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 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.

At this point, everyone should know that Japanese people like their cell phones. In Japan, we are seeing a decline in personal computer use and a bigger interest in more versatile mobiles (the video’s a fake, but there’s still a lot of truth in it, nonetheless). On Japanese phones there are coupon scanners, television tuners (for at least the last 5-6 years), cell phone internet speeds faster than America will ever achieve (well, maybe if Japan shares), and so much more. The point is, Japanese cell phones are the s**t, and American cell phones are not.

This morning I read this article. It was early and I was feeling a little bleary-eyed. I scanned through it and thought that it said that half of Japanese top-10 books are read on cell phones. “Okay, great,” I thought. “This sounds about right.” Americans, even, are starting to enjoy the flexibility of reading e-books on their cell phones, not to mention Amazon’s new Kindle. Granted, I was surprised that Japan was only this far ahead. Normally when it comes to cell phones and technology (and ninjas) we have to look up to them like a third-world nation. The fact is, I was totally off, and I was totally blown away by the real story, which was this:

It turns out that the article was not talking about people reading their books on cell phones. That is old news. That has been going on for years and years. The story here is that people are writing novels on cell phones. They are sitting down with their little 9-key phones and typing something up at unimaginable speeds with their tiny, muscly, fingers tapping in sinewy abandon. The most remarkable part of this is that half of Japan’s top-ten books during the first six months of this year were written on cell phones. The next thing I wanted to know was how people are actually writing these. Rin (pen name), who has sold 420,000 hard cover copies of her 142-page novel Moshimo Kimiga (If You …), says this:

“I typed it all on my mobile phone,” Rin explains matter-of-factly over the same device. “I started writing novels on my mobile when I was in junior high school and I got really quick with my thumbs, so after a while it didn’t take so long. I never planned to be a novelist, if that’s what you’d call me, so I’m still quite shocked at how successful it’s turned out.”

I’m shocked too, honestly. How could books like this become so popular? The reason is this:

Usually they are written by first-time writers, using one-name pseudonyms, for an audience of young female readers – who, in Japan especially, consult their mobile phones so regularly that the habit could be mistaken for a tic. The stories traverse teen romance, sex, drugs and other adolescent terrain in a succession of clipped one-liners, emoticons and spaces (used to show that a character is thinking), all of which can be read easily on a mobile phone interface. Scene and character development are notably missing…

Toru Ishikawa, a professor of Japanese literature at Tokyo’s Keio University, points out that Japanese mobile phones allow their owners only a limited selection of kanji, the Chinese characters regarded by Japanese as more intellectually demanding than their native syllabary. “The size of the screen also necessitates that [authors] use short, simple sentences with basic words. If that’s how you measure the quality of literature, then yes, the prevalence of writing like this will water down Japanese literature.

Emoticons are the really startling thing. Even I, as someone who is fairly liberal with his writing style (tofugu is a poor example of this supposed liberalism) am shocked and displeased with the idea of a novel being written with emoticons. Then again Japanese emoticons are ridiculously detailed and include more content than a burlap bag full of bobcats, so maybe there is some weight to their “dirty” writing.

One of the neat things about these cell-phone written books is the contributions that fans make.

“It might seem strange that young readers are going out and buying the book after they’ve already read the story on their mobile. Often it’s because they email suggestions and criticisms to the author on the novel website as the story is unfolding, so they feel like they’ve contributed to the final product, and they want a hardcopy keepsake of it.”

I’m not sure what I particularly think about these kinds of novels. I’m not a big fan of lolz-internets talk, which I would say is the rough equivalent to these cell phone novels. Then again, language does change over time, and as generations get older certain things become standard and others become old (kind of like the way my parents talk). Even so, I can’t help but think this is very similar to the genbunitchi (言文一致) movement back during the Meiji Era, where Japanese literary giants decided that they should write the way they speak (instead of like eg0-tripping elite samurai), and that was a huge and irritating change for them as well. Crazy hippies.

I hope to God, though, that we don’t begin writing with 5ymb01s and number5. Reading a novel like that sounds almost as inconvenient as writing a novel on your cell phone.

Source: SMH