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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.

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.

> 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.

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 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

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16272392

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8975735

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.

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.

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.

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.

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 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")

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)

It looks better than the usual solo founder saas that has 2 words per screen and infinitely scrolls to be honest.

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.

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.

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.

https://museum.lingscars.com/

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:

https://youtu.be/z6ep308goxQ?si=uQNHIxnRpufWJjAF

It matches the design of Japanese mainstream shops. Look up images for "Japanese drugstore" to see what I mean here.

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.

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:

2022 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33745146

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