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Comment by buster | Hacker News Reader

I guess the cultural aspect is a big reason here. Everyone who has ever watched japanese television or has seen the nightlife of major japanese cities will be overwhelmed by the amound of screaming, blinking lights and information, it's quite different from the western point of view.. :)

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I agree. The design may seem unusual from a Westerner's point of view but from a Japanese prospective, this may fit the bill as a clean, simple design. The same can be said in reverse.

i don't think the design is unusual at all. It's not like i go to theatlantic.com and the first thing i notice is that the design is "unusual." it's just not as "slick" as something like qz.com

Interestingly the information rate of spoken Japanese is comparatively low.

http://ohll.ish-lyon.cnrs.fr/fulltext/pellegrino/Pellegrino_...

That is interesting. Though I don't have supporting evidence I find that the exformation rate of Japanese language amongst native speakers is relatively high. This view is widely held by Japanese people themselves. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ishin-denshin

I'm familiar with the concept as it's one of the things that makes me feel even more comfortable with the language– for certain things at least. That being said, there is also a form of comedy based on the vagueness and misinterpretation of speech. I'm at a loss for what it's called– a quick check brought me to manzai[0] but it's not what I'm thinking of. I'll have to keep searching.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manzai

That's a side-effect of having fewer phonemes.

But with 2000+ characters to choose from, written text can be very dense.

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