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The anecdotal cultural 'explanations' here are a little ridiculous without some real data to reference. > Logographic-based languages... actually allow Japanes

The anecdotal cultural 'explanations' here are a little ridiculous without some real data to reference. > Logographic-based languages... actually allow Japanese speakers to become comfortable with processing a lot of information in short period of time / space not true - article with references: http://persquaremile.com/2011/12/21/which-reads-faster-chinese-or-english/ http://persquaremile.com/2011/12/21/which-reads-faster-chine... > Japanese doesn’t have italics or capital letters which limits the opportunities for adding visual punch that you get with latin alphabets Italics and capital letters have little or nothing to do with how 'Western' web layouts are generally created, and are far from the only way to create emphasis or hierarchy in text. > Language Barrier... Although much gets translated this still causes a delay in new technologies and trends being adopted Is the claim that the Japanese are technologically behind the rest of the world? Why would web development/design be different than almost every other technical industry? This sounds much more like surface intuition than considered insight > Risk Avoidance This might help explain why Japanese websites look similar to each other, but not why they look different from 'Western' 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 'Western' sites. Risk avoidance/copying is universal - it does not explain the difference between Japanese and non-Japanese websites. > Consumer Behaviour - People require a high degree of assurance, by means of lengthy descriptions and technical specifications, before making a purchasing decision Evidence, or is this just a personal observation? > 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 Haven't Google, MS, Yahoo, Facebook, Twitter, everyone demonstrated that this is the goal of what they're doing? It's not culturally unique. > Urban Landscape This has some research to back it up - Nisbett, Masuda, Shah, others Other claims also read as casual inductive observations that don'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't really elucidate much. /end rant

mchaver 13y ago
Katakana can be used for emphasis much like italics. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Katakana#Usage http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Katakana#Usage
- mistercow 13y ago
  That's true, but it would feel very weird to use katakana as a way of denoting hierarchy. You can bold, color, and shadow Japanese text just fine though, so I don't really see the author's point.
  - mchaver 13y ago
    The bigger issue I think is limited font choices.
    - dead_phish 13y ago
      Look at Western design/font choices - Helvetica. Helvetica everywhere.
pflats 13y ago
While I agree with the vast majority of your criticisms, I wouldn't be surprised if you're underestimating the language barrier issue. >Is the claim that the Japanese are technologically behind the rest of the world? Why would web development/design be different than almost every other technical industry? Many programming languages are based on English and the Latin script. Programming, and more specifically web programming, requires a level of fluency with English and its alphabet that I would expect significantly decreases the available talent pool in non-Anglo countries, especially countries with different writing systems[1]. No other technologies lean so heavily a specific language. Math and science are universal and independent of any language. Computer science is universal. Computer programming is not. [1]Comparing a country like Vietnam (that uses a Latin script) to another equivalent Asian country might be interesting.
- blah32497 13y ago
  I would expand this to include the sciences. I did a 2 month industry internship in Japan a few years ago and I was blown away by the effects of the language barrier. They are incredibly disconnected from the rest of the world. While the rest of the world is publishing their results in English, they are publishing in their own Japanese trade journals. It's kind of ironic, b/c in a less developed country (China), or a less populous country (European countries) you wouldn't have the local base to support the publishing of local language journals and technical books. So they're victims of their own success. Sure they can go read an IEEE article, but 9/10 times they'll go to a Japanese source b/c it's so much easier for them. For programming it's probably only worse. I imagine there is a Japanese equivalent to Stack Exchange, but it will have a tiny fraction of the help you get on the English language one. It's probably like programming in the 90s! =)
  - rapind 13y ago
    Well Ruby came out of Japan. So in 1995 some of Japan's coders were programming like it was 2005.
    - dead_phish 13y ago
xixi77 13y ago
> Logographic-based languages... actually allow Japanese speakers to become comfortable with processing a lot of information in short period of time / space not true - article with references: http://persquaremile.com/2011/12/21/which-reads-faster-chine...* http://persquaremile.com/2011/12/21/which-reads-faster-chine... This article and references is about continued reading speed (bandwidth), and as it notes all languages read at similar speed, because the bottleneck is in cognitive processing. Actually, how adults read English is not much different from how they read Chinese -- ie. we do not parse individual letters, just as a Chinese reader does not parse character components. But for a shopping website, the relevant issue is not bandwidth, but latency -- ie. how fast the reader can recognize what's written on a button, and I suspect the results there may be quite different.
dreamfactory 13y ago
> Italics and capital letters have little or nothing to do with how 'Western' web layouts are generally created, and are far from the only way to create emphasis or hierarchy in text. They are key to graphic design. Though even in the West, web designers have only been waking up to formal graphic design in the last few years. > Haven't Google, MS, Yahoo, Facebook, Twitter, everyone demonstrated that this is the goal of what they're doing? The real money now is in commerce, and Japan is well-known for being behind in online commerce due to trust issues with plastic money. I guess that leaves them with old model of ads which would explain the 'million-dollar homepage' look.
krapp 13y ago
There may also be something to these sites appearing noisier to Western eyes because Japanese characters, being more complicated, appear aesthetically noisier than Roman characters. Just a guess though.
uniclaude 13y ago
> Why would web development/design be different than almost every other technical industry? This sounds much more like surface intuition than considered insight I'm not the OP, but I am working on side projects here in Japan with two guys working for local large internet players, and I personally worked for another very large one where I was close to technological decisions at the company level, so I'll offer more than "surface intuition". Language barrier exists. Not only the lack of documentation (which is real), but the lack of Japanese stackoverflow (&co.) answers, fewer people on the mailing lists, and other language related problems seriously hamper the adoption of new technologies. It is also one of the many factors behind the large amount of NIH seen around. Using open source maintained libraries in your software makes less sense if no one on your team will be able to read the docs, changelogs, & co. NDAs prevent me to cite examples, but I'm sure you get the point.

