why Japan’s internet is weirdly designed

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Can we just give a round of applause for the editing and the amazing green screen work for “how technology shaped web design”? 👏👏👏👏

dont japanese people use adblockers?

Sometimes I just sit and this video pops up in my mind. It was a great work!

I never knew that I
Japan internet look like that and great video man :]

I like modern design when it's done well (e.g. material you) but when done badly (e.g. youtube's new rounded design) it really suuuuucks.

This is an incredibly well done vdeo 👏

predicted the fall of twitter… oops sorry I meant X

A crap, I came here to see how a japanese website looks like

That "Twitter might be dead by the time you watch this" line was hilariously accurate 10 months later 😂

Tldr : It looks that way because Japan didn't cater specifically to mobile viewing of things. They were ahead on smartphone stuff but when Iphones started to do minimalistic stuff, japan didn't bother copying because they're profiting enough with their domestic audience and didn't need to cater to what the Iphone's doing.

Correct me if I'm wrong 🥹.

Lil nigga stop moving around so much

The Japanese sites look like an old yahoo home page

There 2 other main reasons: Japan population remains avid traditional readers (books and old formatted magazines/newspapers), while also aging, but still economically active. Which in turns means that a sizeable portion will stick with older skills, and styling. Ask any person (in the world) that was active on internet in the 90s, and was active online consumer – they likely will HATE the overuse of minimalistic websites, and constantly search for something in between that doesn't looks dated, but still provide hefty content, and create addons to purposely reformat forums to avoid empty space. Japan just never had the need to kotow to USA standards since their infrastructure wasn't as dependant as other countries.

this just like "Why US still using obsolete imperial measurement system"

Sis really did a dissertation for a YouTube Video. A+ work if you ask me.

Omg – I was a woman in tech but I ended up leaving bc I couldn't take the misogyny and racism anymore. I was afraid to watch all the way bc I didn't want to go back to that space but I'm glad I kept watching.

I wish I would've met or worked with you in some capacity. You have a light and are so patient in explaining these terms….idk just keep being awesome. Don't ever change queen. ❤

Bro, Your Video editing team is Sooooooo Good 👌

I like to think because they are more user friendly and easy to navigate than limit information on most west pages. I find it a lot more easy to shop online in japan than western brands.

As an American who viewed a lot of magazines. They are full of information packed on each page. I would order stuff off J-List and they pack boxes with Japanese newspapers to pad the contents. The newspaper was just as full of content. Watching walking tours of major downtown Japanese cities, have the same issues with advertising panel's. Every square foot of walls are covered in bright LED screens.

Hostinger sponsorship took up 13.44% of this video.

Well there is no Twitter anymore 🤣

in fact twitter is dead!

"It's not culture"

End of the video: "it's Japanese culture"

This was weird in a way that almost feels like a waste of time. But it was very well done. Not really sure how I feel about this.

Great video! But I have a few things to say. I'll just spill them out in random order.

1) Did you make any relevant comparison between Japanese and Chinese websites? And if so, why didn't you show them? (To me, Chinese websites look very cramped up as well)

2) About the conclusion to which you arrived, but isn't that also a very cultural factor? Do you think that had the same technological situation happened anywhere in Europe or North America, the outcome would be the same as it was in Japan?

3) The fact that you can't read Japanese really minimizes (actually nullifies) your ability to access their websites. That's why you don't take the "character" aspect seriously. Your basic outside knowledge concerning Chinese characters or kanji is also not precise. Koreans do not use Chinese characters anymore. If you didn't notice that in your comparison, well, that does speak volumes about the validity of the comparison.

4) Can't your "smartphone theory" be applied more specifically with Apple's marketing/designing strategy? Being so young, you probably don't know (or remember) the two revolutions in computing that took place in the 1990's: i.e. the advent of Windows95 in 1995, and the inaugural iMac in 1998. The first iPhone was presented in 2007. (Please excuse me if you're not that young. You look young in the video, you know.)

My impression is that Windows 95 opened up the market to a more visually friendly computing life (we used to call it GUI), though Apple had been using advanced GUI ever since their advent of their first Macintosh. It was probably because of Steve Jobs' initial failure to successfully market the Macintosh and more because of the interference from IBM (which was the largest computer producers at that time by far) seeing Apple as an immediate threat limited Apple's success in the business world where most of the computers still existed (Windows 95 was more IBM friendly because it was only a software). 

