Why Japanese web design is so different (2013)
randomwire.com
randomwire.com
This is rich. I'm not sure who they're comparing Japan to, because definitely not to modern American/mainstream web customs. In fact, my biggest complaint about the latter could be written like this:
Advertising - Rather than being seen as a tool to enable people, modern web companies often see the web as just another advertising platform to push their message across as loudly as possible. Websites ends up being about the minimal concentration of information into the largest space akin to a billboard rather than an interactive tool.
> People require a high degree of assurance, by means of lengthy descriptions and technical specifications, before making a purchasing decision – they are not going to be easily swayed by a catchy headline or a pretty image. The adage of “less is more” doesn’t really apply here.
That's actually a pretty strong compliment. One could reverse it and ask, why in America and Europe people are easy swayed by lies in "a catchy headline or a pretty image", instead of demanding actual information about the product?
Makes sense since Japanese culture is risk averse.
Maybe because the information is useless when it's too complicated or out of context?
For example, if you look at the spec sheet of an iPhone you might think that it's less capable than a cheap Android phone unless you have very deep understanding of the technology.
In west, companies try to communicate the utility or the feeling that this product will give you and most of the technical information is seen as distraction and only the cheapest, lowest quality companies will bombard the users with that information in a bid to convince you that they offer the same thing for cheaper.
Apple famously doesn't advertise RAM or processor clock speed on iPhones.
As long as I can remember, they've always under-specced their hardware and then jacked the prices up for the cost of "experience". And my memory goes back to the mid 80's. Same old game then as it is now.
The same goes for Macs, people tend to use these things for many years. In fact, Apple is still selling Macbook Airs like hot cakes despite the device not being significantly updated for almost a half decade now and people are happy with that product.
The claim sounds like induced anxiety of a user who just couldn't swallow the premium paid over the same Ghz laptop or same Megapixel smartphone :)
And this was back in the '80 s. Its not surprising they still play their stupid games. People in tech have such short term memories - much here is on a day by day basis, or weekly. Yet, its the same actors in the Apple administration (well, minus Jobs).
However, it did get slower over time more so than I would expect from a phone and became almost unusable near the end. Not sure whether it was OS updates, application updates, or what, but it was very noticeable. So I would agree with the grandparent comment in that respect.
If I used my phone a lot, I would have probably bought a new phone MUCH earlier due to how slow the 4 became.
Also, battery life and Apple phones - that's rich too, given that Apple was found to make iPhones reduce their computing power over time to preserve battery life, instead of educating their customers that batteries are not magic pixie dust, and they degrade over time.
I find myself morally outraged that they did not consider my very common use case when building their smartphone.
If they could eliminate even less, I'm sure they would. The fact is, we need exactly what we have now, nothing more and nothing less.
https://www.tomsguide.com/us/iphone-8-benchmarks-fastest-pho...
Your memory is faulty. They usually beat competing flagship models by a long margin, ever since the first model:
E.g.
https://www.gsmarena.com/a11_in_iphone_x_crushes_top_android...
Or:
Until now, Samsung's flagship smartphones have always been king of the Android phones – but Google's latest offering has finally knocked it off its perch. Another shock is just how badly the new Sony XZ performed. It finished in last place, some two minutes slower than the iPhone 7. This isn’t the first time the Apple iPhone has won Gold in a speed test. Earlier this year, the team at PhoneBuff pitted the iPhone 7 against the now-discontinued Samsung Galaxy Note 7. The iPhone managed to open and close the chosen apps in a total time of 1 minute 40 seconds, while it took the Galaxy Note 7 a whole 3 minutes and 14 seconds to complete the same task.
https://www.express.co.uk/life-style/science-technology/7396...
Maybe I should move to Japan.
1) detailed energy consumption analysis. 2) SoC Architecture details 3) OS Architecture details
Even if you are knowledgeable enough to understand all these, that information is useful only if you are going to do something different than the original design purpose. If you are going to use the product for the purpose that it's designed for, all you need is the average use time between charging.
Maybe you are an expert in the area but what about washing machines or tables? How likely is that the engineering specs of these products will also be in your domain?
I do not expect consumers to have expert knowledge in every possible domain. But some things can be estimated pretty easily if companies are providing relevant data. Which they go out of their way to avoid, to muddy the waters, so that people don't ballpark things.
