Japan’s most popular homegrown websites are Yahoo! Japan, Docomo and Rakuten. To this outsider, they look chaotic as hell. Text-heavy, information-dense and plastered with mascots, the sites offer little by way of visual hierarchy telling users what to do or focus on first.
Rakuten and Docomo’s sites both have carousel banners with dozens of liberally applied burned-in images and fonts. Docomo also looks like the aftermath of an explosion at the font factory, one possibly perpetrated by the POiNCO Brothers, a pair of crazed omnipresent yellow parrots. The desktop version of Yahoo!, with its 70 text links, imparts the vibe of early 2000s internet with boxy design, slow load times and static pages, giving users the distinct feeling of being stuck in the past.
This is true across many different corners of Japan’s web: Business homepages that look like they were designed by a teenager in 1998; government websites where crucial information can only be found buried in PDFs; even websites purportedly meant to help graphic designers that are completely broken on mobile.
I’m not alone in my gripes. When Canadian YouTuber Sabrina Cruz posted “Why Japan’s internet is weirdly designed” in 2022, I watched eagerly, as did millions of others. Comments poured in, and responses popped up across various platforms. Know-it-all bloggers, speculating vloggers, LinkedIn designers and smug Redditors — both the disdainful and the defensive — chimed in with theories, all attempting to get to the bottom of Japan’s confounding web aesthetic.
Cruz’s video is heavy on the “weirdly designed” and light on the “why,” pointing mainly to Japan’s early adoption of mobile phones, and subsequent response videos drift into sweeping essentialist generalizations about East and West. And although there’s no single answer to the question of how Japan’s internet came to look the way it does, what was absent from the conversation were the perspectives of actual working designers in Japan.
Among the professionals I spoke to who straddle multiple design cultures, there was a consensus, perhaps not surprisingly, that the confusion simply comes down to cultural bias.
Apple stores are the embodiment of wasted space.
Otherwise, there are ways to use negative space to help direct the user to important information. It’s just often abused to direct them away from it to sell something, sadly.