This started to change with the spreading of the Internet into households around the globe, and this is where Apple's insight into home computing began to shine at long last. The symbolic moment was the inaugural iMac in 1998. Since Jobs' second run as CEO of Apple, he and his designing team had made it clear that he was going against the grain of the time and making computing simple. 

Until then, computing was more for geeks and nerds, and these people loved sophistication. Large business were also beginning to use computers more than ever after the Windows 95 revolution, and because of the market share it achieved, the general designing frame of MS, which was more letter based, became more prevalent. It was more cramped than it is now probably for the reasons you mentioned (and partly because Windows users were used to using MS-DOS which had a letter based OS interface). 

However, the coming of the iMac had an immediate impact on the computing world. It didn't change the share ratings that much, but it did send out a message that computers at home should be affordable, easy to use, and aesthetically pleasing. Because of the overwhelming growth of Internet access among average households, Apple's innovation to "Think simple." posed a direct threat to other computing companies who depended on more heavy users up till then. So, they began imitating Apple's marketing strategy in order to get into as many households as possible to share Apple's bite. 

With the iMac's commercial success, Apple was able to pay off much of its earlier debts and they went on a frenzy of introducing innovative technologies to the world. And this is where the iPod (2001) and iPhone come in place. Jobs was pretty clear about iPod being designed to be the predecessor to the iPhone, paving the way for its heir as the king of mobile devices. And by this time, the simple designing revolution had already caught on. So, though I think your "smartphone theory" generally nails it, I do think that the iPhone was more of the end product of the simple designing strategy rather than the simple design being the product of the iPhone.

Yes, and the Japanese were so ahead on their cellphone technologies, they failed to recognize the shift of tide that was moving towards smartphones like a giant tsunami, and that probably did have some influence on their designing trend being left "outdated". But the funny thing is, though everybody uses smartphones in Japan nowadays, the design hasn't changed much. And that's where the more popular theory of Chinese character, or Kanji, comes in.

Kanji is difficult to master, but because a single kanji can convey so many more meanings than a single alphabet, they can make a very crampy looking page very readable. For example, "gynecological diseases" can be written in three letters, "Obstetrics and Gynecology" in four. And what's notable is that any 10 year old can understand these words without any vocabulary training. In fact, there is little to no special vocabulary training in Japanese schools because you don't need them if you use kanji (spelling is non-existent, too) . So, kanji are more visually perceptible than alphabets. You see it, you get it. That's why what seems like cramped designing to a non-kanji user is exactly very perceptible to a kanji reader. 

Also in Japan, they use letters called "hiragana" "katakana" and the Roman alphabet as well. By shifting from each writing system they can change the nuances of the lettered designs. 

And literacy probably plays a role, too. I know that all developed countries have literacy rates higher than 95%, but those rates don't reflect how well or to what extent an average citizen of that country can read. In Japan, not only are the rates high, the overall reading ability of the mass is uniquely high. An average 12 year old can read quality newspapers and magazines with little trouble, and literacy rates don't change between average citizens and the homeless people, either. On the other hand, in many countries, literacy is measured almost solely by surveying people's ability to read and write their own names and things like that. In such countries, high literacy rates will not be comparable with the literacy rate in Japan. Almost nobody in Japan has trouble watching movies and dramas with subtitles whereas I've experienced seeing many Americans not being able to catch up with subtitles. This may be a difference, too.

I still have other things to say, but I'll stop. I've rambled enough. I sincerely apologize for that.

As s sweed, I get extremely stressed by Expressen webpage which is super dense 😂

Great video those cuts definitely kept me engaged

Japs web looks like what we had in 98. it's just shit design.
UPD: Yes, i was correct. They just suck.

I learned so much from watching this!

This was an amazing video and great research

This has to be the corniest video editing ever

Prefrontal cortex😂

The editing is soo dopeeee!!!!
How long did it take you???

When you used ML to compare all the websites it gave me that “client-from-hell” anxiety!! 🤯 lol, like solid flex that you can do ML based analysis but I feel like this is the equivalent of me using blockchain code to track all of the Q-Tips in my house and help me determine when I should throw each individual one away.

Fortunately I can just use my big dumb meat brain to handle this type of batch processing. 😂

I’m a web designer and am loving this video. Seems like all y’all’s vidz are extremely well produced. 🙏 I’m subbing fosho!