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The peculiar case of Japanese web design (2022)
- viggity 8mo agoI took 3 years of Japanese in HS (96-99). About 2 years ago I was doing a lot of work with genai and japanese typefaces. It was wild digging into how different the japanese web is. Back in like 2005, it was common to stylize english text by embedding it in an image and then applying drop shadows, etc. By 2022 everyone does the vast majority of that within CSS. Not in Japan though, I couldn't believe how much text content is still in image form.
- klez 8mo agoI believe this is a continuation of her video on the same topic. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z6ep308goxQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z6ep308goxQ . It's been on my to-watch list for a while. I guess it's time to check it out.
- xp84 8mo agoI personally think it’s a feature and not a bug that web minimalism didn’t impact Japan in the same way it did here in the West. Giant images everywhere, and hiding most complexity behind the ubiquitous ••• buttons, is hostile to discoverability and usability. Our motto: “Hide everything that isn’t specifically earning money, or vitally important to the funnel to maximize our KPI!” I’m not pretending to understand the why better than the author of this piece - just saying I’m happy for Japan.
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- cosmic_cheese 8mo agoThe sooner three-dot and hamburger menus fall out of favor the better. They're a couple of those UI patterns where 8-9 times out of 10 there was probably a more suitable pattern that should've been used instead.
- ctmnt 8mo agoI agree that they’re bad patterns (the three dot menu particularly so, it often just looks like a mistake), but what would be more functional on a small screen? I’d love to see some good alternatives that I could adopt in my own projects.
- aidenn0 8mo agoPersonally, if they just went away on large screens, I'd already be much happier. So many programs I use on my 30" monitor have gone from a readily available quick-to-navigate menu-bar to a horrible hamburger menu that is so self-conscious about using space that it is 10x slower to use than before. Gnome (and maybe GTK as well?) submenus now require a click (as opposed to the previous hover) and replace their parent menu (rather than appearing beside it), making hunting for something in a submenu an exercise in frustration. Considering that: 1. The fraction of Gnome users on a small touchscreen is approximately zero 2. You can always support the miniscule number of small-touchscreen users by having menus behave differently on small touch screens; Apple still has a menu bar on desktop applications! It's particularly frustrating
- cosmic_cheese 8mo agoIt's very context-dependent and I can't detail all of them in this post but I'll give a couple examples. In many cases, for mobile versions of sites hamburger menus can be easily replaced with an app-style bottom-aligned tab bar and on occasion even a linear horizontal navbar. You wouldn't believe how many mobile hamburger menus I've seen on sites that have a grand total of 2-5 destinations. In the case of list views, three-dot menus can be replaced by a mini-toolbar of buttons that appears within a list item when hovering or selecting a row (depending on if it's desktop or mobile), and on desktop if your audience has a bit of a technical leaning a right-click context menu can do the trick. The main thing to avoid is to use either as thoughtless catch-all "junk drawers". Usually if one sits and thinks about it a little bit a better pattern will become obvious.
- thewebguyd 8mo agoThe alternative is progressive disclosure and contextual actions, mostly. Only show buttons and options when they are functional (e.g., a fixed bottom nav bar changes to copy/cut/paste only when text is selected, otherwise it displays nav icons, or changes to something else entirely on some other action). For overflow, have the bottom nav bar slide up (kind of like old iOS control center) to reveal more options, just have to be cautious not to re-create the three dots menu junk drawer in there too. I think the three-dot menu junk drawer is just a result of lazy design from a goal of re-using the same UI everywhere, no matter the OS. If we want good design, then (collective) we need to start making unique native UIs per platform, using that platform’s toolkits and HIG instead of “branded” experiences using cross platform UIs. That’s for mobile, for desktop just dump mobile design entirely. Go full on information density, menus, etc. Make it designed to be navigated with a keyboard and a mouse.
- Nifty3929 8mo agoHidden / disappearing controls are so irritating! Where's the button? Where's the button? I know it must be here somewhere... (accidentally hovering mouse over something) OH THERE IT IS!!
