why Japan's internet is weirdly designed

In 2013, an article suggested that Japanese web design looks different from the rest of the world. In this video, Sabrina uses an AI to figure out if that is true and, if yes, why.

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BIBLIOGRAPHY

STILL INTERESTED IN WEB DEV HISTORY?

SOCIAL MEDIA
Sabrina
Melissa
Taha

CREDITS
Video by Sabrina Cruz
Video Editing by Joe Trickey
Motion Design by Joe Trickey
Sound Design by Joe Trickey
Special Thanks to Richard MacManus, Jade Codinera, Melissa Fernandes, Manav Kaushal, Laksh Agarwal, Ysmael P, Bishesh Dhaubhadel, Elisa Fatini, Bhawna, NotDanielSmith, Tony Manish Howlett, Jane Manchun Wong, mellowdyyyy, Rahul Patel, Hubik, Anjali Sharma, Nabihah Ashari, Jeremy Ghinn, Shawlyyourekidding, Chloe, Katrina Mae Esposo, Akodaki

MUSIC

TIMESTAMPS
00:00 oopsie, i did a misinformation
00:34 what went wrong
01:45 i ruin my DMs for content
02:00 overcompensating for 60 seconds
03:07 is this a woman in STEM?
04:00 is Japanese web design different?
06:04 thank you Hostinger :)
08:07 figuring out why Japanese web design is so different
08:34 Japanese characters are built different
09:56 now THAT'S a woman in STEM
10:30 how technology shaped web design
13:39 why Japan didn't follow the rest of the world
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Welcome to the joke under the fold!

i forgot to write a joke please just comment. i just got off 7 hours of meetings. please let me live :'-)

[ctr]

I am a front-end web engineer in Japan. Most websites in Japan are generally built using a CMS like WordPress.
Japanese people want very detailed information, whether it is a product sales site or a content business site.
If they cannot get detailed information, they will not buy the product or service. Also, if the information on the website is incorrect, there will be complaints, and companies are very afraid of that.
As a result, they create very text-heavy Web pages.
For Japanese people, it is important to have a lot of information and accurate content, no matter what device they use to connect to the Internet.

[Sleeping_inthe_sky]

As a Japanese person born and raised in the United States, I remember being weirded out every time I visited my cousins and saw them accessing the internet on their flip phones. And this was in 2007. It makes sense now- Japan’s webpages were optimized for tools like flip phones and old computers… I think

[krissydiggs]

As a person living in Japan and a worker in Japan I think probably there’s a bit of “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it” attitude at play too. The company I work for uses SHOCKINGLY old internet technology to do business, and it’s a big company. There’s no need to change it, it seems, because it works well enough for them. Though as a person coming from the west it’s a nightmare to navigate (especially in Japanese). As a designer I’ve always been fascinated by this phenomena so I appreciate you doing all this legwork about it!

[ryusaw_]

As a Japanese person, I find this content very interesting.
It is often said that "being easy to understand and simple does not lead to purchasing" in Japan. Of course, it depends on the subject. In some places, there are concepts such as Zen spirit.

In Japan, where people use multiple characters: kanji, katakana, hiragana, and sometimes the alphabet, we control the density of information by using different characters. Many Japanese use these different characters to quickly locate necessary information in a vast amount of text or to grasp the general content of a text. This act is more akin to looking at a picture than reading a text.

As one can see in large cities such as Tokyo and Osaka, there is a flood of information. If you go there, you will understand why Japanese web design has not changed.

Anyway, we remain thoroughly chaotic, outdated, and incomprehensible. But it is fun, so please come to Japan and experience it for yourself.

[guyn]

I worked as a software engineer at one of the top internet sites in Japan for 6 years (one of the companies featured in a screen cap in this video). All the foreign developers constantly clamored for redesigns to a simpler, cleaner site. But time after time after time, user tests grossly favored the old, cluttered designs, so they stuck.
It’s a cultural thing by now; everybody’s used to it here in Japan so there’s little chance of it changing anytime soon.

[mugi_shi]

Hello from Japan!
I'm only 14 years old, so I didn't know the history of the Internet in Japan. So I was thinking that the Japanese internet just hasn't evolved since the 90s. My English isn't that good, so I may be mistaken, but I want to thank YouTube's algorithm, this channel, and the sponsors for showing me this interesting video!

[rizkytanrian]

As a UI/UX and web designer in Japan, I can tell you based on my experience is that many of the reasons are due to the many Japanese companies are obliged to print everything as it is required by the law, or they’re afraid that someone will make a claim if they didn’t write it clear enough, and there’s something about the language that makes writing a formal sentence seems longer (yes short and smart catchphrase exist, but it only act as a welcome, if you want to mean a business in Japan, you have to write everything). In the graphic design side, yes Japanese characters just like Chinese are rather larger and have more details than Latin letters, so they have less options in fonts and you can’t have a too small font or smaller details of the characters may not be visible hence making it indistinguishable with other characters.

But back to culture, does culture affect this a lot? Yes, because often times the companies tends to provide most information possible to avoid customer claims that are dreaded by Japanese business, and some law that also made in order to avoid those claims. One of my friend who studied Japanese social capital mentioned that Japanese people, despite of its welcoming and harmonious attitude actually have a low trust and very suspicious of others (or in this case a website). A website that does not provide detailed information often gets avoided, and on it also made worse by the fact that many Japanese business actually plays in grey area in a very unfair manner, often time they will trick you with colorful or encouraging title, but makes the fine print complicated to exploit you, even big companies that people used most of the time (several greatest offenders are mobile network, insurance, housing, etc), now imagine if they don’t write the fine print… a society where people don’t usually voice their opinion will tends to just be quiet when exploited, would instead be extra careful to choose website with more information than less, and when they voice their opinion they would be gets too petty that the company would instead write the details to avoid that. It is that circular relationship in Japan that shape the country’s website.

