Japanese Web Design: Why You So 2003?

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When I think of Japan I tend to think of beautiful design. Zen gardens, temples, shrines, tea ceremonies, manga, anime, wabi-sabi… the list goes on and on. Yet for some reason Japan just can’t put any of this together to make a decent looking website. Where did they go wrong? What in the world happened? Time to find out.

Japanese Websites

Let’s start out by looking at some bigger Japanese websites. These are just a few examples that will give you an idea about the “Japanese aesthetic” when it comes to web design.

Rakuten

Rakuten is a lot like the Amazon of Japan (with a bit of Ebay thrown in). Japanese websites love text, and this is no exception. While there’s a few images here, the more you scroll down, the more text you end up seeing. You’d think that a shopping site would want to have more images to entice you, but the Japanese web aesthetic of textiness is strong with this one.

NicoNicoDouga

NicoNicoDouga is like the YouTube of Japan if YouTube wasn’t already the YouTube of Japan. It’s particularly known for the ability to add comments right onto the video screen. Once again, we see a ton of text. We’ll delve into why this is in a little bit, but it must be important if you cover your video website with text instead of video, right?

Gigazine

Gigazine is a popular tech blog in Japan. It’s full of strange color choices, missing padding, and advertisements. Though this site is fairly image heavy for a Japanese website, just keep in mind that it’s catered towards the more tech-savvy, which is obviously why this is such a beautiful website. Speaking of which, how many ads can you spot?

Japanese Website Aesthetic

So what is the “Japanese Website Aesthetic?” There are quite a few patterns that show up again and again in Japanese web design, I think.

  • A lot of text, really packed in there
  • Smallish sized images
  • Columns, usually three of them.
  • Poor use of white space / padding
  • (often) blue URL coloring
  • CHAOS

What does this sounds like… does it sound like American web design in the 90s / Yahoo’s current design to you? It certainly feels that way to me. How did this come to be? Why is Japan, the world’s leader in robotics, hybrid cars, and Gundam models, so far behind when it comes to the web? Where did they go wrong?

Mobile Phones

Mobile phones have ruled in Japan for quite a while, though personal computers are definitely catching up. Back when Americans were getting heavy laptops and Gateway computers, the Japanese were texting up a storm on their futuristic cell phones. Because of this alternate tech history, a lot of Japanese websites were designed for flip phones and eventually this became part of the aesthetic. To make a website work well on phones like this, you need to do a few things:

  • Skinny columns (that just go on top of each other on a mobile device)
  • Textiness… lots and lots of textiness.
  • Smaller images (they load faster!)

If you look at the example websites above, you’ll see that they have all of these things. While a lot of bigger companies have the resources to create completely separate designs for mobile and computer, smaller companies can’t do this. What’s the solution? They just end up making a website that (sort of) works in both. That explains why so many websites kind of look like they’re supposed be viewed on your phone… because they should viewed on your phone!

Slow Personal Computer Adoption

Nowadays individual computer use is really picking up in Japan. Ten or fifteen years ago, not so much. As I mentioned before, it was cell phones that won this war of Internet dominance. Now though, more and more people are starting to use personal computers. Although the current aesthetic has been built up around mobile phone use, I expect to see a shift as more and more people hop on computers. I don’t think Japan will catch up right away (it’s kind of like how developing nations are supposed to go through their industrial revolution, or something), though I do hope it moves pretty fast. I do not enjoy navigating you, Japanese web. You hurt my eyes.

Internet Explorer 6

When it comes to Internet Explorer 6 usage, Japan actually rolls in at third for the entire world. Only China (23.8%) and Korea (6.3%) out-muscle Japan (6.1%) in this out-of-date-browser-war. When you have this many people using such a terrible browser, you have to design with it in mind. IE6 limits what you can do design-wise, which means you have to make a choice: Do I make my website look not as good as it could be? Or, do I ignore this 6.1% of people and design how I want?

This isn’t even when you take into account IE7, which is better, but still not all that great to work with. Until people upgrade to better and more modern browsers, better design will remain more difficult. Not impossible, but this certainly doesn’t make things any easier. How do you get around this? Flashhhhh.

