One might also argue this is similar to a shopping experience, where there is so much information being shouted at you and shown to you and for anyone not accustomed to this type of service, can be a bit overwhelming. No, this doesn’t happen everywhere, but visit any busy shopping place/area and it’s noticeable.

In any case, this is just speculation derived from my own observations of living in Japan.

These all of course are pure speculations and I can be completely wrong :)

PS. Somebody mentioned that can not come in Japan because has a little girl. My girl is for 4 years old and my boy 1. My personal opinion is that if you have small kids – Japan is the country to be in terms of how safe it is for kids (and adults). (I am comparing it with Europe (Belgiuim)).

Heated comments from my better half who also happens to be Japanese is that because of the ‘customer is God’ approach to Japanese customer service there tends to be a paranoia that customers may complain if there’s not enough information right in front of the customer. It’s very apparent in SOME advertising where they cram in every single piece of info that they think might be beneficial to customers. But it’s not always the case, and I think there actually is a lot of variety in advertising in Japan….. it’s just the cheap and nasty sometimes overpowers the beautiful, when competing in the same space.

there is a lot of flash, and Yugo Nakamura is pretty famous for the stuff he’s done with it (Design and the elastic mind being a good example of him at his best…. or some might think worst – http://www.moma.org/interactives/exhibitions/2008/elasticmind/ )

I guess there’ll be a lean away from this as iPhones/ipods/ipads have a pretty good chance of surviving in Japan. @font-face embedding should definitely help too but some are also pretty hefty because the kanji character sets are so large that it’s not practical to embed the whole thing (I guess that might be another reason for flash in that respect.)

anyway…. my 2 cents.

So the difference in design is probably not related to Japanese users having a preference for cluttered style.

I’m waiting for someone to drag Hofstede’s cultural dimensions into this discussion.

so let see…

U.S. Department of Health & Human Services, American Airlines for USA.

Small user test. The person is not a Web designer at all. Questions to my Japanese partner in life: Do you know a Japanese Website from a big company which *you* would consider “Design”?

Her:… hmmm UNIQLO? But I consider it a mess. Difficult to find information.

Me: What about Ministry of Health, Labor, and Welfare?

Her: Hmmm not beautiful but easy to find information.

For the litterature, There are magazines such as WebDesigning with a balance between flash design and web design. I have seen beautiful Flash sites (Unfortunately flash ;) ). The point has been made already that many micro flash sites are a lot better than the typical design. Some companies have decided to go entirely flash such as IMG SRC

If you want to see the influence of characters on your perceptions check the difference between OurWorld (Japanese) and OurWorld (English). This is the Web site of United Nations University hosted in Japan.

Another thing which has been mentioned in the comments. Who decides? The structure of Japanese companies is very different and most of the time (no generalization) top to bottom. Moving up in the hierarchy means often getting older (not merit) and having good connections. The Government offices are also with a touch of gray and papers accumulated everywhere. Fluorescent Tube lamps are the main lightning you get in all offices and administration.

One of the issues of this blog post is the western romanticism about *one* of the characteristics of Japanese culture (Wabi-sabi), but Japan is not only that. The question would just have been better asking people to share Japanese Web site well designed. And ask your Japanese readers to tell their impressions about these government Web sites. The bias? Your Japanese readers are most likely designers and not common people.

As for the cluttered Japanese web design trends, I find it interesting that although the Chinese has a different historical take on design to the Japanese, Chinese web design has similar problems.

But then I always wonder if it is a problem, because although to our eyes they look horrible, they have had a chance to develop or evolve. Forgetting about sites for bureaucratic organisations, and concentrating on commerical sites, it seems that the dense information approach is continued to be used. If it didn’t work, you would have seen a slow change over the past 5-6 years to a more western oriented style. To use an evolution analogy, we might look at the poor male angler fish’s life cycle with horror, it is working for the species. I must resist the temptation to tie it with Richard Ishida’s comment, my wife’s Japanese and a black belt :p

if you have a Japanese wife you know that this isn’t true at all

@Richard Ishida — lol! 頑張れ！ :D

PS @bardak not quite sure what the metro comparison was about — most people use IC cards or their phones to pay for subway trains in Japan, and while ticket machines may be overwhelming to western eyes they’re not hard to use (I sense a theme here…). Also your usage stats are off: Metro systems by annual passenger rides (Wikipedia)

Once you remove the need to sell, there is much less incentive to dress things up. Selling is mainly done via TV and print media.

* The variety of reliably available font choices is even more limited than for Western languages.
* There are no italics in Japanese
* Capital letters provide a nice visual punch at the beginning of a line. Japanese doesn’t have caps.
* As long as Windows XP lives, text below 12px will be illegible, above 20px ugly, to many users.

This all means that it is more difficult (though not impossible) to create the contrasts required to organize information with type alone. Many designers get around this by adding decoration or using graphic text.

A lot of bad design seems to stem from the fact that websites are controlled by either the company’s overworked IT department trying to keep up with endless update demands via an aging or non-existent CMS; or a sales-driven ad agency who threw in the website for a song on top of their massive media budget, and find it easiest to manage their revolving stable of suppliers by selling plug-n-play flash “promo” sites. Neither of these situations lead naturally towards long-term design planning.

I think a major driving force in everyday Japanese culture is *CONVENIENCE*. If you’re looking for information, then minimal amounts of text and empty spaces are not very useful.

I have also found a strong tendency to prefer two-dimensional layout of information in many places in Japanese culture. I wrote some global design guidelines for Xerox many years back, and Fuji Xerox wanted me to adapt them for their use also. One of their major requirements, however, was to break up the pages using graphics, charts, multiple columns, call-out boxes, etc. They said that developers would find it too boring to just scroll through paragraph after paragraph of text with inline images. If you look at Japanese meeting reports, they are like the web pages you showed – lots of small boxes, arranged two-dimensionally on the page.

It also helps, I think, to consider that Japanese text is really more like a group of small icons. Rather than recognising the word shapes made from sequences of alphabetic characters, they tend to pick out ideographs when reading. (I was told that this is one reason Japanese selection lists can be longer than Western ones. While we have to read words in a list, they can scan long lists more effectively by looking for characters. I used to identify phone calls, meetings, etc in my things to do lists using words in a column of my ttd table, but if i wanted to find, say, all the phone calls, I always used to miss one or two. Once I changed the words to icons, I found it much easier to spot all the phone call related items, and usually without missing anything. I suspect there is a similar thing going on here on some level.)

I think that if you can actually read Japanese natively, the look of the page is radically different too. Of course, what Japanese people see on screen is not characters, but ideas springing out of the page. As someone said earlier, if you even just use Google Translate on the page, to a Westerner things suddenly look much less confusing and jumbled.

I also used to marvel at the jumble and, let’s face it, ugliness of most Japanese cities. The older post-war buildings in particular seem to typically be very square, concrete and utilitarian, and pretty much devoid of grace and elegance. But you often find small instances of graceful and elegant things within the sprawling mess, that show the beauty and perfectionism that Japan is famous for. And when you do, the contrast makes them all the more beautiful.

But before I get carried away too much… as I was saying, I suspect that convenience culture is a major factor in the designs you are seeing, and the iconic nature of Japanese text, which is based on square designs, also plays a part in tripping up our Western sensitivities.

We have the ‘western’ lifestyle, we live the “more is more” philosophy daily – that’s why we consider less is more special in the websites!
Maybe it’s the opposite in Japan – their lifestyles are so flat that they need.. “these” websites to balance things up :)

I Yuya Saito has got it right…

I think :)