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This was an outstandingly well-done, informative read. It explains things I’ve pondered, and been frustrated by, for over forty years.
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Why Japan’s internet looks weird — unless you live here
Complex values, aesthetics and history have shaped a digital world that outsiders often misread
Dec 15, 2025
When I moved to Japan more than five years ago from the United States, where I worked for two design-forward digital media startups, I struggled with the Japanese internet.
The first challenge presented itself even before I arrived. I spoke no Japanese, knew little about living in Japan and needed to find an apartment. I was overwhelmed by how much information was crammed onto a single page of any of the real estate websites and how hard it was to find what I needed amid a thicket of text and details. Why was it even an option to choose a place within a seven-minute walk from the nearest train station? What was this long list in the left column of different combinations of letters — 3, D, L, K? What was the difference between a building that was two or three years old, and how much could it possibly matter? And why, in God’s name, wasn’t the list of prefectures in alphabetical order?
Despite some level of inurement over the years, in April I found myself floored once again. At the World Expo in Osaka, I was reminded of the wide gulf between Japan’s digital products and those of the West.
This year, as Japan made its bid for global relevance at the expo — which drew more than 25.5 million visitors to Kansai — attendees were stymied by the shoddy user experience (UX) of a world’s fair meant to show us the future. Themed “Designing Future Society for Our Lives,” the six-month-long event was plagued by a poor digital showing, with a head-bangingly confusing ticketing system, digital queues hundreds of people deep and endless scrolling pages explaining step-by-step how to use those pages. I was impressed by the way the fair’s digital design managed to feel both wildly overthought and underthought.
The expo demonstrated that what can sound like the minor grumblings of Japan’s foreign design-heads is actually a wider-reaching source of cultural and logistical friction, one that affects residents as well as tourists. As everyday life becomes increasingly digital, so does travel. A trip to Japan is no longer just trying to find a bar in Golden Gai with no cover charge or being shushed in Gion; discovery and collision alike happen in the streets — and on our phones. And just like a physical trip, a digital journey reveals the surprising and sometimes bewildering origins of local logic.
My space is not your space
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.
“The West has an aversion to information density at times,” says Shoin Wolfe, who runs Shoka Sonjuku, a data-driven growth agency that works with big corporations like Docomo and complicated databases like real estate site Lifull Home’s. Wolfe, who has lived half his life in the U.S. and half in Japan, says users in the West prefer negative space and color theory.
“(In web design) I think that negative space is an aesthetic, Western idea,” says Wolfe. “In the West, with physical products and just design in general, they have this idea that more negative space equals luxury.”
But in Japan, a minimally designed website could signal that the brand or product is underdeveloped or too simple, or that it’s a small, scrappy operation that doesn’t have the safety and security of corporate backing behind it.
“Sometimes you hear, ‘It’s too sabishii (lonely),’ whereas you (were aiming for) minimal,” says Raphael Hode, CEO of Nowthen, a creative agency based in Tokyo. “If you design a Japanese website that looks Western, it rarely works. You get feedback that it doesn’t.”
A Japanese real estate listing packs dozens of filters, labels and specs into a single view — a stark contrast to the pared-back, image-first layouts common on Western property sites.
| ANNA PETEK
Hode began his career in Paris as a brand and digital strategist before moving to Japan, where he has worked for the past decade. His design agency focuses on startups, mostly globally focused Japanese companies, as well as some foreign firms trying to enter the Japanese market. But, he says, if a client wants a fully bilingual site, he urges them to choose one language and audience to prioritize. Designs that work in Japanese and those that work in English are simply not interchangeable, he says.
If a company has an English site with a headline followed by two lines of text, for example, the Japanese version will contain more text, some five or six lines underneath the headline.
“I think if you’ve lived in Japan, intuitively you will see the same statement, and you’ll be like, ‘Hmm, yeah that’s not enough,’” Hode says.
In 2020, Lawson learned the hard way that too much minimalism can backfire. When the convenience store chain redesigned its branded product packaging to embrace negative space, it faced swift and loud mockery on Twitter. Users complained the now uniformly beige products looked too similar and gave no indication of the contents. The following year, Lawson found itself rebranding its rebrand. New packaging showed blown-up images, making it obvious what was inside.
Warning signs
Japanese customers are used to seeing a lot of information packed into tiny spaces — consider how much text you can find on the label of an onigiri (rice ball), for instance.
“Because one symbol (of kanji) can compress what would be four to six letters in an alphabetic language, we grow up being accustomed to processing dense visual information very quickly,” says Akiko Sakamoto, a freelance UX designer and design strategist who works between Kyoto and Tokyo.
Indeed, in a country preoccupied with safety, information overload is a part of daily life. Signs, posters, rules, maps and warnings proliferate in places where people want reassurance — train stations, post offices, even bathrooms. Readers might be familiar with the experience of checking into a traditional Japanese inn only to be slapped with an ultrapolite, sit-down orientation complete with a thick binder of rules and maps covering all possible concerns and questions.
