I'm surprised this article got so many upvotes. It's a lot of anecdotal evidence, and even the anecdotes and websites they pointed out don't support the point t

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