You said washing machines or tables - two areas which are as far away from my expertise as one can be; I still believe I'd be able to do a good job shopping if I had the following data:
For washing machines - peak/average power/water/detergent use on "typical" and "highest cleaning" (worst efficiency) program. Also peak and average generated noise (in dB) for those programs.
For tables - size, weight and supported weight (I'm flabbergasted by companies which don't provide the last; do people buying desks/tables not care about the safety of secondary use cases like "sitting on a desk" or "standing on a desk to change the lightbulb in the ceiling light"?).
Giving engineering specs for consumer products is often very easy way to con to the consumer. All these knock off cheap devices have amazing specs that are advertised very loudly.
An interesting observation is that you actually don't want engineering specs about washing machines or tables :) That's probably because you are not very knowledgable about these things so you seek information that will affect you as a user. You are interested if you can fit the table and how much it will cost you to operate the washing machine, which are not exactly technical specs of the product but impact on the user.
If you step out of your techie shoes and step in the shoes of a washing machine nerd or a carpenter shoes you will find out that all you want to know bout a smartphone is how long the battery lasts and does it work nicely. Now, you probably want to know the type of the electric motor of the washing machine, it's power circuit and the material of and type of the pipes. As a carpenter you probably want to know what kind of process was applied to the wood and what's the brand of the glue used.
The thing is, I don't trust the vendor. They have every incentive to stretch and lie in their marketing copy, and they do that. And you can put any bullshit into self-selected "real use" metrics like "talk time", "browsing time" or "number of songs / photos that fit on the device", by choosing unrealistic values in some parameters that make the result look favorable. But you can't cheat much on raw GHz, mAh or GB. In the atmosphere of (experience-based) lack of trust, I prefer raw facts and making the necessary ballpark calculations myself, thank you.
("Number of songs / photos / movies that fit on the device" is one of the more annoying/dumber metrics ever. It's as if car companies gave you "number of cities you can round-trip through on full tank" instead of MPG or l/km values.)
Or, if the vendor insists on "real use" metrics, they should at least provide the math behind it, so that I know they're not pulled out of the asses of people in marketing department. The core problem is, still, that I have experience-based (and market-understanding-based) bias against trusting what a vendor says at face value.
--
RE washing machines, don't confuse engineering numbers on the interface with use cases (the "technical specs" of a product) and the engineering numbers for internals. I don't give a damn what kind of motor you put inside, much like I don't give a damn what particular CPU you put in a mobile phone. The motor turns, and apparently has enough power and torque to drive a loaded machine to stated speeds; all I need to know now is how much power it (or rather, the whole machine) eats and how noisy it is. With phones, the CPU is ARM and runs Android; there's little user-facing difference between various SoC models, so all I care is how much cores it has and how fast are they.
(And yeah, I actually might be interested in the materials used in the internals of my washing machine, as a proxy for its reliability; however, given how hard it is to find reliable white goods these days, I just don't bother - I assume they're made out of costs saving and super glue, and plan accordingly.)
What if Apple/Samsung employs you and you look at the battery capacity and inform the rest of the world about usage time? Such a talent should not be wasted. You might be close to disrupt the battery industry or win the "I got a talent" TV show.
If all fails, start selling "Geekbench hates this guy" video series and teach the world to accurately estimating gadget performance and battery time from spec sheets.
You can also bring down Youtube to it's knees as all these test and review videos will become worthless overnight.
I have an app idea for you: The fastest benchmark software on the planet, instead of running intensive tasks just write a code that compares numbers of Ghz, Ram etch. Whichever is bigger that device is faster, obviously. Gone are the days of 12H battery tests, just calculate it from the battery mAh.
> You claim that you can accurately estimate usage time from battery capacity in mAh, performance from Ghz number
I'm not claiming that I can accurately do that, for engineering values of "accurate". I'm claiming that I can estimate the fit of the device for my use cases better with those values than with manufacturer-provided "real-life" benchmarks.
Ignoring your sarcasm for a moment; you mention benchmarks providers - yet the reason those third-party benchmark shows and sites exist is because manufacturer-provided benchmarks are usually pulled out of asses of the marketing department and are utterly worthless and usually (by design) not usable for comparison shopping.