mchaver 13y ago

Katakana can be used for emphasis much like italics. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Katakana#Usage http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Katakana#Usage

mistercow 13y ago
That's true, but it would feel very weird to use katakana as a way of denoting hierarchy. You can bold, color, and shadow Japanese text just fine though, so I don't really see the author's point.
- mchaver 13y ago
  The bigger issue I think is limited font choices.
  - dead_phish 13y ago
    Look at Western design/font choices - Helvetica. Helvetica everywhere.

pflats 13y ago

While I agree with the vast majority of your criticisms, I wouldn't be surprised if you're underestimating the language barrier issue. >Is the claim that the Japanese are technologically behind the rest of the world? Why would web development/design be different than almost every other technical industry? Many programming languages are based on English and the Latin script. Programming, and more specifically web programming, requires a level of fluency with English and its alphabet that I would expect significantly decreases the available talent pool in non-Anglo countries, especially countries with different writing systems[1]. No other technologies lean so heavily a specific language. Math and science are universal and independent of any language. Computer science is universal. Computer programming is not. [1]Comparing a country like Vietnam (that uses a Latin script) to another equivalent Asian country might be interesting.

blah32497 13y ago
I would expand this to include the sciences. I did a 2 month industry internship in Japan a few years ago and I was blown away by the effects of the language barrier. They are incredibly disconnected from the rest of the world. While the rest of the world is publishing their results in English, they are publishing in their own Japanese trade journals. It's kind of ironic, b/c in a less developed country (China), or a less populous country (European countries) you wouldn't have the local base to support the publishing of local language journals and technical books. So they're victims of their own success. Sure they can go read an IEEE article, but 9/10 times they'll go to a Japanese source b/c it's so much easier for them. For programming it's probably only worse. I imagine there is a Japanese equivalent to Stack Exchange, but it will have a tiny fraction of the help you get on the English language one. It's probably like programming in the 90s! =)
- rapind 13y ago
  Well Ruby came out of Japan. So in 1995 some of Japan's coders were programming like it was 2005.
  - dead_phish 13y ago

xixi77 13y ago

> Logographic-based languages... actually allow Japanese speakers to become comfortable with processing a lot of information in short period of time / space not true - article with references: http://persquaremile.com/2011/12/21/which-reads-faster-chine...* http://persquaremile.com/2011/12/21/which-reads-faster-chine... This article and references is about continued reading speed (bandwidth), and as it notes all languages read at similar speed, because the bottleneck is in cognitive processing. Actually, how adults read English is not much different from how they read Chinese -- ie. we do not parse individual letters, just as a Chinese reader does not parse character components. But for a shopping website, the relevant issue is not bandwidth, but latency -- ie. how fast the reader can recognize what's written on a button, and I suspect the results there may be quite different.

dreamfactory 13y ago

> Italics and capital letters have little or nothing to do with how 'Western' web layouts are generally created, and are far from the only way to create emphasis or hierarchy in text. They are key to graphic design. Though even in the West, web designers have only been waking up to formal graphic design in the last few years. > Haven't Google, MS, Yahoo, Facebook, Twitter, everyone demonstrated that this is the goal of what they're doing? The real money now is in commerce, and Japan is well-known for being behind in online commerce due to trust issues with plastic money. I guess that leaves them with old model of ads which would explain the 'million-dollar homepage' look.

krapp 13y ago

There may also be something to these sites appearing noisier to Western eyes because Japanese characters, being more complicated, appear aesthetically noisier than Roman characters. Just a guess though.

uniclaude 13y ago

> Why would web development/design be different than almost every other technical industry? This sounds much more like surface intuition than considered insight I'm not the OP, but I am working on side projects here in Japan with two guys working for local large internet players, and I personally worked for another very large one where I was close to technological decisions at the company level, so I'll offer more than "surface intuition". Language barrier exists. Not only the lack of documentation (which is real), but the lack of Japanese stackoverflow (&co.) answers, fewer people on the mailing lists, and other language related problems seriously hamper the adoption of new technologies. It is also one of the many factors behind the large amount of NIH seen around. Using open source maintained libraries in your software makes less sense if no one on your team will be able to read the docs, changelogs, & co. NDAs prevent me to cite examples, but I'm sure you get the point.