- montenegrohugo 8mo agoI found this gem. Hadn't seen it on HN yet, so I thought I'd post it! I've always found Japanese design fascinating
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- iamnothere 8mo agoI prefer the Japanese style. Information dense, yet clean. It reminds me of the web before Apple-style minimalism took over. To contrast with a superficially similar style, Chinese web stores are also maximalist, but they tend to assault you with popup coupons, confetti effects, and other such things. Japanese style feels very efficient and utilitarian by comparison.
- mc32 8mo agoIt reminds me of the “portal” era of Netscape, Excite and Yahoo. Very information dense. Among others’, Google’s minimalism took over.
- iamnothere 8mo agoThere are still a few information dense English language sites out there, but they’re rarer. Honorable mentions: - https://based.cooking/ https://based.cooking/ (or the more updated fork https://publicdomainrecipes.com/ https://publicdomainrecipes.com/) - https://ooh.directory/ https://ooh.directory/ - https://gwern.net/ https://gwern.net/ - https://www.metafilter.com/ https://www.metafilter.com/ - HN :) (These are primarily text and lack the occasional color pop of the Japanese style, but I still admire the density and efficiency.)
- deltoidmaximus 8mo agoI felt like part of Google's success was that the simple search bar loaded fast in an era where I often had slow internet. Yahoo's portal page had to much on it to distract or slow me down from doing what I came there to do. Later on I remember finding out Yahoo had a search.yahoo.com page or something that was also just a search bar but that was harder to type so was still a failure of design. This was before combined search and address bar.
- awad 8mo agoIt would not surprise me that Yahoo Japan was the blueprint for many of these sites. It still is extremely popular as a portal destination.
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- trashb 8mo agoI think there are some important points missing. Japanese society can adopt things fast the "keitai denwa" where created and adopted earlier than anywhere in the world but in 2025 most companies still use fax machines. The japanese society seems to have different citeria for adoption and depreciation of technology (compared to the west). When considering web layout you have to consider traditional media layout for example magazines, newspapers, books, flyers or comics. With the japanese language it is possible to layout your articles (text) in different directions left-to-right, top-to-bottom and top-to-bottom, right-to-left. Magazines are read from (western)back to front. Basically there is more flexibility in layout compared to other languages but translating that tradition to the web is difficult today and historically was very difficult. Most visited websites are news pages, those will be layed out more similar to a traditional newspaper. In japan they often adopted a column layout where in the west we adopted a more list like (row layout) format. As stated in the article CJK characters are problematic, however the japanese text especially is confusing (because they tried to solve it early on) on the encoding side as there are a few standards that don't cooperate. Especially on the early internet due to technical limitations and a fractured technology landscape (different devices, and operating systems). Therefore a lot of websites that wanted more advanced layouts opted for (and still do) publishing images embedded in html for more advanced font and layouts. Also most japanese primarily visit japanese language text websites and therefore don't come in contact with the western website design styles very often. A lot of non English speaking countries have this however in japan it is common because of the relative cultural separation. Most japanese just don't interact with companies people or media outside of japan often, a huge part of this is because they are a first world country that has a very low English proficiency. leading to the two styles evolving independently.
- rolymath 8mo agoI think the answer is more obvious: The average Japanese web designer doesn't assume his user is an idiot, while western design is more condescending
- carlosjobim 8mo agoA potential customer who is a non-idiot will be able to work around idiotic business practices, while a potential customer who is an idiot won't be able to work around good business practices. Hence, you grab more customers by catering to idiots. Unless you as a business want to avoid these clients.
- rolymath 7mo agoDisagree. Idiot design means more steps for non idiots (see: terminal vs GUI)
- carlosjobim 7mo agoAnd how many consumers purchase terminal apps vs GUI apps?
- esafak 8mo agoI don't like it. I feel like every element in the page is shouting at me, abandoning any notion of visual hierarchy. I wonder how Japanese designers regard that concept. The funny thing is, Western minimalism is strongly influenced by Zen, which is diametrically opposed to this.
- matthewkayin 8mo agoI respectfully disagree. If you compare the western designs in the article to the Japanese ones, the western designs have these giant banners and images that insist on themselves. Those are the ones that are shouting. It's like the Japanese pages are presenting information and the western pages are trying to be highway ad banners.
