The peculiar case of Japanese web design (2022)
sabrinas.space206 points by montenegrohugo 9 hours ago
206 points by montenegrohugo 9 hours ago
I 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
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.
this is also relatively common in Denmark, at least for government sites. One common thing you see (saw, haven't noticed in the last couple years) in Danish .gov sites is queuing where you need to wait some time before you are allowed in to use a site.
The UK driving licence authority (DVLA) also has a period in which you can’t conduct a range of transactions overnight, but that’s because it interfaces with systems that still run batch jobs overnight and the cost of making it all 24/7 simply wasn’t worth it considering the demand.
Really having common maintenance windows makes things way easier. If you already have a service with a limited geographical range its not bad.
Anyone who has attempted to play Final Fantasy XIV beyond the free trial has experienced this. Their subscription management web app is so incredibly bad it takes a significant amount of time and effort just to purchase a subscription. I wonder how much revenue they lose simply from people giving up.
I was bored and tried playing FF14 about a year ago. You need to do the usual download a launcher to download the game, fine. It asks you to log in before it'll download, fine. It crashes ~10% of the way through downloading the game. Not great but you can make it by restarting the launcher and trying again. And again and again, about a dozen times. It does eventually finish though, and I did almost successfully make a character. Except after making my character you have to choose a server instance - and every single instance in the NA server I could find was "full". I don't know if it was actually full or erroring but I gave up at that point.
The buttonology is cryptic. Like you asked tasked enterprise java devs to write frontend in jquery.
At least that's how I remember it. Game might be fun, but I'll never know.
So you didn’t even get to the final boss, purchasing a sub.
While I played it I always had this dirty feeling imagining what the backend code must look like. Sends chills down my spine.
I played on my Playstation when I played a few years back, fortunately it was a seamless process! As parent comment said though, subscription process was almost user hostile for some reason.
I was wondering why the process was so convoluted. I thought it was because I was doing it from my phone and they just had a poor mobile site. Well, apparently they have a poor desktop site that has poor mobile support!
I found this out when buying a Japan Rail Pass for a trip a few years ago, blew my mind.
https://www.japanrailpass-reservation.net/ only works 4:00–23:30 Japan time.
This is especially funny since the JR Pass cannot be purchased by residents of Japan.
Yeah 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.
Considering the state of japanese IT, there is probably a person typing each reservation from the website into a 1980s mainframe.
After receiving the orders that were actually printed from an Internet Explorer 6 only website, and faxed over from another office before being re-scanned in along with a barcode that usually failed to make it over the fax, hence the need to hand-type things. True story (not for JR specifically, but circa 2013)
The US Social Security Administration website is available from 6am to 8pm, Monday to Friday (or at least it was that way a few years ago)
The service hours seem a bit wider nowadays [0], but not 24/7.
[0] https://www.ssa.gov/myssa-static/rel_1.0/offHoursPopup.html
if you're talking about the train booking site going down -- struggling elders are still using the face to face or phone support. they probably have never made an online reservation.
A lot of Japanese websites also have to be tremendously over provisioned because of how regimented the country is. A friend of mine worked infrastructure for a local newspaper, and every day at 6PM they'd send a push notification to all their subscribers and had to provision for that peak. When he asked if they could smooth out traffic, send the notification to some folks a minute before, or a minute after he was almost thrown out of the room. "Japan runs on time. Not a minute early, not a minute late. On time".
The 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.
I 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.
>"It reminds me of the web before Apple-style minimalism took over."
The loss of color and texture is my biggest gripe. So many webpages and user interfaces abandoned the idea of distinguishing components using different colors and just went with making the page as close to bleach white as possible. I suppose an upside of this is that it made dark-mode easier to adopt. That being said, good dark mode support seems relatively recent.
And now all AI slop coded by anyone is that. Tell tale signs: AI likes to make cards, implement SVGs by hand, all cards have a left hihghlight border, off center font spacing, badges and notification icons, etc.
I think you made a good observation about what’s in essence different between the Chinese style and the Japanese style. The popup coupons and confetti effects are all animations. Personally I find these animations highly distracting. Whereas if something is information dense but static, I like it.
(There are also non-store Chinese designs; they are not trying to sell anything so they don’t need coupons and confettis. These are actually enjoyable to use. And they are more information dense than the English equivalent because the Chinese script packs more in a smaller space. This of course makes such designs i18n-hostile.)
> Apple-style minimalism took over.
To be fair, it was Microsoft-style minimalism that Jony Ive brought to Apple, who then popularized it.
