Slashdot Mirror
The Puzzle of Japanese Web Design
I'm Not There (1956) writes "Jeffrey Zeldman brings up the interesting issue of the paradox between Japan's strong cultural preference for simplicity in design, contrasted with the complexity of Japanese websites. The post invites you to study several sites, each more crowded than the last. 'It is odd that in Japan, land of world-leading minimalism in the traditional arts and design, Web users and skilled Web design practitioners believe more is more.'"
Nothing to see here, a blurb from a blog, kdawson strikes again
Ever been to Tokyo? If ain't flashing and neon, no one is going to notice it. For a population conditioned to such an environment, it would make sense that LOUD websites draw more customers.
> Japan's strong cultural preference for simplicity in design
What? It's the exact opposite.
This is my only real complaint about Japan. I can't stand the shops here. There are colored flashy signs everywhere, and you can always hear at least a dozen different adverts at the same time.
Likewise every device is ridiculously complex. My fan has 6 buttons and a remote control. Just to blow air! And the toilet has a dozen buttons and two knows to adjust seat and water temperature. Everything is completely overdesigned.
this is a fairly stupid [read:ignorant] article. 1) in japanese, the websites mentioned in the article are relatively simple. 2) japanese like their content information-dense. pick up a japanese newspaper sometime (or a hot pepper guidebook). it's not that the design is cluttered. it's that they are very eco-friendly when it comes to using paper [read: they like to cram a lot together to save space]. it's very anglo-centric to declare their design to be so cluttered, considering these two things.
Google Chrome offered to translate the pages in question.
After translation it looks cleaner. I stopped looking at the characters as a mess of intelligible symbols but instead as words that i understood.
Here's a great example of the effect in reverse.
http://slashdot.jp/
I don't really see much of a difference between the JAL page und delta.com, united.com or lufthansa.de. And the page of the ministry of health isn't looking too crowded either. Neither is the third one, but I couldn't figure out how to switch that one to English (still, ebay.com seems just as stuffed). The japanese versions of the pages look like a crowded mess, but that's rather because I can't deal with the characters. Switch to english and you should be fine.
> Slashdot editors' strong cultural preference for finding the irrelevant
Oh, okay.
Wabi Sabi apparently doesn't translate well into the internet.
Our Western globalization has made it so the new medium follows what they believe is more "Western" than Japanese.
Or they're just crazy. I dunno. We're talking about Japan here.
If the author of TFA could actually read and understand Japanese. Although the example websites he gave seems overwhelmed, I found no difficulty in locating the information I need, and I think the layout is rather well organized.
Some "simple" website can have information arranged so awfully that you spend minutes of time just to find out that what you need is under the "Click here!" link.
And to say Japan is a country of minimalism? Please look at the complexity of their kimonos and gift wrapping, not to mention many other things. They've the minimalism side of course, but it doesn't mean all the things they do are so simple.
Looks like every other Asian website I've ever visited.
http://mora.jp/artist/80307744/80006846/?cpid=sony.co.jp
This example has a design no more complicated than an English website serving similar purpose (in this case, music retail). It mere appears to be more cluttered because the Japanese writing system is more complex.
A similar observation can be made with regards to Chinese, which is even more compact than Japanese due to the lack of a phonetic alphabet. Take a look at Yahoo:
http://www.yahoo.com/
http://www.yahoo.com.cn/
http://www.yahoo.co.jp/
The hanzi/kanji writing system simply does not lend itself to minimalistic designs in the same way that can be achieved by the Roman alphabet. This is partially why many modern brands in Japan make liberal use of English in their designs and typesets.
That said, it is also true that Chinese and Japanese web designers appear to follow a set of standards rather different from the Web 2.0 design philosophies. Many of them still like to use <TABLE> to format their layouts.
Those sites don't look that complex, and aren't that bad run through Google Translate. Probably the complex-looking symbols of Japanese are overemphasizing the sites' clutter.
And it infects real life. Any business district in any Korean city looks Geocities circa 1998.
A preference for simplicity in design does not imply a preference for a simplification in design.
"One should make things as simple as possible; but not simpler."
--Albert Einstein
Simplicity is highly prized wherever the clutter is superfluous or gimmicky. In 'classical' computer science fields such as language and operating system design, this is given the synonym "elegance".
