Randomwire

See https://randomwire.com/why-japanese-web-design-is-so-different/ It is amazing that almost 10 years have passed since this article, but the example web sites are still more or less the same.

I love that Shimadzu ad with the DeLorean in the Edo period later into the article. https://randomwire.com/wp-content/uploads/japan-back-to-the-future.jpe… 江戸時代から科学の子ども。 "From the Edo period, science's children." My translation here may not be super great - it's backed up by looking up and seeing that the Shimadzu Corporation has always made instruments for educational scientific measurement and was founded in the Meiji, 1875, which is only in the decade after the end of the Edo period.

So true and so sad. From the great innovator to the follower. I also realised that the people are quite inflexible and unwilling to change. The following article explains it so well. Although it's about design/web but it gives you an insight to how Japanese think. http://randomwire.com/why-japanese-web-design-is-so-different/

I'm suddenly reminded of this article: https://randomwire.com/why-japanese-web-design-is-so-different/

This article is from 2014. Looks like there is a 2013 version here: https://randomwire.com/why-japanese-web-design-is-so-different/ https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25148942 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16254569 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6718067

Good article on this from a few years ago https://randomwire.com/why-japanese-web-design-is-so-different/

Because most people accessed the internet on their clamshell phones and not through a PC/laptop. So most websites were designed to be mostly text and easily browsed from clamshell-phone internet browsers. Now that smartphones have become ubiquitous more sites are finally being designed to look nice on smartphones - sometimes still at the consequence of desktop use. It took a few years after the iPhone release (aka: for it to get widespread market adoption) for JP websites to start "catching up" with Western web design. There are some other reasons too - but I'd wager the above is the #1 reason and others are more of an "in addition to that" type thing. More info: https://randomwire.com/why-japanese-web-design-is-so-different/

Somewhat off-topic, but I find that Zoji Neuro Fuzzy rice cooker linked in the article[1] extraordinarily ugly — it looks more like a medical device than a kitchen appliance to me. It's interesting to me that while Japanese design is generally very much appreciated and admired in the west, there are some areas where their design just doesn't translate to western aesthetics — and, at least to an outsider's perspective, seems almost an antithesis to the idea of Japanese design. I'm thinking also of the recent article [2] about Japanese web design. 1: http://www.zojirushi.com/app/product/nszcc 2: https://randomwire.com/why-japanese-web-design-is-so-different/

This article reminds me of Japanese web design and how dense it is. It's almost a bit like the 'western' web when Craigslist was first launched. Ultradense, kind of ugly, but extremely utilitarian. https://randomwire.com/why-japanese-web-design-is-so-different/

It's not just Japanese, Chinese also. An article not long ago theorized some reasoning behind it: https://randomwire.com/why-japanese-web-design-is-so-different/

That just looks like a different aesthetic. Much like Korea and Japan[1]; they could make minimalist webpages in the Western style, but they choose not to. [1] https://randomwire.com/why-japanese-web-design-is-so-different/ and https://www.translatemedia.com/translation-blog/website-design-in-asia… and http://digitalcommunications.wp.st-andrews.ac.uk/2016/03/03/why-is-eas… and so on

Better to link to the original source article: https://randomwire.com/why-japanese-web-design-is-so-different/

What is considered as good design depends a lot on the zeitgeist and culture. For example in Asia (e.g. China, but also Japan) there is a rather different taste what is considered as a well-designed website: https://econsultancy.com/blog/67466-why-do-chinese-websites-look-so-bu… http://blog.teamtreehouse.com/why-is-chinese-web-design-so-bad https://randomwire.com/why-japanese-web-design-is-so-different/

I don't speak Japanese, nor do I know particularly much about their culture or how it might be changing - but there's a quite common topic of differences between "western and asian" web design. So maybe you should keep it separate and have a more targeted design for each language. https://randomwire.com/why-japanese-web-design-is-so-different/ The product I work on has both English as well as multiple Asian languages but we keep them the same just using different languages for each.

Interestingly, there are some cultural differences in web design, Japanese for example expect a cluttered website: http://webdesign.tutsplus.com/articles/big-in-japan-web-design-in-the-… https://randomwire.com/why-japanese-web-design-is-so-different/ http://blog.teamtreehouse.com/why-is-chinese-web-design-so-bad

Some interesting parallels here to Japanese web design, which is also traditionally notoriously dense and link-heavy: https://randomwire.com/why-japanese-web-design-is-so-different/

In Japan they have a game arcade inspired by the KWC: http://randomwire.com/kowloon-walled-city-rebuilt-in-japan/

Should move the corporate to China and clone the heck out of everything. Facebook -> RenRen Twitter -> Weibo YouTube -> Tudou Google -> Baidu Flickr -> YuPoo See http://www.randomwire.com/chinese-web-20-clones Yeah, Trolls, go ahead and sue them.

Prior art? 2009 - http://www.randomwire.com/storing-sensitive-data-in-the-cloud 2008 - http://firmit.wordpress.com/2008/10/28/truecrypt-virtual-encrypted/

It's reputational hangover from I would say maybe the 80s. My experience in Japan was totally the opposite. Most people's emails are something like [email protected] because that's the email their phone provider gave them, and they don't know how to check their email if they lose their mobile phone. Internet access is sparse - not even the starbucks at the famous shinjuku intersection had wifi when I was there in 2014. If you want internet, you need to go to an internet cafe - those places that people sometimes just move into as cheap apartments. To do that, you need to register for a card... with a Japanese phone number and a Japanese bank. You want any paperwork done, it'll involve a fax. No, scanning and emailing will not work, sorry. No, you can't just bring the paper in, it must arrive via the fax machine. Japanese websites: https://randomwire.com/why-japanese-web-design-is-so-different/ Etc.

I've lived in public housing in Singapore and have experienced the noise (and sometimes worse) of neighbors above and below. The cheapness of construction is definitely a factor in the experience - in nicer (private) apartments, there's less disturbance, and less chance of being dripped on by an air conditioner or hung-out washing. That said, when I visited Hong Kong, I stood at the base of the gigantic blocks of housing there and marveled at how they were the equivalent of small towns. They're: - significantly taller than most Singaporean public housing - have more shops packed on their ground levels - packed much closer (very little space between blocks) so they really feel a whole different level of dense (and Singapore is very dense already). Staring up at their brutally uniform towering shapes is quite the feeling. If they were interconnected and had open corridors between blocks, I could imagine playing a rather interesting game of tag across many buildings. I guess that's pretty much what the Kowloon Walled City[1] was. Dense megacities are interesting in their own right, even if they're not nice to live in (as dystopic cities in cyberfunk fiction show). Now I live in a house, but I miss the conveniences of being able to walk to a shop or bus stop/subway stop in 5 minutes. [1] Incidentally, an arcade in Kawasaki, Japan recreated the Kowloon Walled City - check out the rather interesting photographs at http://randomwire.com/kowloon-walled-city-rebuilt-in-japan -…