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Comment by unsignedint | Hacker News Reader

One possibility is that Japan is a country with 2.1% of IE6 users (source: http://www.ie6countdown.com/) might be playing some part of this. (Although, my hunch is most of that 2.1% are in an office environment...)

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!)

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> they make graphing paper out of Excel to create a document

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.

You have a good point of there. Japanese does not have kerning, so it is the grid base to begin with.

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.

> 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.

> They usually won't tell me if they don't understand something

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.

The standard explanation is that fear of loss of face[0] makes the Japanese not want to expose the fact that they don't understand what you're saying (or have written).

0: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Face_(sociological_concept)#Chi... (the Chinese explanation also largely applies to Japan)

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