But that is not the same at all as cutting away useful material simply so that you have less material. Even Ubuntu users were wild once Gnome decided that being able to configure sounds for systems events was something that was unnecessary. This was (contrary opinions notwithstanding) an oversimplification.
Japanese website design works differently to western design for a number of reasons. To begin with, the typical font size is somewhere around (the equivalent of) 16pts due to the requirements of distinguishing many and much more complex characters. Up your zoom level by two factors and see how many non-Japanese websites fail to look cluttered.
Also, decent support for native and interoperable characters (and decent support for fine-grained character placement) has historically been poor for Han/Kana scripts, which need it far more than Latin scripts do. Hence why huge chunks of Japanese websites regularly use images of text rather than text. Part of this is admittedly stylistic, but it is still due to the desire to cram different sizes of font into a "block" shape; this is much more common in Japanese due to the fact that ALL characters inherently take the same space and so they are more commonly written into a "grid" than on a "line", logically speaking.
In short, there are many reasons - some technological, some cultural, some stylistic, some inscrutable - for why things are as they are and will remain so for some time to come. But it's not as simple an issue as you might think at first.
Asian websites seem to reflect pictures of downtown areas of major asian cities - Tokyo, Hong Kong, parts of Beijing, Vietnam, etc. Shockingly, their major cities don't look terribly different from western megalopolises like NYC and London. Their colorful ads just happen to have asian character sets, which have a lot more lines and end up looking more busy to the western eye. Have you looked at yahoo.com/ or amazon.com lately? I mean, Yahoo has cleaned up their image some, but it's still very cluttered and messy. I can only imagine what Google News.jp or .cn looks like, or heaven forbid, the japanese translated version of Wunderground.com?? Just add some purple and yellow rounded corner rectangles in the background and it looks like every other stereotypical asian website out there.
Anyways, my point is, websites are driven by advertising. Websites of local languages are going to look similar to the Times Squares and Piccadilly Circuses of the world, in their local languages and alphabets. Certain color combinations might make certain alphabets stand out better. Helveltica (and all the child fonts it's spawned over the years) happens to look really good in Red, White or Blue on a White or dark colored background, which is probably why western advertising all looks the same for the most part. People tend to use more asian color schemes for party invitiations when using Comic Sans, and that font everyone loves to hate, Papyrus, tends to look best Black on white on tan.
moox. for a new generation.
I looked at the three websites linked above, and they didn't really seem that bad to me. The author of the blog doesn't say if he can read Japanese or not, and it should not be assumed that he can for the fact that he wrote the blog entry in the first place. I think that probably makes a difference. Just looking at the language itself makes it seem more complicated than it might be.
Something that I've noticed on various Asian sites over the years is that they seem to be mainly text based, displaying a lot of information right when you go to them. This isn't necessarily a bad thing, especially for the Asahi Shimbun or it's English page. It's a newspaper, it should have a lot of information displayed right in front. So should the Japanese Ministry of Health, Labor, and Welfare (linked above). The New York Times has one of the best newspaper websites around, mainly because it uses very few images and displays a lot of information right on it's front page. Other local newspaper websites I've visited leave little to be desired. I think if the New York Times website were written in Japanese, one might feel the same way as the blog author.
Many Chinese websites also seem to want to jam everything onto the front page. I used to find it disorienting and confusing but I guess my eyes are accustomed to it now.
http://www.taobao.com/
A dream is good. A plan is better.
I'm not so sure he's right, looking at the examples he gave. The examples are crowded and small (even the banner ads are smaller than on American web pages, maybe because they tend to have smaller laptops with smaller screens in Japan), but they aren't cluttered. They are simple in the sense that they present just what is needed, and nothing more. I think this matches the Japanese style he is referring to.
Just for comparison, look at the Japanese Ministry of Health and Ontario Ministry of Health web page. They both start out with a similar header, announcing what page you are on and showing the search function, but the Japanese page takes about half as much space. Then on the Japanese side it's just a solid wall of information from top to bottom. I question their color choices, but as someone else mentioned, Japanese like bright colors.
The Ontario web page then has a huge, stock-photo section with a small little section on each one. What a waste of space. I should say, to me it looks fine, but the same information could have been presented in significantly less space, and the photos, while pretty, are nothing more than that.