Ah and why they avoid dark and not-dense? Maybe it is the Japanese design aesthetic that in scenario where they finally want to make a minimal website, a black on white is the most popular choice, or a soft gradation with low contrast, perhaps some dull color palette are what considered to be stylish, chic and even elegant in Japan.

[ありんこ-dm]

Japanese here living in Japan. Very interesting. You said that google is the search engine used around the world, but in Japan, yahoo was so strong that it was the more dominant search engine for a while (now no longer of course and everyone uses google to search, but yahoo is still prominent and many people still uses an yahoo email account, not gmail).
I remember the younger generation had moved onto google but older generation was still using yahoo to search.
Maybe this is also partly the reason?

[answerinprogress]

there was no typo in the title. if you saw one: you didn't.

[QuorumOssifrage]

Master of UX here. As a part of my certification, I took a class with an expert who did UX work in Japan and Korea. The overwhelming response that was given to her was that minimalistic webpages didn't seem to have the information that they wanted, even when the information they wanted was there. There seemed to be a perception that minimalistic design was a dumbing down of a website. Even when steps were taken to keep the amount of information the same on a redesign, this perception persisted. This perception was common in 2016 (when I took my certification), but even then Japan was moving closer to the rest of the world. Nowadays Japanese websites seem a lot more diverse than they used to be: still having cluttered and dense websites, while also having more and more minimalistic websites every year.

Also it has been a minute since 2016 or since I've done any serious UX work, so let me know if I've made any mistakes or if anything changed.

[Hingaflips]

This was so incredibly well done. You’re camera work, storytelling, PROGRAMMING AND SCIENCE KNOWLEDGE, holy shit.

[セルビア-gn]

I'm Japanese! I'm sorry if I'm using a translation I watched all your videos and comments!There was a lot of English that I didn't understand, but I can see that you've done a great job and put in the time to find out this difference and more!It was very easy to understand the difference from Japan while incorporating my own

[cherenkov_blue]

"This is a tricky one, because I was a STEM student, so I don't have a lot of the necessary domain knowledge... However, being a STEM student also means that _that didn't stop me from trying."_

Yeah, this is accurate. I cannot count the amount of times I have gone down a rabbit hole as a result of finding an interesting question and then going "Wait, shit, I have no idea how to approach this."

[canhedotricks]

When first starting out learning Japanese and discovering all the commonly used websites, I remember being struck by how "old" all the websites looked. It was like being on the internet as a child again. So glad this is an actual thing and not something I misconstrued.

[sydneymulder]

Last semester I took a class that included students from other language majors, and our professor had the idea to compare city websites in a few of the countries that our majors covered. Most showcased each city beautifully and were easy to navigate with dropdown menus. Then he got to Japan. :)

[zcbz]

"twitter was normal one day and by the time youre watching this it might be dead" she knows the

[TheIppoippo]

I'm a 25+ year software engineer (from UK), and half of that work lifetime has been spent in Japan (where I am now). While I'm not primarily a "front-end developer" (I'm backend, server), I do interact with the engineers who do that stuff.
So I guess I have some insight into, biased with my own opinions and feelings.

Whilst there may have been technical drivers for why the page design was information dense at the start, cultural reasons are why that design language has remained prevalent and is only changing in a small subset of the Japanese internet now.

The big cultural thing I've seen is that everything must be fully explained... in DETAIL! If it's not explained, it's not to be trusted. Japanese users won't actually read all that info, but they expect it to be presented. (This applies to Powerpoint presentations too, they are crazy high information density, rather than a simple set of bullet points that get elaborated upon in the verbal presentation). Japanese seem to be very good at taking dense information, blanking it out and only absorbing the stuff that needs to be known. (Same with signage, written and audio... train stations and the city are an audio cacophony just hammering away at you).

A website is just a online version of a formal printed document. (Another aside, if you doing something formal like buying a house, rather than send it to you, they get you to go in person to an office, and a formally qualified person will read you the small print!!! So, so, boring. As they read it to you, they then highlight with a pen the actual bits you should just skim read. Anyway I digress).

The other big culture point will be resistance to change. That's why new design language influences from other places haven't been largely adopted.
Some of the small startups, providing things like HR software, etc now do seem to have more Western Style design. But as more functionality gets added, and with a lack/shortage of expertise in the Product Design, Information Architecture and Web Designer area, it often falls to Project Managers and Software Engineers to add in this new functionality into the UI design... and frankly we aren't that good at doing it.

[zyaicob]

It's interesting that Japan just does computers differently in this instance because Japan doing computers differently is what led to emoji coming into existence.

[krim]

Korean is not logographic, they use an alphabet like Latin or Cyrillic scripts. They just have a unique way of positioning their letters into blocks rather than strictly horizontal.

[DavinderEvolution]

BROOOO why am i so impressed with this video? she literally spent a lot of time, not just researching, but making this video, editing it so well. I am at the geography section with the map in the background with the little proximity animation and the border lining of asian countries. Brilliant!