- doodaddy 8mo agoThis goes beyond just web design. In Japan, UIs in general steer toward being information dense. At first glance they look positively ancient. And while they take some time to become familiar they seem to be first and foremost, functional. Frankly I wish we in the west would focus more on function and sticking with it instead of hopping to whatever the UI/UX trend of the day is. It seems to me that the more focus there is on UI/UX the worse the experience gets.
- m4rtink 8mo agoYeah! I am using renshuu[0] to learn Japanese and the UI totally bombards you with information - reading, pronunciation, example sentences, additional information sources, mnemotechnical hints from the community, etc. Not to mention there being an insane amount of ways you can learn, word games, achievements and even a virtual Japanese garden you can populate with items and animals you unlock as you progress in your studies. :) And I love it! It works so much better for me to learn the words and characters that way, possibly due to all the added context. Its just so much better than "western" minimalistic learning tools and bland apps in general. :) [0] https://www.renshuu.org/ https://www.renshuu.org/
- tshaddox 8mo ago> While the nation is known abroad for minimalist lifestyles, their websites are oddly maximalist. I’m not aware of this stereotype of Japanese minimalism. I guess there’s Marie Kondo, and some Japanese high-end dining tends towards minimalism. But then there’s manga, anime, kawaii, Nintendo, Sega, Miyazaki, etc., a lot of which is closer to maximalism than minimalism.
- m4rtink 8mo agoDo not forget the Tokugawa tomb in Nikko. ;-)
- Cpoll 8mo agoYou also have wabi-sabi and all the other bits of Zen Buddhism we've imported.
- ghaff 8mo agoHaving attended a lot of conferences in Japan, I would have said signage and the like tends towards the amateur and garish. Which isn't inconsistent with what you wrote. I've always found Japan a weird mix of refined/minimalist and kitsch.
- pezezin 8mo agoI read a description somewhere that I loved: the Japanese have a very refined sense of beauty, but no sense of ugliness.
- flakiness 8mo agoA subset of Japanese people use minimalism as a justification as lesser purchase power these days. That said, I think the Japanese commercial ecosystem is still less wasteful than the one in the US except the excessive plastic wrapping. I hope one day they realize that won't count as "Omotenashi".
- CuriouslyC 8mo agoFruit would like a word
- rickcarlino 8mo agoAre westerners entering a period of “minimalism fatigue”? Anecdotally it seems like color and texture are slowly taking hold in designs, especially in works targeting a younger demographic. Example: liquid glass, anything published by Taco Bell, the meme of making sites look like they came from Geocities in 99, etc...
- Cthulhu_ 8mo agoMaybe it's just a slow design trend, these things come and go.
- WD-42 8mo agoI hope so. I fancy myself pretty decent at reading. I see the Japanese sites and marvel at the amount of information they have available at a glance. I’m so sick of having to scroll 5 page lengths on western sites just to get to any meaningful information.
- gdubs 8mo agoI'd say more of a rejection of a certain kind of millennial Instagram scented candle branding minimalism.
- mghackerlady 8mo agoI know I certainly am. I hope we move towards things having colors other than white and black again. Please give me back grey backgrounds, I don't like the blinding whites everything has but dark mode is horrid when you aren't in a dark-ish environment
- thewebguyd 8mo agoI hope so. I never bought into the minimalism/flat design hype and have lamented its loss ever since. What’s worse is it bled out of the digital world and into the physical. There’s a real lack of color in our modern world, at least over here in the US. Everything is so neutral and boring, all in the name of efficiency.
- anal_reactor 8mo ago
- usui 8mo agoI read this piece when it came out in 2022. Maybe it should be marked with "(2022)". Previous discussion https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33745146 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33745146 I just want to add that in addition to peculiar web design, Japanese websites have a way of assuming architectures or usage patterns where servers need to sleep or do some kind of scheduled job, which is really weird for people used to sites that need to account for a range of timezones or 24/7 availability (unless there is a pre-announced downtime that exists as a one-off thing). I know at least three websites off the top of my head that go down for "maintenance" at an exact scheduled time for hours every day, assuming that users would never want to access them overseas during those times (actually, one of those three doesn't even announce the reason, it just returns "server failed to respond" errors until it's time to "open up" for business again). Many services work fine, but at least a quarter to a half of Japanese web services are awful even though they eventually work if you can strangle yourself into making it work. The floor for Japanese web services is way below the floor for American ones. Those sites can get really mindnumbingly bad both on the front end and back end. I'm not sure what the cause is, but it must be a variety of factors. If tech-savvy users can't even make it work, I feel really bad for the struggling elders forced to use those sites.
