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Comment by vantagepoint | Hacker News Reader

On a slight offtopic note, I wonder why Japanese websites are still stuck in the mid 90s to early year 2000 style. One example of this is the imageboard type of websites, which interestingly enough has caught on here in the US.

I wonder if these better connectivity will bring more cross culture web designs or applications to both places.

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In some ways it's cultural, but in many ways it's political. That sort of overhaul would have to come from the top. No-one wants to be the person who suggests it since, if any income drops as a result you'd be in a hard position. So, many lower sections jostle for space and they all get in. (I heard this from a Rakuten frontend performance engineer. Other companies may vary.)

Edit: it's also extremely unlikely for a designer with a strong vision and skills to rise in a large company. Most will turn freelance long before they get there. Most upper management seems to come from eigyo - sales. I don't think engineers (basically just troops to implement the sales guy's vision and take the blame when something goes wrong) are in a position to easily climb the ranks either.

Edit2: I don't think the feature phones argument still holds water. Most sites will redirect for feature phones on the user agent level - they have too. Many models and carriers have their own quirks (eg only tables allowed, only inline styles allowed, different emoji codes) around which a large but dwindling infrastructure exists, catering for normalizing across models using template generated html. The browser versions are separate.

There was an interesting discussion about Japanese web design on HN late last year: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6718067

Here is my (limited) understanding:

A significant amount of internet use in Japan is via feature phones, with smart phones only catching on in the last few years. This limits the complexity of what can be displayed quite a bit. Similarly, the Japanese market tends to be significantly older than the rest of the world (http://www.statista.com/statistics/276045/age-distribution-o...) and resistance to change.

Same reason they still love fax machines:

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/02/14/world/asia/in-japan-the-fa...

It's a cultural preference

I can't find the article I read about this last year, but it's largely cultural. There is a greater expectation of information density in Japan, look at their advertising or TV news for example. Also, there is a severe paucity of Japanese (East Asian in general) web fonts so they're stuck with a lot of dated fonts from 25 years ago. Additionally there is just a different aesthetic there.

I came back from Japan last month. It's cultural.

A lot of stuff the Japanese do is from "back in the day" and there's a lot of group think that goes on there.

There's also not as much of a great sense of entrepreneurship or critical thinking going on there. Most people are like zombie's - wake up, get dressed, work until 7 or 8pm, take the subway or JR home, smoke or drink, socialize, repeat.

I've been told that the main devices that are used to browse the internet in Japan are mobiles (smartphones). That results in the websites being built for mobile users instead of desktops.

I'm not sure if this is true though.

Japanese are very egocentric and insular.

There was a story on Hackaday about Japanese Hackers simply ignoring English speaking part of the internet. Those are Hackers hacking on something in a Hackerspace, people on the forefront of open minded thinking.

>Japanese Hackers simply ignoring English speaking part of the internet.

Internationalization seems to be something that hackers rarely invest time on. It is not like hackers in Silicon Valley build their products while worrying about supporting users who speak Mandarin/Cantonese/Japanese/Hindi etc. I really don't think it is close-mindedness at play here.

Am I to understand then that there is a parallel online hacking community populated by Japanese-speakers? I have never really run across this, just blogs randonly-dispersed.

Of course there is! After all, the majority of Japanese developers don't speak English.

There's also a lot of offline activity: meetups, study groups and (less commonly) hackathons.

For example, look at JAWS-UG (Japan AWS User Group)'s schedule:

http://jaws-ug.jp/

I don't see why that's "egocentric". They just don't speak English...

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