So I think it's just a matter of Japanese trying to fit the most amount of information into the least amount of space. Or maybe they don't trust stock photography of smiling people, I don't know.
Qxe4
"Jeffrey Zeldman brings up the interesting issue of the paradox between Japan's strong cultural preference for simplicity in design, contrasted with the complexity of Japanese websites.
japan's preference for minimalism created a writing style that fits entire words in single character space. with this minimalism their bandwidth per character space increased... they could either take their gains, or up their usage of the character space to that of other writing styles, and see compounded returns, maximizing their value. the japanese written language is about maximizing space. the website is space. japan maximizes the utilization of the space. isn't that what modern minimalist design is all about? if the space is to be utilized for sitting, then all it needs is a chair. there is no paradox here, just a simple minded article author with questionable motives especially considering our government pages full of graphics and text and even video. extra digital content is effectively free. a moose head on the wall isn't. what do racist patriots have to gain by attempting to propagate a labeled paradoxical stereotype upon others? why would they try when their claims fall flat under the least scrutiny? does jeffrey often wonder if all of his countrymen are illogical as he is? if you do, jeffrey, THEY AREN'T.
So a blogger looks at five websites and makes a cultural conclusion based on that? That's just not science.
I've been to Japanese websites, and sometimes instead of words they use a single Unicode character to denote a link. That's minimalism.
Author of TFA is a Jew. Thanks for stereotyping!
... is Japan's biggest BBS 2ch, check it out: http://www2.2ch.net/2ch.html
How the hell it got that popular while still looking like that however many years after it was made, I don't know.
He's right! Those sites are full of meaningless glyphs and contain almost no words!
"Have you ever thought about just turning off the TV, sitting down with your kids, and hitting them?"
If you call that cluttered, you have obviously never seen the web sites of Swedish tabloids.
GAAH! MY PRINTER IS ON FIRE!!! PUT IT OUT! PUT IT OUT!
On the contrary, I would have said that Japanese sites are most notable for the huge-wall-of-text-on-a-plain-or-patterned-background design style. For instance:
http://www31.ocn.ne.jp/~kabuky/kiminote1.html
http://www.geocities.jp/teikakaku_videocards/kako/1080732188.html
They`re a lot easier to find when I`m not looking for them. I`m talking about pages that are lightyears long and nothing but text (and probably not updated since 2003)
I got to spend some time living in Okinawa, Japan, a small southern island where the US military has a lot of bases. The culture there, while leaning towards being very conservative, does pack a lot stuff anywhere they can. Most stores & shops are small, with a lot of stuff, the tv news programs, are almost like there websites. Yet families live as generational, (everyone from great grandma to her great great great baby granddaughter live under one roof most of the time) family honor is first, meaning lie to everyone else. People know how to save, and when you do start to understand the language, and ask the guy your age what that says, he doesn't either, since the younger generations are not learning the more advanced characters. I find that though my experiences that Japanese culture has many contradictions. While the occasional person would talk to you with the little English they know to test it out, (usually a tourist from mainland japan, as in winter Okinawa is there Florida Keys) they practice what is considered in the US, discrimination. You submit a photo with your application for a job, appearance is everything. You do not date, nor marries a gaijin (http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=gaijin). It is hard to say for sure why it seems that Japanese websites have so much on them, but with out translating the pages, it might just be that they are using more a simplified kanji. But if you the look a photos of Tokyo, the same can be said, in simpler terms of Okinawa Japan. It was so bright there, that you would walk out and only see a bright radiating haze from all the lights, and coke machines. (Rumor was that there was 1 vending machine for every 3 people on the island.)
Always a scrolling ticker, two big, flashy, animated popups in the corners, something popping up near the bottom, the actual content is obscured in 50% or more.
45 5F E1 04 22 CA 29 C4 93 3F 95 05 2B 79 2A B2
I can show you very ugly mainstream sites in the "Western" Internet too: AOL or MSN.
As for non advertisement sites, Japanese ones tend to have much less clutter. Ever read around the Japanese Wikipedia? A typical article looks like this, which is much less frills then the English counterpart (e.g. much less images, and that's pretty common for Japanese sites).