This comment pretty much circles us back to the original quote I pulled out of the discussed article: "[Japanese] People require a high degree of assurance, by means of lengthy descriptions and technical specifications, before making a purchasing decision – they are not going to be easily swayed by a catchy headline or a pretty image." You seem to be advocating that one should be "easily swayed by a catchy headline or a pretty image". Well, I don't trust marketing departments of consumer-good vendors that much.
I don’t think that you can use average consumption since even software update can make or break your use time as it can drastically alter the behavior of the device.
Oh and it’s still the marketing department that choose to communicate these numbers to you, not engineers. If the battery doesn’t last they will choose to slap the mAh of the battery instead of the estimates.
but maybe i’m wrong, maybe these days the phones use about the same energy and battery capacity is a useful measure
He's saying that with the battery capacity he can estimate how long it'll run for him because he know what his current phone is like. It's a relative comparison.
If he's told by the manufacturer that it plays X hours of video he can't try and figure out what that means for him, especially if his phone is from a different manufacture. Also two different manufacturers will use different video players making it harder to compare the two.
mAh is a the best we can get. I know that given two phones one with 3000mAh and one with 2000mAh the former will probably have longer battery life under the same OS. If there are different OS's then I need to apply a bit more comparison from knowledge but I still have more information.
battery use time provided by the manufacturer is a better measure as it includes both variables of the function and not just the capacity.
he can’t estimate use time of another device from the battery capacity as he is missing the consumption variable unless it’s the exact same device.
He will have better shot if compares his actual use time to the advertised time and apply the difference to the device that he wants to predict.
Also, knowing battery capacity in mAh gives you another funny side effects:
1/ I can ballpark how long it will take to charge it.
2/ I can ballpark how many times I can recharge it with my powerbank (or conversely, what powerbank to buy to have at least two recharges of my phone).
That's the nice thing about such "natural" metrics - they allow for further comparison for different use cases.
I agree you can kind of estimate the charge time via mAh if you pick one charging speed (most now support multiple charging speeds & there's also wireless charging in the mix) but most vendors provide guidelines of charging times you can expect & there's a crapton of benchmarks by independent third parties validating those claims & providing a more complete set of results. Same goes for battery life claims. As for powerbanks, I guess the mAh is useful but there's plenty of info online outside of the vendor's website for that.
If I were the vendor providing this kind of in-depth detail that's demanded by/useful to a very small percentage of the customers would be counterproductive (if I'm providing the info in the best interest of the majority of customers) since it would be more likely to confuse customers who want to compare on just raw specs rather than what the device actually delivers. I can just rely on third parties to report that info for the people who care.
For example I play a certain game. I know how quickly that drains my current phone but I don't know how to compare that to video playing time.
Same thing goes for everything else that I have no technical knowledge about: there's look and feel, general customer reviews; sadly most of which are getting highly commoditised via bot-fuelled channels. I would on the other hand love to see the version of the internet where these reviews are directly tied to your IDs.
Comparing hardware specs across ecosystems makes little sense, since all modern smartphones are generally fast enough, so it comes down to what kind of walled garden you prefer.
Your way of comparison is wrong, most of the user neither need a phd in electric or computer science or are going to compare that way. The way is simple 3500mah> 3000mah 2.1 Ghz<2.6 Ghz 4 GB Ram < 8 GB Ram See.
Why just don't write random numbers on the box so the users can compare these?
Write, for example, 400 capacitors and let users compare the number of capacitors on the circuit board. Let them brag that their phone have more capacitors.
Maybe write the number of diodes, so Huwei Hr67 users can enjoy the wonders of diode dominance over Mi 8jj that has 20 diodes less.
...or maybe you forgot the /s :)
1/ They're more "natural" - which means it's easy for everyone to give those numbers, giving you something to compare in the first place. With "real-use" measurements, one vendor will give you "video time", the other will give you "browsing time", and you can't compare them.
2/ They're harder to fudge. Amount of RAM is amount of RAM, it does not depend on what testing procedure a vendor uses. "Video time" is not directly comparable between brands.