Flash

Remember when America was all into Flash? I feel like Japan’s been going through that lately, which seems right on target because they’ve always been about 10 years behind in the game that is web design. If you design in Flash, you don’t have to worry so much about IE6. That being said, the most popular phone in Japan (iPhone) doesn’t work with Flash. Right now Japanese web design is a little too buddy-buddy with flash in my opinion. It makes for poor user experience, generally, which goes right along with all the other problems that Japanese web design has. Hopefully we’ll see them kick this “fad” to the side of the road here pretty soon, especially with touchscreen mobile getting so important.

It’s Not All Bad, Though

All that being said, there’s a lot of great web design coming from Japan as well. To round out this article, I thought I’d share some examples of beautiful web design. Click on the images to see the actual site in action.

Uniqlo

Ishiyama Senkoh

toyota art

Toyota Municipal Museum Of Art

Hanamichiya

Swiss

Taromagazine

Takeo Paper Show

While a lot of these websites are a lot better looking (in my opinion) than the examples shown at the top of this article, though some of them are done in Flash (ick). I suppose if you’re looking to design with IE6 in mind, Flash is a good way to get around that?

Whatever happens, though, I’m really looking forward to the evolution of Japanese web design. With everything except web design, Japan has such an interesting aesthetic. If it could be applied to Japanese web design, well, I think we’ll end up seeing some really innovative stuff.

So, here’s to hoping they don’t actually follow in our footsteps. If they can avoid the phase where everything’s a ridiculous gradient… well… I’ll be happy. Wabi-sabi it up, please.

Newer Comments →
  • Paladin341

    IE6? Wow….  You’d think they would start using Google Chrome more since Google Maps has so much love in Japan.

  • Dy~

    For a country that’s so tech savy, they sure are behind – hopefully they’ll catch up rather quick

  • http://twitter.com/WackoMcGoose Kimura

    If I ever get enough money to do a homestay in Japan, once I get settled in with my new 家族, one of the first things I’m doing is getting them to install Firefox.

  • Flayer Marian

    To be honest most the Japanese sites for businesses outside of the internet (Weekly Shouen Jump as an example) have imo really good pages.

  • http://www.trainerkelly.net/ Kelly

    I love that I’m not the only one thinking this when I look at Japanese websites. XD I love their language, culture, and all, but man! Their web design is so behind. The cellphone reason makes 100% sense, but still. They could do something much more visually appealing. Most Japanese websites I’ve been on make me want to claw my eyes out they’re so badly done.  OTL Hopefully they’ll catch up soon enough.

  • Flayer Marian

    Nah never mind. Jump’s pages sucks. Its different from the stlye they had some month ago.

  • Tess

    I remember trying to buy books from Japanese Amazon…….. I remember thinking I was lucky I got the right things xD

  • RAWRRAWRDINOSAWR

    I was always wondering why Japanese websites look so crappy! :D I thought it was just a nostalgia thing. I had a speaking partner – totally awesome guy; I was a freshman undergrad and he’s like reaching for his macroeconomics PhD and works for the government already – and we were talking about the internet one time. I brought up Yahoo! JAPAN – the worst offender, if you ask me; makes Rakuten look tidy – and I just asked,

    “So, why do Japanese websites look so crappy?”
    “I…” He paused. “I don’t…know… D: They do, don’t they. Why do they do that??”

    I feel like the person who reveals to young children that cool things aren’t actually that cool. THAT person. Hopefully, I have not changed his entire worldview. 

  • coldcaption

    I see that a lot of American web designers just ignore IE completely. In high school they all had some old version and websites would display with all kinds of layout problems. I didn’t hold that against them because I don’t think web designers should have to put up with it; if people won’t get better browsers, it’s on them!

  • Extrarice

    I wonder if the markup semantics for both HTML and CSS being English might also contribute to not-as-slick website design? I can’t imagine my English-speaking-self being able to code anything if the semantic structure was based on, say, Farsi.

