Do you think these layouts are still used because they're better for the target audience, or because the Japanese are more averse to change?
I think it's a little of both TBH. I do notice that Japanese designs like to kind of go their own way.
Maybe the Flash layouts are more "exciting" and so it sells more products? This is a great question. It is understandable that it may be easier to add custom renders & graphics of the characters. I would love to speak with somebody from Japan or someone who understands the culture to gauge their opinion.
I suspect it's also partially the language used where there's differing information density. http://www.tofugu.com/2012/05/01/why-do-japanese-people-talk...
Take a look at a typical Chinese web site say Alibaba. Contrast www.alibaba.com vs. china.alibaba.com.
Japanese has a huge amount of variation in information density, depending on politeness, etc. Other languages can vary too, but not to the same degree in my experience.
Informal, colloquial, Japanese can be extremely dense because by default much is left unsaid (whereas in English there are many cases where one states the obvious explicitly -- "I agree" instead of "agree" etc). This is particularly true for written Japanese because of its ideographic content, which is extremely dense, but it's true of spoken Japanese too. Japanese is famous for having many homonyms, and one of the reasons it has so many is that words for many things are short, disambiguated by character in writing, or only by context in speaking.
However when one is being polite ... Japanese polite forms (and there's a big range of them) can be absurdly verbose.
So, which form do you consider when talking about the "information density" of a language? I dunno, but most people don't use highly polite forms in everyday speech, and much speech is pretty informal (among friends, family, etc).... and in Japanese, informal speech is generally very short and blunt, more so than English.
[Japanese can sound pretty "busy" because of the staccato nature of its pronunciation, but that doesn't necessarily mean there's actually more information there...]
Another thing I noticed in years of dealing with Japanese people (although, I'm from Japan, my time in the US is longer) is they certainly do have some obsession with grids -- to the extent they make graphing paper out of Excel to create a document. (Ugh, I hate these documents!) Many of those websites are table styled as well. (Another pet peeve! Use CSS!)
I hate that shit too! They use Excel for the most pointless reasons. I've gotten all kinds of documents as Excel spreadsheets when a simple word document would have sufficed.
It might be too much of a stretch, but maybe this has something to do with so much time spent in childhood writing on 原稿用紙 making Japanese people prefer "grid-like" organization.
This and the fact that pictgraphical might be contributing relative acceptance of more texts.
This is actually funny, as I was constantly making jokes in the past with my peers, where western people write very comprehensive documents with too much information, that Japanese counterpart often won't bother reading.
Yeah, I've run into that problem in the past. I have to make a conscious effort to simplify anything I write (or say) in English in order to ensure that Japanese people understand it. They usually won't tell me if they don't understand something, whereas I'm the opposite when it comes to Japanese, so that I can optimize my language learning.
Why do you think that is? Because I was raised to always ask questions and learn what you don't understand. I have never really "studied" with a Japanese friend or colleague so I can't say I've ever had the same experience.
0: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Face_(sociological_concept)#Chi... (the Chinese explanation also largely applies to Japan)