Because these numbers are harder to fake. Suppose phone A advertises "8 hours of typical use" and a 4Ah battery. Phone B advertises "10 hours of typical use" and a 3Ah battery. Which do you think would actually last longer in use?
Interesting as it is from a "lies marketers tell" perspective aren't they much more likely to lie about 200 hours standby time than 3800mAh of battery power? The latter can be independently verified much more readily.
They can lie about the standby time in a way they can support in a court of law - it was tested in pre-production with no apps running and the best battery they could find that has been made to the specs, say. But they can't really support putting a 20% lower power battery in and labelling it wrongly.
If it tells you the processor, you can compare with other phones using the same, or other devices with similar chips. CPUs with disabled parts are given different courses by the manufacturer.
Hours of use, etc., would only be useful if done by an independent agency, like NCAP car safety ratings.
> Let them brag that their phone have more capacitors.
You can dive down the rabbit hole of comparisons; a 3500mah battery might be bigger than a 3000mah, but if the 2.6Ghz processor demolishes it faster than the 2.1Ghz one, it'll end up worse.
This assumption that humans only make rational, logical decisions is inherently flawed. I know HN likes to decry marketing, but humans crave the way these things are framed. Granted that means it's open to manipulation, but the continual argument here is always "give me every single piece of objective information about absolutely everything and I'll make my decision" doesn't extend too far outside of this echo chamber.
> Granted that means it's open to manipulation, but the continual argument here is always "give me every single piece of objective information about absolutely everything and I'll make my decision" doesn't extend too far outside of this echo chamber.
Again, the argument is that objective information, even if mostly incomprehensible to people, is still better than whatever fake-metrics vendor's marketing department spits out, by the virtue of reality not actively trying to confuse you.
And the software makes a huge difference. I remember an old computer I had converted to Slackware linux completely burrying my much more powerful windows 95 machine because the networking stack was so bad on Windows it couldn't keep up with the efficient Linux one.
No, it means that you are probably not in the core audience that Apple tries to target with its ads (to use the iPhone example from the parent). This is nothing good or bad - I also prefer to compare specs instead of "feelings" (I openly admit that lots of important information is not given in the specs listened in a typical webshop, such as how long the mobile phone will be supported with Android updgrades). The important spec field that makes the difference is "Operating system": If you care about what iOS offers, you will only consider mobile phones that have "iOS" in this field (i.e. only compare the specs of the different iPhone versions). If you don't care about what iOS offers, you will probably not buy an iPhone anyway.
That's not how purchasing decisions are usually made outside of big ticket items, and even then.
Thanks to all of our basic needs being met there's only real emotional and psychological ones left. That's what all advertising targets, promise of fulfillment or some other emotional rewards. In our consumerist society you buy things not because you need them or because of their specific functions but because they promise to fulfill some imagined emotional need.
So you mean typical manipulative advertising that distracts you from informed decision making to get at your feelings so you'll want their product.
Could be just me. But maybe west here means the U.S.? I don't think I have seen even iPhone ads without a little spec sheet.
> Apple famously doesn't advertise RAM or processor clock speed on iPhones.
There is a lot of space between these two extremes. While I do not expect full spec sheet for a tool (because, as you said, I couldn't understand it anyway), I do expect to be able to find out some basics; for me RAM or CPU certainly are a part of these basics.
I visited Japan once. I'll take a stab at it.
In America and Europe we have plenty of space to pile up junk we don't really need. Thus we can be more careless with our consumption. I often browse Amazon and just buy random things I might need out of boredom. Sometimes those things improve my life, sometimes they just end up who knows where. And I often buy those things with nary a glance to anything other than a couple lines of user reviews.
You are supposed to 'get it' or 'feel it'. How you manage to get your foot or your mind to perform as instructed is an exercice left to the student.
It's pretty hard to agree on something you can't talk about.
We already have a hard time agreeing on things we have metrics on.
Tangentially, takkyuubin is actually a trademark by Yamato, and the Ghibli movie, Majou no takkyuubin was actually sponsored by Yamato, and is one of the reasons there is a black cat in the movie (their emblem). The generic term is takuhaibin (宅配便).
Ahhhh. I've seen Ta-q-bin which obviously seems trademarked, but not realized takkyuubin vs takuhaibin.
