I just want to add that in addition to peculiar web design, Japanese websites have a way of assuming architectures or usage patterns where servers need to sleep or do some kind of scheduled job, which is really weird for people used to sites that need to account for a range of timezones or 24/7 availability (unless there is a pre-announced downtime that exists as a one-off thing). I know at least three websites off the top of my head that go down for "maintenance" at an exact scheduled time for hours every day, assuming that users would never want to access them overseas during those times (actually, one of those three doesn't even announce the reason, it just returns "server failed to respond" errors until it's time to "open up" for business again). Many services work fine (at least a quarter to a half of Japanese web services are awful even though they eventually work if you can strangle yourself into making it work), but the floor for Japanese web services is way below the floor for American ones. Those sites can get really, really mindnumbingly bad both on the front end and back end. I'm not sure what the cause is, but it must be a variety of factors.
abustamam 25 minutes ago [-]
A pet peeve of mine — undated blogs :(
iamnothere 1 hours ago [-]
I prefer the Japanese style. Information dense, yet clean. It reminds me of the web before Apple-style minimalism took over.
To contrast with a superficially similar style, Chinese web stores are also maximalist, but they tend to assault you with popup coupons, confetti effects, and other such things. Japanese style feels very efficient and utilitarian by comparison.
kccqzy 25 minutes ago [-]
I think you made a good observation about what’s in essence different between the Chinese style and the Japanese style. The popup coupons and confetti effects are all animations. Personally I find these animations highly distracting. Whereas if something is information dense but static, I like it.
(There are also non-store Chinese designs; they are not trying to sell anything so they don’t need coupons and confettis. These are actually enjoyable to use. And they are more information dense than the English equivalent because the Chinese script packs more in a smaller space. This of course makes such designs i18n-hostile.)
xattt 9 minutes ago [-]
They feel like paper catalogues!
mc32 46 minutes ago [-]
It reminds me of the “portal” era of Netscape, Excite and Yahoo. Very information dense. Among others’, Google’s minimalism took over.
iamnothere 41 minutes ago [-]
There are still a few information dense English language sites out there, but they’re rarer. Honorable mentions:
(These are primarily text and lack the occasional color pop of the Japanese style, but I still admire the density and efficiency.)
rickcarlino 32 minutes ago [-]
Are westerners entering a period of “minimalism fatigue”? Anecdotally it seems like color and texture are slowly taking hold in designs, especially in works targeting a younger demographic.
Example: liquid glass, anything published by Taco Bell, the meme of making sites look like they came from Geocities in 99, etc...
Cthulhu_ 27 minutes ago [-]
Maybe it's just a slow design trend, these things come and go.
WD-42 22 minutes ago [-]
I hope so. I fancy myself pretty decent at reading. I see the Japanese sites and marvel at the amount of information they have available at a glance. I’m so sick of having to scroll 5 page lengths on western sites just to get to any meaningful information.
tshaddox 37 minutes ago [-]
> While the nation is known abroad for minimalist lifestyles, their websites are oddly maximalist.
I’m not aware of this stereotype of Japanese minimalism. I guess there’s Marie Kondo, and some Japanese high-end dining tends towards minimalism. But then there’s manga, anime, kawaii, Nintendo, Sega, Miyazaki, etc., a lot of which is closer to maximalism than minimalism.
Cpoll 23 minutes ago [-]
You also have wabi-sabi and all the other bits of Zen Buddhism we've imported.
m4rtink 34 minutes ago [-]
Do not forget the Tokugawa tomb in Nikko. ;-)
trashb 56 minutes ago [-]
I think there are some important points missing.
Japanese society can adopt things fast the "keitai denwa" where created and adopted earlier than anywhere in the world but in 2025 most companies still use fax machines. The japanese society seems to have different citeria for adoption and depreciation of technology (compared to the west).
When considering web layout you have to consider traditional media layout for example magazines, newspapers, books, flyers or comics. With the japanese language it is possible to layout your articles (text) in different directions left-to-right, top-to-bottom and top-to-bottom, right-to-left. Magazines are read from (western)back to front. Basically there is more flexibility in layout compared to other languages but translating that tradition to the web is difficult today and historically was very difficult.
Most visited websites are news pages, those will be layed out more similar to a traditional newspaper. In japan they often adopted a column layout where in the west we adopted a more list like (row layout) format.