Compare the Hungarian and the British websites for university application. On the Hungarian site, the link for actually doing application stuff is the tiny "én felvim" box in the top right.
I checked all three examples and I can't find a single word of text. It's all just meaningless pictures!!!one
Expert in software patents or patent law? Contribute to the ESP wiki!
The Japanese character set is bigger, bolder and to my western eye rather scruffy and scrawly. All characters are also the same size as CAPS so it feels like their websites are shouting at you.
I was working on a Japanese site recently and during production we had it all set to English so that we knew what we were referring to within it. Design wise it was a nicely put together clean and simple site. As we neared the end of development we switched it all over into Japanese and suddenly it looked crowded and messy and as though there was too much going on in the page.
If you, switch the Japan Airlines example into English http://www.jal.co.jp/en/ it becomes much more palatable to the western eye.
Japanese font is fixed width. They also combine the chinese, their 2 alphabet and fixed width latin and even fixed width arabic numbers. Half of the page are often rendered images with no hinting or as low quality jpeg. No wonder it look like shit.
compared to the web sites in China. In China, not just web sites, all UI have terrible "busy" problems, everything has to be jammed onto the same page. Have you seen an application with 233 buttons on the UI? Yes, that's all the functionalities of the system, and I personally counted the buttons.
I've been working in Shanghai for 7 years. Initially, I just couldn't understand why customers wants us (the vendors, system integrators, developers etc) to put so many things on the same. It's simply not good to have menu, or navigation. Everything has to be presented on the same display. And every customer wants flying ads, flashing images and icons, animation, sound, popups, etc, etc.
After so many projects, I finally started to understand, although I hate it, and would not use it personally.
And everything turns into a vicious cycle that feeds onto itself. There's simply no way to explain to the customers.
1. Create a Website with ads per view of the site
2. Post a slashdot article talking about website design and how it is different in some local/culture, etc. and link to your websites as references.
3. Profit!!!
The web sites are very like Japanese newspapers, magazines or Ginza signs. Not surprising. Web design != (high concept)design.
Parent obviously referred to "anglo-centric" regarding authors CULTURAL heritage - not genetic.
You know... English speaking western civilization in general instead of author's parents' religious preferences.
Implying that parent poster is somehow wrong because the author of TFA is Jewish is kinda... you know... racist.
Makes it sound as if Jews can't be a part of any civilization or culture but their own.
Mit der Dummheit kämpfen Götter selbst vergebens
I visited that site and it had these huge headlines in Verdana. Just like Ikea, where they have signs in foot-tall Verdana type. Makes me wince every time I go there.
I love Swedish design, but Verdana was just not intended for use at that size.
Nothing new here.
Being extremist one-way only exacerbates being extremist the other way, which is why Japan has so many contrasts.
The main reason they have such flashy things everywhere is probably because the traditional culture of Zen, Tao etc. became overwhelming, and they wanted something different.
A dutch program from my youth tried to explain dyslexia by showing street signs in Hebrew, rather then dutch. It looked apparently very confusing. Except to my mother who could read it. The clutter wasn't there for her because she parsed it as readily as dutch.
ANY foreign language will look cluttered because you brain is trying to create meaning out of chaos and failing. If you watch a loading dock you will see chaos. A person who knows the process will see organization.
People who say in this topic that Tokyo is crowded obviously never been to Time Square or for that matter the Kalverstraat. But your brain can parse those signs and classify them as unimportant.
Your brain, being inhabited in tasty meat, is trained to react strongly to things it doesn't expect because it expects them to be a hungry animal on the lookout for said tasty meat. We don't have to notice that tree we have grown up around, but we have to notice the addition of two eyes and a twitchy tail to its branches.
Here is a simple test: Install a japanese language pack in your OS and change the setting so everything is in japanese. Notice how cluttered it all of sudden is? Excactly the same layout, but you suddenly can't find anything.
For that matter, put slashdot through google translate and see how suddenly the site seems filled with random ramblings by sociopaths who live in their mothers basement.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
Western Viewers see the kanji, and it registers as pictures and not words. Most of those pages have english versions. Check them out in english, and all of a sudden they seem normal, if a little dated, looking.
their layout seems cluttered, but it really is no different from ebay, or amazon. it's just that they use kanji characters which may seem overwhelming to those not used to it
then I'm not sure whether these sites would seem all these busy at all. I suspect that they just look like they are confusing, because I'm confused and don't understand them. That's my fault, not theirs. I'm the one that doesn't speak the language.