  • JatinChittoor

    Yea, I always thought Japan was lacking in the IT sector and that’s why their web pages are so wordy!

  • testyal1

    Now that’s an idea. Making a chair out of ス and other fun characters.

  • Jateku

    This explains a lot!
    I was always wondering why Japanese websites almost always look like yahoo :b 
    I’m sure Japanese are the same way with american websites.

  • http://last.fm/user/ars-poetica Kairi

    It’s so awful that it can only get better (I hope).

  • Stroopwafel

    Can anyone tell me, is that スイス website really just a site where you order a tiny chair in the shape of a katakana ス?
    Could anyone tell me if they ship to Holland?

  • ですこ

     You broke that man. He may never Internet again.

  • ですこ

     I’d buy a chair made out of 椅.

  • http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=607790802 Alex Napoli

    This question has been on my mind for about a year now, but every Japanese person I’ve asked thinks the web design is perfectly fine.

  • http://www.vietamins.com Viet

    Yep. This is a large trend among web designers. Sometimes it costs a lot of money and time (and headaches) to write up an alternative design/hacks just to support IE. Weighing the options, it’s not worth supporting for some.

  • Kevin Lee James

    Well, seeing as Yahoo still dominates Google in Japan it’s not that surprising. 

  • http://www.tofugu.com/ Hashi

    Yeah, I’ve always kind of wondered that too.

  • coldcaption

    I took a class in that high school for “Advanced web design.” It was nice because I already knew a lot of the material, except my teacher graded with IE. I made the same case to her and she was rather immovable over it, but she sometimes would accept layout issues because of it anyway. It killed me when I’d work on a design for hours at home and bring it to school to find it backwards and upside down.
    Love your designs here, by the way. Gorgeous stuff!

  • Xsuna

    Yeah, got to agree with this post. As feel as that, any idea why they tend to use quite an ugly font in many things, not just websites but also things like some video games?

  • Kevin Lee James

    The bright side to this is, like the end of this post says, Japan still has some amazing web and graphic design amongst all the utter crap; especially from some bloggers over there. Love the YowaYowaCamera blog. Simplistic. 

  • ChaseM314

    ¥39,800 seems a little steep for a chair shaped like a ス. 

  • hobbid hobbin

    Am I the only one who thinks the text based pages work better? I really the like the whole total chaos sort of thing. 

  • lightroy

    Oh, so there are also well-designed ones XD wasn’t aware of that.
    Anyway, I hope this will change soon. The zen art and concept of perfection applied to web design would be..well, great. As it should be, imho.

  • DenjinJ

    Japanese fonts are orders of magnitude bigger than English ones, not counting full multilingual Unicode ones. They can be quite expensive and you can’t really assume most people have a lot of them, so you kind of get a “serif” (common sorta brushlike) one, and a clean sans-serif one.

  • DenjinJ

    I definitely prefer them – they’re low on resource usage and widely compatible. It’s way nicer than say, most English sites for car makers, where the site is either a huge Flash object or behaves like one, and if you have a different browser than they made it for, you get screwed up drop down menus that might pop up across the screen, or vanish when you try to select something from them. Or the site may lag a second when you click something as it loads a fullscreen image in an attempt to be some kind of magazine layout or something.

    It’s like in Japan they tend to think “we want people to be able to use this site whatever they have to access it with” while a lot of bigger English sites seem more like “if visitors aren’t using my favourite browser, then screw ‘em – they wouldn’t get my brilliance anyway.”

    Sadly that seems to be infecting Japan now too? Say what you will about the old sites, but in the examples here, the functionality of the old ones looks clear, and the new ones look like they’d be nice to hang in a gallery, but from those screenshots it’s almost like a puzzle trying to guess how they might work.

  • Shirokuma

    Actually, a print designer once pointed out to me that Web site design in Japan mirrors the primary principles of print design here: The so-called makunouchi bento layout. Look at the pages of any major consumer information-oriented magazine (Trendy and Mono are two particularly egregious examples), and you’ll see what he means. First you make a lot of boxes, then you fill them with stuff.

