Almost 10 years have passed since this article was posted, and things are quite different now. Most of the popular web pages have cleaned up, and new startups are mostly following modern international design trends.
Even sites that remained dense in terms of color (like the Rakuten top page), have more white-space around text, less columns, larger hi-res images, and carousel banners. Oh, and Flash is gone for good now.
The Japanese web became a great deal more usable, and in the same time popups are still less trendy here than abroad (although coupon and campaign popups are all over the place in e-commerce sites).
But I still shudder when I encounter an oldskool site. I don't care about the minimalist design, and if done correctly it can be quite fast and fun to use. But usually it comes with hefty price tag:
- These sites are rarely ever responsive. If you're lucky, there's a mobile version that works based on user agent sniffing, and often suffers from feature parity issues.
- You can expect a regular monthly maintenance window where the site will be shut down for multiple hours during midnight. You should keep an eye for this announcement.
- There are no cookie banners popping up, but nobody said anything about blinking gifs or bleeding red text.
- Forms are complicated and have weird validation rules. You usually enter your name which must be in Kanji (or Full Width latin alphabet characters if you don't have a Kanji name), and then a phonetic name which would be either Hiragana or Katakana - but there is no standard for that, and the site doesn't try to be nice and help you with auto-converting these things (although it's quite easy to do).
- Entering your address is also generally painful, since you have to first enter your zip code, and then choose your prefecture (usually on a tiny drop-down list which is arranged from north to south!) and street address. This address is then verified against your zip code, although it could have been auto-generated from your zip code.
- Lots of complex web apps are still written in circa-2000 frameworks that try to keep all the presentational state in a cookie or a URL parameter and won't let you use the back button or open multiple tabs.
- Worst of all, these text-heavy sites are not necessarily as fast as they should be some times, owing to poor hardware, or perhaps log files that haven't been cleaned up for the last 10 years and are now clogging up the disk on the poor host machine.
If you want an example for an old skool site that suffers most of this problem, take the registration site for the ETC mileage club (this is the point rewards club for the nationwide automated highway toll gate payment card).
Top page: https://www.smile-etc.jp/
Registration form: https://www2.smile-etc.jp/NASApp/etcmlg/MlgReq?gvlddpef=1011...