As stated in the article CJK characters are problematic, however the japanese text especially is confusing (because they tried to solve it early on) on the encoding side as there are a few standards that don't cooperate. Especially on the early internet due to technical limitations and a fractured technology landscape (different devices, and operating systems).
Therefore a lot of websites that wanted more advanced layouts opted for (and still do) publishing images embedded in html for more advanced font and layouts.
Also most japanese primarily visit japanese language text websites and therefore don't come in contact with the western website design styles very often. A lot of non English speaking countries have this however in japan it is common because of the relative cultural separation. Most japanese just don't interact with companies people or media outside of japan often, a huge part of this is because they are a first world country that has a very low English proficiency. leading to the two styles evolving independently.
The company was well known amongst the web development industry, as it was often referenced at colleges and universities.
esafak 47 minutes ago [-]
I don't like it. I feel like every element in the page is shouting at me, abandoning any notion of visual hierarchy. I wonder how Japanese designers regard that concept.
The funny thing is, Western minimalism is strongly influenced by Zen, which is diametrically opposed to this.
matthewkayin 17 minutes ago [-]
I respectfully disagree. If you compare the western designs in the article to the Japanese ones, the western designs have these giant banners and images that insist on themselves. Those are the ones that are shouting. It's like the Japanese pages are presenting information and the western pages are trying to be highway ad banners.
resoluteteeth 22 minutes ago [-]
That page is a few years old and it's much less the case now, which seems to disprove most of the broad cultural conclusions people are trying to draw based on it.
klez 1 hours ago [-]
I believe this is a continuation of her video on the same topic. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z6ep308goxQ . It's been on my to-watch list for a while. I guess it's time to check it out.
montenegrohugo 1 hours ago [-]
I found this gem. Hadn't seen it on HN yet, so I thought I'd post it!
I've always found Japanese design fascinating
1 hours ago [-]
xp84 1 hours ago [-]
I personally think it’s a feature and not a bug that web minimalism didn’t impact Japan in the same way it did here in the West. Giant images everywhere, and hiding most complexity behind the ubiquitous ••• buttons, is hostile to discoverability and usability. Our motto: “Hide everything that isn’t specifically earning money, or vitally important to the funnel to maximize our KPI!”
I’m not pretending to understand the why better than the author of this piece - just saying I’m happy for Japan.
cosmic_cheese 45 minutes ago [-]
The sooner three-dot and hamburger menus fall out of favor the better. They're a couple of those UI patterns where 8-9 times out of 10 there was probably a more suitable pattern that should've been used instead.
ctmnt 30 minutes ago [-]
I agree that they’re bad patterns (the three dot menu particularly so, it often just looks like a mistake), but what would be more functional on a small screen? I’d love to see some good alternatives that I could adopt in my own projects.
Nifty3929 20 minutes ago [-]
Hidden / disappearing controls are so irritating!
Where's the button? Where's the button? I know it must be here somewhere... (accidentally hovering mouse over something) OH THERE IT IS!!
1 hours ago [-]
doodaddy 46 minutes ago [-]
This goes beyond just web design. In Japan, UIs in general steer toward being information dense. At first glance they look positively ancient. And while they take some time to become familiar they seem to be first and foremost, functional. Frankly I wish we in the west would focus more on function and sticking with it instead of hopping to whatever the UI/UX trend of the day is. It seems to me that the more focus there is on UI/UX the worse the experience gets.
m4rtink 27 minutes ago [-]
Yeah! I am using renshuu[0] to learn Japanese and the UI totally bombards you with information - reading, pronunciation, example sentences, additional information sources, mnemotechnical hints from the community, etc.
Not to mention there being an insane amount of ways you can learn, word games, achievements and even a virtual Japanese garden you can populate with items and animals you unlock as you progress in your studies. :)
And I love it! It works so much better for me to learn the words and characters that way, possibly due to all the added context. Its just so much better than "western" minimalistic learning tools and bland apps in general. :)
I took 3 years of Japanese in HS (96-99). About 2 years ago I was doing a lot of work with genai and japanese typefaces. It was wild digging into how different the japanese web is. Back in like 2005, it was common to stylize english text by embedding it in an image and then applying drop shadows, etc. By 2022 everyone does the vast majority of that within CSS. Not in Japan though, I couldn't believe how much text content is still in image form.
rolymath 52 minutes ago [-]
I think the answer is more obvious: The average Japanese web designer doesn't assume his user is an idiot, while western design is more condescending
Rendered at 16:14:36 GMT+0000 (Coordinated Universal Time) with Vercel.