Delivery in Japan boggles my mind to be honest, I'd love to get an account of their cost structures - the logistics behind making this scale at the existing price point must be amazing and should probably be studied extensively in the west.
I've observed the same in Germany. I think these pessimistic estimates are on purpose, to convince unknowing customers to subscribe to Prime because of the better estimates.
Because most of these are also required for travelling within Japan I sometimes just don't bother asking for a refund.
* All text is embedded. Fat chance ever finding it with a search engine, copying anything, searching within the page, or using Google Translate on it
* Every URL is guaranteed to die. While link rot is pretty common in Western webdev as well, things like SEO have caused some to clamp down on it. And it's no way as bad as it is in Japan, where I'll come back a month later to find the link dead or the whole website has moved and none of the old content exists anymore.
* They still use Flash.
* Navigation is often not as efficient as it can be, with sites often throwing you on a landing page, navbars being confusing, and lack of search
* Images are often low resolution and low quality
Some of the reasons given in the article make sense (for example webfonts being expensive or large in size), but it's really disappointing when you compare it to a Japanese novel or magazine and see that the country is perfectly capable of beautiful work.
Then of course I switched to Amazon.com for a comparison and almost every word on the page was part of an image and could not be translated either. I guess it's more common than I thought.
* Many websites, especially government ones, require Active X. You might need to dust off that IE6 installation file.
* In lieu of Active X, some sites require you to download and install their own proprietary "security" program; what it does, I don't think anybody really knows
* Like you describe Japan, lots of Korean text is embedded in an image
* Many sites try to prevent users from right clicking or copying text, for "security" of course
* The eCommerce site I used had quality issues similar to Ali Express. Listings could be anything, a seller could list a baseball bat, a cell phone and a watermelon on the same page. Sellers would play this trick of having at least 2 variations of a product, one being a very low price and also conveniently out of stock all the time, this would ensure it showed up when you sort products by lowest price first, but it was impossible to ever get it for that price.
When I was there a year or so ago it was getting better. Hopefully it's mostly fixed by now.
On the bright side the internet is really fast and cheap.
That makes that, when they present a design, it has to look like they worked really hard in the design. That's why there is always so much information.
To the eyes of an executive who has no idea of design (most of them) a minimalist design would look like if the designer was lazy and didn't work hard enough.
Of course, I am exaggerating.... But not a lot.
Source: Working as a Web Developer in Japanese companies in Japan since 5 years ago.
I am far from being a person who has deeply studied Japanese culture (I just happen to live here) but my impression is that it is so ingrained in the mentality that it works at a subconscious level.
In my own limited exposure, most designers I have encountered worked by feel and experience instead of analytical principles. I've definitely heard people say that a part of the page feels a bit empty or get some evaluation to that effect from peers. It's much rarer to hear someone say something looks too busy or crowded.
I suspect that in the long grind to "polish your work", there's a simply tendency to remove all these "empty feeling" spots more than to "trim the fat".
This reduced the problem to why there's a bias for things to feel empty instead of busy. To venture a bit of personal sociology here, my experience makes me feel like Japan produces a bias toward more intentional and deliberate behavior. Or worded less charitably, we could maybe call it fussy?
Accepting this idea, in web design we'd expect a bias toward needing deliberate explanations for every aspect of the page layout, including every bit of white space that someone might point out.
I think it's interesting that "Japanese design" in almost every other area hints at a certain functional minimalism, that stands in stark contrast to these sites. I mean sites like, ironically enough, the Css Zen Garden (http://www.csszengarden.com/), highlight the western perception of their design principles: lots of white space, consistent design, minimalism.
White space is luxury for the eyes.
The article does make a good point about how sites were "mobile first" for Japanese feature phones. Smartphones took a while to catch on in Japan because people were already satisfied with their feature phones, but now smartphones are in full force and web design has mostly caught up with modern/trendy practices. You can see all kinds of articles about modern web stuff on Qiita.com, even translations of buzzy blogposts.
I think any speculation about cultural differences is nonsense. Overwork or trying to appear busy or neon signs or whatever doesn't make for shitty web design. Web design was bad simply because the main focus was on the feature phone (which had limited rendering capabilities) and desktop sites were an afterthought.
Also, compare https://yahoo.co.jp (afaik most visited site in japan) and https://yahoo.com.