    Funny, because the classic design aesthetic here was often so spare, even dramatic… But it’s good to see some examples of that finally turning up on the Web, too (although some go the other extreme–there are sites that are so spare as to be completely inscrutable!).

  • Natalia

    Shirokuma’s on the money – many magazines are similarly cluttered and chaotic. Great article!

  • http://twitter.com/Jomann Jomann

    Recently nico douga has rolled out a new web design for premium users called “nico zero”
    its a really modern take on their old layout, and everyone that I has used it said its “hard to use”.
    also a lot of japanese people on nico I see they use internet explorer when browsing the web.

  • http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=1130205792 Lars Bauer

    wohoho, thank you :D
    it’s just i like another japanese website and i’m like: omg! this looks like a webpage i built at some free space at the age of 14. it really does

  • Xxx

    ジャップのWEBデザイン糞すぎワロタwなんで2003年ぽいんだよwww
    http://engawa.2ch.net/test/read.cgi/poverty/1337109555/

  • http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=100001462817558 Michael Baltazar

    So everyone is Japan were using cell phones but now they are transitioning to personal computers? Does that mean not many people there use laptops or tablets? And if they used cell phones, are they using smart phones now?

  • http://www.tofugu.com koichi

    Just saying that personal computers / laptops / etc are getting more popular compared to before. Both are pretty necessary, though, and phones are still the winnarrs

  • cmm

    I don’t agree with you at all.

    Chaotic and festival design match with the character of NicoNico Doga more than looks-well-designed but totally empty website. The design of Rakuten imitates the design of advertisement by supermarket distributed everyday with newspaper. Have you ever seen that kind of advertisements? Gigazine inherits the atmosphere of text-based site in the early days of internete. The design matches with the dubious character of the website as a source of information.

    Web browsing with cellphone is not relevant at all. They all have substantial reason for their design and you are just missing the point because of your superficial aesthetic.

  • Travisnamewebster

    Doesn’t Japan have spies to take other peoples ideas? Or is that just all the other countries. Lol

  • linguarum

    A similar thought – When people think of Japan, they think cool design and architecture. So when I first went to Japan, I was surprised to see so many buildings are boring, gray, and rectangular, kind of like a Stalin-era prison. I think it’s the same with Web design as with architecture – old and utilitarian tends to win out over new, cool and designy.

  • Empathyart

    That swiss design is awesome.

  • Airwalker

    One thing I find annoying about Japanese web sites are small images on blogs. I understand that they are practical for fast loading times on phones, but then when I proceed to click on them in an attempt to see what’s actually there, they’re still just as tiny!

  • http://www.facebook.com/jathon.thompson Jathon Thompson

    Japan + Web Design = my kinda article. :D

  • http://twitter.com/akky Akky Akimoto

    I agree with cmm. Those designs are well considered for majority Japanese users, that’s why they beat their competitors. You should also think that the difference of characteristics between ideogram(Kanji) and phonogram(Roman alphabet). Just filling Japanese text into so-called modern western web design will not be the best for local market.

  • ですこ

     You mean… people who visit other websites…?

  • Hinoema

    So if flash is (ick), what do you think of JSP?

  • http://twitter.com/suiius Yui OKADA (SUZUKI)

    All of his “better samples” are made in Flash era of Japan, I suppose. Yes, we finished “all into Flash” period in this 3 years (because of iPhone and iPad) and struggling next design standard with HTML5… this is just my opinion though. 
    Actually I haven’t thought about portal-sites-like text-oriented-design sites really because many of these websites have never changed their website structure from their start so this article’s point of view is very interesting, thanks.

  • Stroopwafel

    あっ　ちょっと高いですね

  • Sssss…

    Brilliant topic and article. I retweeted this earlier today.

  • http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=1567001652 Jamal Antonio

    My thoughts exactly :P

  • http://www.spinxwebdesign.com/custom-web-design/ spinxwebdesign

    Well found, it seems whether this web design is a past history or may be what the future of web may switch to such a mode of designing in order to make it look good in all those mobile phones which has induced those Japanese to build such websites long time before.

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