There is a cultural tendency to overexplain, accounting for every possible use case, addressing every imagined user and even the slimmest of likelihoods. An American friend of mine with more than 20 years of experience as a UX designer was recently in Kyoto and posted a photo of a sign that read, “This is not Nijo Castle.” His own comment: “Good to know where I’m not.”
To control how multiple scripts appear together, designers often bake text into images, a workaround that prevents resizing, selection and screen-reader access.
| ANNA PETEK
It stands to reason that Japan’s digital products would take on the same tendency toward zealous exposition rather than simplification or curation.
And it’s what people want. Wolfe has the data to back it up.
In his work with Lifull Home’s, his team tested new designs to make the pages look more minimal. Cleaner with more negative space, the pages hid information that users rarely clicked. And yet, he says, the pared-down versions saw less engagement and fewer conversions.
So they reverted to the old design.
This doesn’t necessarily mean users dislike minimalism outright, notes Wolfe; perhaps they simply expect certain types of websites to look a particular way, or they resist changes to interfaces they’re used to.
By the time I moved to my third apartment in Japan, I for one was quite happy I could filter listings by “allows 24-7 garbage disposal” and “faces south,” and that I could toggle to apartments beyond a seven-minute walk from the station but not more than 10.
A font of problems
“Isn’t it just because foreigners can’t read Japanese?” a colleague said bluntly when I asked if she found the internet hard to use. I felt stupid. Is that all there is to it?
Well, no, or this article would end with this sentence.
But written language is indeed one of the most important pieces in this puzzle.
Kanji typefaces are, not surprisingly, designed differently from Roman alphabets. For one thing, the characters are drawn to fit into a box, while Roman letters are oriented to a baseline. Consider the words ALL and 全部 (zenbu), for instance. On the Japan Times website, they are both sized at 20 pixels, set to Utopia Std and Hiragino Mincho Pro respectively, but the Japanese word appears larger. In print, the kanji needs to be slightly smaller to account for the size difference. In other words, a designer who wants to use both Roman characters and kanji can’t just opt for a one-size-fits-all font and go for a coffee break.
As a set of characters or symbols, Japanese — along with Chinese and Korean, collectively known as the “CJK fonts” in industry jargon — is much heavier than the Roman alphabet. English, for example, might have a few hundred glyphs, while the basic Japanese set contains around 9,000. A professional typeface that includes specialized kanji used in people’s names can comprise as many as 23,000 glyphs. All that weight — somewhere between 30 and 75 times larger font files — means a Japanese website loads significantly more slowly than one in English.
Behind every Japanese website are large font files: thousands of kanji, kana and Roman glyphs that make each typeface far heavier — and more complex — than its alphabetic equivalents.
| ANNA PETEK
Chinese is just as large, but Japan has the added complication of two additional scripts — hiragana and katakana — or four total, if you count the Roman alphabet, which is often used on Japanese websites even when English isn’t available.
“If you put Japanese into the world’s languages and scripts, Japanese is special,” says typographer Eric Liu. “Very special.”
This has led to the uniquely frustrating experience of surfing the web in Japan and trying to highlight text to copy and paste or trying to translate a page, only to find the words are burned into the image. (I’m looking at you, Rakuten).
Fitting four scripts into tiny spaces can result in buttons and links that look odd and lopsided. In order to make the scripts look balanced beside each other, the designer has to do extra work. If she wants to include multiple fonts in one space, apply a graphic treatment to the font or use slightly different weights and sizes to make the text look more cohesive, the page can become painfully slow to load. So the designer works around it by creating a custom static version — that is, by creating the design just as she wants it, then locking it into an image.
This is generally considered bad design practice: The text in the image is not responsive, meaning it doesn’t adapt to different layouts; it can’t be edited easily; the information can’t be indexed or searched; and it can’t be read by text-to-speech software, creating accessibility barriers for illiterate and visually impaired users. Also, it’s really annoying.
Rakuten Cardman, played by actor Jay Kabira, brings a level of energy to credit card ads that might leave Western viewers bewildered but feels perfectly at home in Japan’s mascot economy.
| ANNA PETEK
Liu has lived in Japan for more than 20 years and is on the board of Association Typographique Internationale, a nonprofit global forum for type and typography. At the World Wide Web Consortium, where he’s an invited expert specializing in Chinese text layouts, he says there is a push to move Japanese designers away from these text-in-image work-arounds.
Still, he says, there is an obvious bias toward Western design norms.
“All the environment or the infrastructure was based on the Latin design; the operating system is made by the Americans, the keyboard is made by the Americans,” he says. “Westerners get used to this so-called ‘modern’ design, and they think everything should be like this. But when they put it into the CJK background, they found everything was different.” He points out that Adobe launched InDesign in 1999 — but it took another two years to launch the software for Japanese layouts.
“The type itself, the font itself, is different, but so is the environment around the type,” Liu says. “What you can do in the layout for the Japanese or Chinese — the environment itself — is quite different.”