I just want to add that in addition to peculiar web design, Japanese websites have a way of assuming architectures or usage patterns where servers need to sleep or do some kind of scheduled job, which is really weird for people used to sites that need to account for a range of timezones or 24/7 availability (unless there is a pre-announced downtime that exists as a one-off thing). I know at least three websites off the top of my head that go down for "maintenance" at an exact scheduled time for hours every day, assuming that users would never want to access them overseas during those times (actually, one of those three doesn't even announce the reason, it just returns "server failed to respond" errors until it's time to "open up" for business again). Many services work fine (at least a quarter to a half of Japanese web services are awful even though they eventually work if you can strangle yourself into making it work), but the floor for Japanese web services is way below the floor for American ones. Those sites can get really, really mindnumbingly bad both on the front end and back end. I'm not sure what the cause is, but it must be a variety of factors.
To contrast with a superficially similar style, Chinese web stores are also maximalist, but they tend to assault you with popup coupons, confetti effects, and other such things. Japanese style feels very efficient and utilitarian by comparison.
(There are also non-store Chinese designs; they are not trying to sell anything so they don’t need coupons and confettis. These are actually enjoyable to use. And they are more information dense than the English equivalent because the Chinese script packs more in a smaller space. This of course makes such designs i18n-hostile.)
- https://based.cooking/ (or the more updated fork https://publicdomainrecipes.com/)
- https://ooh.directory/
- https://gwern.net/
- https://www.metafilter.com/
- HN :)
(These are primarily text and lack the occasional color pop of the Japanese style, but I still admire the density and efficiency.)
Example: liquid glass, anything published by Taco Bell, the meme of making sites look like they came from Geocities in 99, etc...
I’m not aware of this stereotype of Japanese minimalism. I guess there’s Marie Kondo, and some Japanese high-end dining tends towards minimalism. But then there’s manga, anime, kawaii, Nintendo, Sega, Miyazaki, etc., a lot of which is closer to maximalism than minimalism.
Japanese society can adopt things fast the "keitai denwa" where created and adopted earlier than anywhere in the world but in 2025 most companies still use fax machines. The japanese society seems to have different citeria for adoption and depreciation of technology (compared to the west).
When considering web layout you have to consider traditional media layout for example magazines, newspapers, books, flyers or comics. With the japanese language it is possible to layout your articles (text) in different directions left-to-right, top-to-bottom and top-to-bottom, right-to-left. Magazines are read from (western)back to front. Basically there is more flexibility in layout compared to other languages but translating that tradition to the web is difficult today and historically was very difficult.
Most visited websites are news pages, those will be layed out more similar to a traditional newspaper. In japan they often adopted a column layout where in the west we adopted a more list like (row layout) format.
As stated in the article CJK characters are problematic, however the japanese text especially is confusing (because they tried to solve it early on) on the encoding side as there are a few standards that don't cooperate. Especially on the early internet due to technical limitations and a fractured technology landscape (different devices, and operating systems). Therefore a lot of websites that wanted more advanced layouts opted for (and still do) publishing images embedded in html for more advanced font and layouts.
Also most japanese primarily visit japanese language text websites and therefore don't come in contact with the western website design styles very often. A lot of non English speaking countries have this however in japan it is common because of the relative cultural separation. Most japanese just don't interact with companies people or media outside of japan often, a huge part of this is because they are a first world country that has a very low English proficiency. leading to the two styles evolving independently.
The company was well known amongst the web development industry, as it was often referenced at colleges and universities.
The funny thing is, Western minimalism is strongly influenced by Zen, which is diametrically opposed to this.
I've always found Japanese design fascinating
I’m not pretending to understand the why better than the author of this piece - just saying I’m happy for Japan.
Where's the button? Where's the button? I know it must be here somewhere... (accidentally hovering mouse over something) OH THERE IT IS!!
Not to mention there being an insane amount of ways you can learn, word games, achievements and even a virtual Japanese garden you can populate with items and animals you unlock as you progress in your studies. :)
And I love it! It works so much better for me to learn the words and characters that way, possibly due to all the added context. Its just so much better than "western" minimalistic learning tools and bland apps in general. :)
[0] https://www.renshuu.org/