- abustamam 8mo agoA pet peeve of mine — undated blogs :(
- Jn2G3Np8 8mo agoI found this out when buying a Japan Rail Pass for a trip a few years ago, blew my mind. https://www.japanrailpass-reservation.net/ https://www.japanrailpass-reservation.net/ only works 4:00–23:30 Japan time.
- usui 8mo agoYeah this is probably downstream of the fact that if you visit any of the individual JR sites from the expandable map at the bottom, you'll discover they're all down at this time as well. Let's scrap the website and make a staffed phone line or fax machine with operating hours.
- resoluteteeth 8mo agoThat page is a few years old and it's much less the case now, which seems to disprove most of the broad cultural conclusions people are trying to draw based on it.
- gRoberts84 8mo agohttps://museum.lingscars.com/ https://museum.lingscars.com/ The company was well known amongst the web development industry, as it was often referenced at colleges and universities.
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- ChrisArchitect 8mo agoSome previous discussion: 2022 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33745146 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33745146
- juniperus 8mo agoHave you seen a japanese newspaper? the characters alone are very information dense. and a newspaper front page can be very information dense just by the nature of the language/writing system. otherwise, a lot of japanese webpages just seem impossible to navigate to me. Some images are clickable, some aren't, you still have to scroll to reach where you're going. It's just a bit like a maze, and a lot of what you see is kind of useless.
- BalinKing 8mo agoTo be fair, Japanese headlines use a specific writing style that is much more compressed than normal text, like how English newspaper headlines drop words like “a” or “is” to save space.
- Ashken 8mo agoHere’s the YT video if anyone is interested: https://youtu.be/z6ep308goxQ?si=uQNHIxnRpufWJjAF https://youtu.be/z6ep308goxQ?si=uQNHIxnRpufWJjAF
- qoez 8mo agoMakes me think that mass analysis of archive.org websites (on a much larger scale than 2000 sites) for color distribution from screenshots or other stuff like this is a cool project ripe for picking.
- psygn89 8mo agoHaving lived in Japan it feels they either they go all in on minimalist or maximalist. Some stores are quiet, others are obnoxiously loud and brightly lit to where you don't see your own shadow. Some magazines have a ridiculous amount of text on the cover, distorting the characters to fit with bold text stroking, others especially fashion might have one line if any at all alongside their logo. Game and book covers can be more on artistic/subtle side whereas in the west we often fight for your attention with character collages or action scenes.
- p_j_w 8mo ago>others are obnoxiously loud and brightly lit to where you don't see your own shadow. The name Don Quixote now triggers a PTSD reaction in me.
- tobinfekkes 8mo agoI just landed in Tokyo for the first time last night and ended up in the Don Quixote in Shibuya by accident (or adventure). What an experience! It's an invasion of all the senses!
- p_j_w 8mo agoThat one is the absolute worst on weekends. Complete sensory overload coupled with huge crowds. I didn't care for it! The eels in the fish tank out front are pretty cool, though.
- seanmcdirmid 8mo agoMUJI vs Loft is my favorite example. How could two stores be so different in design language.
- sheept 8mo agoI think to figure out if it's a cultural difference or unwillingness for technological change, it'd be interesting to compare Korean or better yet Chinese apps, which were designed more recently. In my brief experience, - Promotional websites (e.g. https://ant.design/index-cn https://ant.design/index-cn, https://seed.bytedance.com/zh/seedream4_0 https://seed.bytedance.com/zh/seedream4_0) seem to be designed similarly to Western websites - Chinese mobile apps do seem to be more colorful in general (as observed with Japanese websites in the article), and some are more information dense, like Douyin Shop and Live. Bullet comments also add to the density - I briefly worked at TikTok US, where the company uses Lark Suite. The desktop and mobile interfaces look pretty similar to Notion/Slack, but it has more vibrant colors and slightly more features (being an everything app for the workspace)
- numpad0 8mo agoOne thing I haven't seen mentioned on topics regarding this phenomenon: Japanese gambling places(pachinko parlors) appear to be more loud and obnoxious than their Western counterparts. I mean, it's literally* gambling, so both are supposed to be maximally obnoxious. There aren't supposed to be differences. Yet there appear to be. And that makes me think that there might be just differences in dopamine resistance between two cultures or something. Like people just take higher doses. I don't think that'll be a crazy concept considering that typical ABVs of hard drinks vary by regions.