Yes, this was the portal style and I still adore it and use it myself, where I can. As long as the page has a scannable information hierarchy, information dense sites are better when you just want to get stuff done (/look stuff up), which for me is most of the time. I don't care about the fluff and "hero images" and the rest.
It reminds me of the “portal” era of Netscape, Excite and Yahoo. Very information dense. Among others’, Google’s minimalism took over.
It would not surprise me that Yahoo Japan was the blueprint for many of these sites. It still is extremely popular as a portal destination.
I 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.
There are still a few information dense English language sites out there, but they’re rarer. Honorable mentions:
- https://based.cooking/ (or the more updated fork https://publicdomainrecipes.com/)
- HN :)
(These are primarily text and lack the occasional color pop of the Japanese style, but I still admire the density and efficiency.)
> 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.
Having 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.
A 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".
Wet Japanese climate necessitate sterile packaging. It's not as extreme as the Southeast Asia, but things do get soggy in matters of hours. So "excessive" aluminized plastic wrapping is just a necessity.
I think a lot of what looks like to much wrapping can be explained by high humidity year round. The wrapping protects products from spoiling or being damaged in such an environment.
Are 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...
I 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.
Minimalism does have its merits though. When decorating my apartment I looked for ways to use color without making whole thing look like confetti poop.
Yeah I'll agree there, as the saying goes "all things in moderation." It's when it goes too far is when it starts to suck the life and human-ness out of everything.
I suppose my issue is more with the "corporate minimalism" trend rather than minimalist design in general.
I think good minimalism is when you express more with less. In my living room, the appliances are grey but wall artworks are colorful - you immediately look the paintings, not at the drawers. The artworks themselves aren't colorful, each one has a specific color scheme, so that when you take a step back, a pattern emerges, and there are gentle but clear color zones that serve different purposes. In another area I have space that's exclusively grey and white, and then there's one corner that's unicorn puke. Minimalism creates lower lows so that the highs punch even higher. The house is modern-minimalist and you can easily find angles to take photos literally from Ikea catalogue, but at the same time it's very radical from artistic point of view and nobody who's seen my house has said that it looks bland.
The problem with corporate minimalism is that the vague nothingness became the goal of the design rather than a way to set the scene for something else. It's like asking your audience to stop the chatter but then there's no show.
I 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.
I 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
I'd say more of a rejection of a certain kind of millennial Instagram scented candle branding minimalism.
Hopefully. Everyone copied Apple without pausing to consider; "hey, does this make things _less_ usable?". Hint: yes, yes it does.
And now they're following Apple into maximalism again making it even less usable. As someone who did accessibility, minimalism did make it easier, it's hard to do maximalism right, one needs to use component extension and extensive styling rules for overlaps and bounding boxes versus a simple vector rectangle with revolved corners. I do miss the 2000s steel/gradient/font/faux 3d icewm-ish looks, they were pretty easy to pull off and didn't really hinder usability
I 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.
The 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=6718067
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16254569
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30523955
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33745146
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35209424
The article shared here seems to be a 2022 follow-up of sorts to the original blog post from 2013 that your links reference.
A 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.
Having 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.
>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.
Have 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.
Japan 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
What 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.
I 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.
I 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.
I 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 (and cite "the peculiar case of Japanese web design")
About 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?
I 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://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)
I believe this is a continuation of her video on the same topic. 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.
It looks better than the usual solo founder saas that has 2 words per screen and infinitely scrolls to be honest.
That 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.
This 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.
Yeah! 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. :)
I'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.
Speaking of design, I absolutely cannot stand the font used in TFA. Especially the lower case f. It's actually painful to look at.
I found this gem. Hadn't seen it on HN yet, so I thought I'd post it!
I've always found Japanese design fascinating
Makes 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.
The company was well known amongst the web development industry, as it was often referenced at colleges and universities.
Here’s the YT video if anyone is interested:
I 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.
The 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.
I 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.
Personally, 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
The 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.
It'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.
If you don't crowd your menu, then you can just have the text links below the website logo, with flex-direction: row and justify-content: center
It'll take up less than half of a smart phone screen, and customers don't need to bother with any burger menu.
The phone web should only have two functions: Poke and scroll. For most normal websites that is.
Hidden / 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!!
It matches the design of Japanese mainstream shops. Look up images for "Japanese drugstore" to see what I mean here.
Chinese web design also interesting
I 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.
One 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.
Some previous discussion:
I 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
A 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.