My argument is that, if all this stuff about Japanese people liking information density were so true, then why do new websites not look like Yahoo.co.jp? Nobody is making web portals anymore. Those sites are relics of the past.
Also, I can find plenty examples of modern webpages besides the two I linked. How about Mericari, who have taken over the second hand goods market from Yahoo Auctions (http://www.mercari.com)? How about Gunosy, a news aggregator who have no doubt stolen tons of traffic from Yahoo (https://gunosy.com)? How about the bank AEON (http://www.aeon.co.jp)? How about the Post Office (http://www.post.japanpost.jp/index.html)? The Yelp of Japan, Tabelog, looks almost exactly like Yelp.com (https://tabelog.com/ - the English version looks less modern, click on 日本語 if you get redirected).
Edit: Consider also that Yahoo.co.jp and Rakuten are an amalgamation of like 100 different services. Yahoo has news, weather, train info, maps, games, forums... If you look at the subsections, they don't have that 90s Web Portal kind of feel: https://games.yahoo.co.jp
I think one of the major factor is how the IT industry works in Japan, and the process to build a website, an application or anything which involves software engineering. A good majority of Japanese websites are not built or controlled by the company, but rather by what they call "System integrators", which they refer to as SIer, and these are quite different from the software/design agency we see in the US or in Europe. The usual flow is something like
- Company A wants to build a website - Company A talks to the SI company B - Company A and B spend hundreds of hours doing meetings - Company B's "System Engineers" write tons of specifications on Excel - Company B asks company C to actually code the specification written on Excel - Company C may then again delegate part of the system to company D, and this can a few more levels down depending on the size of the project
As nobody actually does the "building the service" part in company A or B, they usually do not have any designers, and therefore cannot give enough design related information to the company actually implementing the software. However, the only incentive for company C being to get paid by company B, the quality of the work or the UI/UX does not really matter that much as long as it fulfills all the specifications written on Excel.
Now, some companies are starting to see that this model is quite flawed, and either recruiting engineers and designers of their own (e.g Recruit, a huge company in Japan owning many different webservices [1], has put a lot of efforts recruiting engineers and designers these past years). Some other companies start choosing companies which are closer to the software/design agency model - companies who actually do the engineering and designing part - but the SI model is still prevalent [2].
[1]: http://www.recruit.jp/service/
[2]: https://www.jisa.or.jp/Portals/0/report/basic2015.pdf?201602... (p14)
I spent a lot of time on the Japanese web about ten years ago, when there were still a lot of self hosted amateur sites for fiction, tech, and other hobbies. These sites were spartan compared to their English counterparts, with a much higher ratio of text to images. What few images there were were often original photos or illustrations. It's hard to express how different the aesthetic was, but it was as though everyone from artists to meme makers to TV show fandoms were taking design cues from 90's programmers.
In comparison, the equivalent English sites of the time had a strong aversion to emptiness. Every page needed banners and buttons decorated with copyrighted images that had been cropped and filtered. Authors were more concerned with elevating the best work taken from elsewhere than showing one's own work, and one could participate in that work by remixing it.
Seeing this cultural difference changed how I thought about copyright. Copyright is easy to enforce when social norms and cultural aesthetics don't treat content as a commodity everyone needs to have. This isn't a popular opinion among tech libertarians, but I'd rather live in a world where private content creators had more control, but where everyone was doing more creating than sharing.
Likely density of meaning per char would enable this layout --even in newspapers.
Anyhows, it's functional, if not beautiful, and it works for people. No need to "refresh the look and feel" of their web properties every so often.
This is the most infuriating characteristic of modern web-deveopment, the constant churn to change what is working for people. Glad to see that it is not universal.
I had to look up the results of my Korean language test the other day. This should be as easy as entering your name + test registration number to get one number of info back (your test score). I had to install so many suspicious browser plugins that I ended up downloading a VM just for this.
"Character Comfort – Logographic-based languages can contain a lot of meaning in just few characters. While these characters can look cluttered and confusing to the western eye, they actually allow Japanese speakers to become comfortable with processing a lot of information in short period of time / space (the same goes for Chinese)."
The concept that your native language can impact information processing speed/density is pretty interesting.
