the use of flash animation are some of the distinguishing features of a Japanese web page. These features that distinguish Japanese websites are due to a variety of factors that are linguistic, cultural, and technical in nature.

fouc 5y ago
I always wondered if part of it was due to japanese smartphones.
- selcuka 5y ago
  That is discussed in the article.

friedturkey 5y ago

I’ve come to prefer Japanese web design over western design in general. It can be messy at times, but you don’t have endless pop ups asking you to sign up for their “newsletter” ad spam that is sold off to third parties(nobody reads those—your stats are fraudulent and people only register because they think it’ll end the pop ups), endless cookie pop ups, random bot support chats for things that would never need it, “Take me to the new design!” pop ups that lead away from a functional page to absolute garbage, h u g e white space for zero reason, random “login with Google!” pop ups for a basic-ass text page, social media buttons, and so on. Japanese web design feels like walking into a casino, but western design feels like having a dump truck emptied on you.

5350-uiop-1130 5y ago
>Japanese web design feels like walking into a casino, but western design feels like having a dump truck emptied on you. perfect analogy i think in general they have more of a "if its not broken dont fix it" mentality whereas in the west we seem to be "move fast and break things"
tsss 5y ago
As someone who works on newsletter popups I can tell you that they do, unfortunately, work quite well. Hardly any other measure translates so easily to increased sales.
- astura 5y ago
  Same with asking for upvotes and subscriptions on YouTube. It's so annoying but it works so well.
granshaw 5y ago
Umm, those things have nothing to do with web _design_, but are rather a function of market dynamics
- friedturkey 5y ago
  White space and pop ups aren’t part of design? That’s a very strict definition. Design is also merely a function of market dynamics, hence why it changes with trends and not to improve function.

judge2020 5y ago

Some of their examples have changed since this was written in 2013, for example Niconico is effectively a bunch of flexbox now[0], the only remnant possibly being the search bar being separate from the navigation bar. Rakuten[1] is arguably less cluttered than Amazon's front page. Yomiuri[2] looks like msn.com but in Japanese. 0: https://www.nicovideo.jp/ https://www.nicovideo.jp/ 1: https://www.rakuten.co.jp/ https://www.rakuten.co.jp/ 2: https://www.yomiuri.co.jp/ https://www.yomiuri.co.jp/

franklampard 5y ago

……They are just behind on UIUX

fouc 5y ago
I think UIUX is culture & context & device dependent. For example, Japanese had smartphones long before iPhone/Android phones got any significant market share.
- franklampard 5y ago
  just look at most of the mentioned websites now. Most of them resemble US counterparts now.

bryanrasmussen 5y ago

That first image reminds me of a lot of ecommerce sites in 2004. And even so I think I can find lots today that probably still look like that, although with some Western language and not Japanese. Maybe color scheme a bit different. What I'm saying is, the first image covering the screen when reading why Japanese web design is so different looks like a lot of web design I have seen that was not Japanese.

usrbinbash 5y ago

Compared to the over-crufted, over engineered, designed-for-phone, low-information-density, cr4p I get served on many "western" websites, where I am happily invited to download a gazilion MiB of adware and feel my phones battery running hot just to access a website, I prefer the asian design philosophy.

suction 5y ago
Where exactly do you see "Asian design philosophy" on Japanese major websites? Also, what exactly do you think of as "Asian design philosophy" in the first place?
Tor3 5y ago
I'm reading a few Japanese newspapers online these days (their English sections, mostly), and it's so much easier to read than nearly all of the online newspapers in my own country. No narrow fixed-size space in the middle of the page (is this meant to be read only on phones, portrait mode, by youngsters able to read with their nose pressed into the screen?). Proper pages, no endless scrolling. Flows nicely to fill out my browser window. No clutter. Easy to read, and easy to come back to and re-read something. In Europe a lot of the online news web pages makes me feel I'm reading a low-quality low-cost dirty mag from the seventies sold from under the counter, as far as design is concerned.