- Liftyee 8mo agoIt matches the design of Japanese mainstream shops. Look up images for "Japanese drugstore" to see what I mean here.
- pmdr 8mo agoA website that's useful should look like Japanese websites look today. Most websites looked like that pre-2010. We just went overboard with making them "responsive." Why do we need >36px text on the desktop for anything other than the main title? I swear we're all getting osteoarthritis from nonstop scrolling.
- underlines 8mo agoThe reposts go on and on, while Japanese web design stays the same https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25148942 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25148942 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6718067 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6718067 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16254569 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16254569 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30523955 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30523955 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33745146 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33745146 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35209424 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35209424 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16272392 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16272392 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8975735 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8975735
- codethief 8mo agoThe article shared here seems to be a 2022 follow-up of sorts to the original blog post from 2013 that your links reference.
- elicash 8mo agoWhat I'd add to this discussion is that a minimalist website looks HIGHER END, in the same way that a clothing store that's packed with clothing looks cheaper than a store that has like 10 dresses and tons of empty space. Depending on the brand, you might want to appear like a good bargain! Alternatively, you might want to appear like you sell luxury items. But either way, the design is communicating something.
- sdn90 8mo agoI'm an American that has been living in Asia for a years. I actually hated the web design at first but now I much prefer it and find it difficult to use American apps with the modern tech aesthetic now. I noticed that I started to get annoyed doing things like filling forms. I feel like American apps tend to reduce complex flows into simpler decisions but requiring more steps. It feels like my brain is wired to want to see as much information at once now.
- shawn_w 8mo agoSpeaking of design, I absolutely cannot stand the font used in TFA. Especially the lower case f. It's actually painful to look at.
- mbo 8mo agoI have a little theory that a thing that makes Japanese website feel Japanese is their choice of typeface, which will almost always be something with robust CJK character support. This typeface is preserved when Chrome auto-translates the site. But fonts with good CJK support have wider Latin letter-forms, even when not in `font-variant-east-asian: 'full-width'` mode. I write about this here: https://maxbo.me/subordinate-latin.html https://maxbo.me/subordinate-latin.html (and cite "the peculiar case of Japanese web design")
- theflyestpilot 8mo agoChinese web design also interesting
- Izkata 8mo agoAbout halfway down the page (look for "revolutiooon") there's some example images that seem to be meant to show how Japan didn't change around 2010 while the rest of the world did. Except the "American" set of images also show that we didn't really change either. Were those supposed to be different images?
- nottorp 8mo agoIt looks better than the usual solo founder saas that has 2 words per screen and infinitely scrolls to be honest.
- jp1016 8mo agoThe technology argument is the most convincing one to me. I worked with a Japanese client a few years ago and the internal tools they used were wild by western standards. Like full-on frameset layouts in 2020. But it wasn't ignorance, it was continuity. The tools worked, people knew how to use them, and there was zero appetite for redesigning something that wasn't broken. The font thing is also underrated as a factor. When you only have a handful of web-safe CJK fonts and you can't rely on weight/size variations to create hierarchy the way you can with Latin text, you compensate with color and density. It's a constraint that pushes you toward a specific aesthetic whether you want it or not. I think the framing of "peculiar" is a bit western-centric though. Dense information-heavy pages are arguably more respectful of the user's time than the trend of spreading three sentences across five viewport-heights of whitespace.
- a456463 8mo agoJapan is "old" But old is not bad. The VC and SV fetish of new just so that can steal people's money needs to get old, by that token
- casey2 8mo agoJapan is a highly literate population, so anybody using a Japanese website can read Japanese. Literacy among the English speaking world is much poorer. Growth metrics push large companies into minimalist design for both habit forming and accessibility reasons. Most of the sites shown are the equivalent of a weekly ad. You have an interest cut off, and you show that limited set of information. Since Japan is a very "low trust" society I'd assume most people just think minimalist sites look like a scam startup venture.