Thats why the "Aoccdrnig to rscheearch…" text is still readable ( http://knowyourmeme.com/memes/aoccdrnig-to-rscheearch ).
That’s all stuff that directly impacts design density and so on.
Movable type was invented in Korea 200 years before Gutenberg, and their version was much easier because they just had to plug letters into a square grid. When I was a kid, everyone learned to write on sheets of paper containing a 20x10 grid. Lengths of books and school essays in Korea are still frequently measured by the number of 20x10 sheets they would take up if printed on such a grid.
When your writing system is designed to fill a two-dimensional grid, whitespace is not only unnecessary but also potentially distracting. Chinese and Japanese don't even use spaces between words. (Korean does, at least in modern usage.) Leaving a large amount of space between lines would break up a block that should belong together.
Probably for the same reason, WYSIWYG editors here tend to insert <br> instead of <p> when you press the Enter key, Western semantics be damned. Extra space between paragraphs is implemented using two <br>'s instead of margins on the <p> tag. In other words, people see no need for vertical space that isn't an integer multiple of the height of a 1-em square.
Because each character fills a square block, if you pack characters as close as possible, a paragraph becomes a rectangular array of dense squares, which is tiring to the eyes. Adding extra space between lines makes it much easier to read.
With Latin alphabets, characters have irregular shapes, so you will have enough "holes" between successive lines, which helps the reader follow the current line.
Check out the desktop version of this site for what seems to me to be an English version of Japanese design: https://na.finalfantasyxiv.com/lodestone/
Funny.
Or, their ATMs. Amazingly confusing at times. Yet, no Japanese seems harmed in the making of this situation.
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It does, however, have katakana -- which is sometimes used in a similar fashion.
And the usage of katakana in the way the parent describes isn’t “tiring.” It follows almost the exact same pattern as words are italicized in English, where a word or phrase is represented differently from the surrounding text. Less common/standardized, but not tiring.
EDIT:
My bad on the bouten/dakuten confusion. Apologies.
Their point about katakana was also correct - normally a word is either written in katakana or it isn't, regardless of emphasis. Using katakana for emphasis happens but it's not common, and would get tiresome very quickly.
https://ja.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/圏点
As for katakana, it really does depend. For common or short words, people usually don't have a problem, but if you throw a whole katakana sentence at a Japanese person they will often stumble and reading speed noticably decreases.
Others have also pointed out the dots which are quite common in formally printed materials. In emails and such, I see people use the 「」 quotation bracings as emphasis from time to time.
Look at the amazon and ebay websites. What, are then not as filled with information? Most of the time as much useless.
The only difference is that they use the older 2000-s fonts which are smaller, and therefore enable the newspaper-look.
They are not doing it out of kindness, they are probably going to add ads and PageRank-siphoning links to the translation when you're not looking.
"WebDesignGeeks" was an outfit who used to pull this scam all the time to popular programming articles, and their "translations" were just the output of Google Translate.
Don't link to unchecked translations and don't let them be hosted on someone else's site.
Upper line - complex kanji, Lower line - its components.
When you look at the complex kanji on the upper line, some of its components look unnaturally stretched, as if they were automatically scaled instead of being drawn by hand. So I'm guessing the design is at least semi-automated.
(It's common for kanji like 日 and 雨 to have slight visual differences when used as components – the tiny 'legs' 日 has are missing in 曇 and 温, at least in the font I have. But it still looks like they just have a few variants of each character that are reused)
It sounds like while there are a lot of reused components, there's a lot of tweaking needed for it to look right:
> For instance, just have a look at the various uses of the radical 言 (yan, speech). Even in cases where it is in the same position, such as the left half of the character, the stroke weights and shapes are slightly different (the characters shown below are the exact same font and size).
As for input: there are component-based input methods where you would for example type 明 by entering the keys corresponding to 日 and 月, but as far as I know, they aren't very popular. Most people use phonetic input systems where you type e.g. 明 by typing "ming" and picking it from a list (or letting auto-correct do it for you).
Perhaps the one thing that stands out is my adblocker doesn't work on japanese advertising so I get all the ads that I'm no longer used to seeing on my usual websites...
Japan, and perhaps also the rest of Asia, has not had such a backlash.