‘Every day, yoroshiku’
In many ways, the look of Japan’s internet is a natural extension of its existing design and visual culture. While Japan evokes the Zen-like calm of Muji, tatami rooms and Jun'ichiro Tanizaki waxing poetic in the half-dark, it’s just as much the chaos of Shibuya Crossing, pachinko parlors and Don Quijote.
It may be the outsider’s high expectations for Japan’s renowned minimalism that makes its maximal spaces so striking — and so irritating.
Anyone who imagines Japan as all silence and shadows behind shoji screens needs only to watch five minutes of morning television to be disabused of that notion. Zany, outlandish, cartoony and overcrowded with graphics, bubbly scrolling text, exaggerated reactions and canned sound effects, these shows are their own category of maximal media.
The ads that run between segments can also seem nonsensical. In a 1999 analysis of Japanese TV commercials, global marketing professor Carolus Praet at Sapporo’s Otaru University of Commerce quoted a 1996 article in East Asian Executive Reports: “For the most part Japanese advertising has been ‘soft-sell,’ relying on the use of celebrities, attractive graphics, music or catchy slogans to sell products.” This was contrasted with “hard-sell” advertising, which uses “analytical logic, product comparison, or ‘annoy and attract attention’ tactics.”
This difference holds up 30 years later. A recent American ad for Pantene Pro-V shampoo shows anonymous women floating in space; shiny, voluptuous hair in close-up; before-and-after shots; and simulations of vitamins swirling into the soap formula, with the product name stated up front.
Meanwhile, a Japanese ad for Himawari shampoo features actor Wakana Matsumoto with smooth, shiny hair holding a bottle in her hands. Photos flash across the screen of her smiling profusely in her daily life, as she says, “From now on, every day, yoroshiku.” Only at the end of the commercial do we see and hear the product name, with a close-up on the bottle.
Japanese marketing, Praet concludes, leans more on cuteness, graphics, slogans, celebrities and mascots, which is why ads can seem chaotic, crowded and occasionally absurd to outsiders.
In print media, dense pages and covers are also the norm. In a video interview with Australian YouTuber Ken Sakata, illustrator Adrian Hogan shows a cover he worked on for the Japanese magazine Popeye, which features a collage of drawings of more than 20 men who were interviewed for the issue. Contrast this with the Time 100 List, whose recognizable covers typically feature just one of the selected celebrities or leaders — rarely more.
“A Japanese reader will tend to scan the whole page before making a selection,” says Hogan in the interview, noting that readers would prefer to see all the options laid out rather than a single dominant visual.
The politics of playing it safe
Sometimes, though, the answers are anodyne.
“There is totally a political and an aversion-to-failure aspect as to why bigger websites start to seem really bad,” Wolfe says. “And it’s really because they don’t want to fail.”
Sensitive to negative customer feedback or social media backlash, companies often choose not to retire features or pages that go largely unused. Rather than calculate the actual risk of taking something away, Wolfe says, the safest bet is to just keep adding to the page, resulting in dense and cluttered designs.
“Big companies do struggle from politics,” he adds. “Making digital products has always been seen as not as impressive as physical engineering, so it’s still to this day not taken as seriously by many bigger companies.”
Sakamoto echoes Wolfe. “I’ve often heard the idea that, when the internet began spreading in Japan, it was primarily used by entrepreneurs and tech-oriented people rather than traditional designers or artists,” she says. “Many first-generation Japanese websites were created by nondesigners. As a result, those early sites didn’t reflect traditional design principles or Japanese aesthetics, and that still affects the current design styles I suppose.”
In urban neighborhoods like Shibuya Center-gai in Tokyo, a crush of signs, lights and advertisements mirrors the maximalist instincts that also shape Japan’s busy, information-heavy web interfaces.
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Liu has lived in Japan long enough to know that small design irritations often have lengthy explanations for why they are the way they are.
He points to the Tokaido Shinkansen between Tokyo and Osaka as an example. At the front of each car, a digital ticker above the door provides station information as well as ads and updates.
For decades, this ticker also ran news and headlines, sent directly from contracted news agencies. It was a remarkably well done system, says Liu. But the news agencies have a longstanding tradition of using full-width characters in print to make character counts easy.
“(So) the display for Japanese is very elegant, but when it contains Western words...” he says, laughing. The display is huge — “one letter is bigger than my face,” he continues — so it can be read easily by anyone. But it’s so large that sometimes a single English word can’t fit within the space, making it look ridiculous.
“I know. I know why it is like that,” says Liu. “But I also understand how it's difficult to change, because they’d have to change the whole system.”
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Alan Zulch 17 hours ago 
srbh 11 hours ago Like Alan above, I've been loooking for this explanation for nearly 40 years. Excellent and well thought-out. Would follow a blog or regular section in JT on this subject.
J.P***y a day ago Now, If only Japan Times will put the comments box directly below the article so that the rare comment will be seen, a wee bit of discussion might take place.J.P***y a day ago Excellent essay that captures both the complexity and simplicity of contemporary (design) life in Japan.
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