For example, compare the sony site with the same sort of thing on itunes. Doesn't look all that different, and might even have fewer elements.
Am I part of the core demographic for Swedish Fish?
when i was there i also noticed everyone uses wep and ie6, probably because everyone's so nice nobody goes around smashing stacks and sniffing packets
i love the sensory overload, i say more gifs and embeded wavs i say
I think it has more to do with their habit of using space most efficiently. Land is a scarce resource in Japan and if you look at people's houses in cities or shops you will see things packed into every nook and cranny.
Merely being blinded by the inscrutable oriental stereotype. Translate it into "American" with some simple search and replace and it becomes blindingly cliche.
Start with "paradox between Japan's strong cultural preference for simplicity in design, contrasted with the complexity of Japanese websites"
Some search and replace later:
"paradox between America's strong cultural preference for thin women, contrasted with the obesity of American Walmart shoppers"
It is the oldest (non-)story in the book, convince folks that what they don't/can't have is the ideal, preferentially if you can use it to profitably sell your product/service.
"Science flies us to the moon. Religion flies us into buildings." - Victor Stenger
Yep. Ahhhh!
canadians are rural country bumpkins who have nothing serious or pressing to discuss so they ramble on and on and "eh" this and "aboot" that and pretty soon you lost track of what you were interested in or talking about so you zip up your parka because the sun is going down (it just rose an hour ago!) and you just go just go and click any link to pass the time ...yes, what i just wrote is retarded
but we're talking about national culture and character informing website design, which, to me, is an equally retarded subject matter
as your post aptly demonstrates: the connection is not weak or tenuous, it is nonexistent
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
Not go all "pc" (the other kind) on you, but it's probably not a good idea to generalize all of Japan on the basis of Tokyo.
If the entirety of the USA were like Times Square, the character of Chicago, San Francisco, Austin, TX, Miami, Iowa City, IA, etc. would all be lost in a Marlboro billboard that puffs smoke.
Every supermarket plays its own catchy theme song on infinite loop
So you're saying that shop BGM in video games such as console RPGs and Animal Crossing actually happens.
Everywhere you go you are subjected to escalators that beep when you approach the end, traffic lights that play Japanese folk music when you cross the street
Those are for the blind. AFB has been trying to get more aural feedback in U.S. cities.
trains with their own theme songs that play at every stop, garbage trucks with their own theme songs.
I'm starting to see where the Japanese RPG designers get their ideas.
Wow. I should have caught this post sooner. Major slashdot emergency.
Here is Japan Airlines:
http://www.jal.co.jp/
So here is American Airlines:
http://www.aa.com/
Jp Gov site:
http://www.stat.go.jp/
US Gov site:
http://www.uspto.gov/
Ugly Jp Consulting site:
http://www.e-netten.ne.jp/
Horrible US Consulting site:
http://www.bryantwebconsulting.com/
Now for some better pages:
http://www.au.kddi.com/
http://www.sony.co.jp/
http://www.vaio.sony.co.jp/
http://bape.com/ (you cannot see the JP site from the US)
http://www.capcom.co.jp/sf4/
This got world attention:
http://www.uniqlo.com/calendar/
And a typical web site gallery site will quickly help you find more:
http://www.webdesignclip.com/
So all of you who just argued for what Japanese is and what American is, you might want to give this blogger a tweet and call him out for making you think hard about the offensive stereotypes you just helped uphold.
Seriously people, if these sites look complex, its because you can't read Kanji.
>It is odd that in Japan, land of world-leading minimalism ...ouch!
Are you serious....?
When was the last time you went down any main roads in the middle of downtown tokyo, the ads all over the place make new york look like the middle of a tiny village. I think because japanese are used to seeing so much publicity, they actually have trained eyes to see so many ads all at once, and are used to it, so that a website with pages like these do not really hamper them much, but for our less trained eyes,
Only a douche asking a question. Don't read TFA, he probably subshittet this himself to get ad revenue. Wanka!
It's not just Japanese web design, it's all forms of media. I have been exposed to powerpoint presentations created by our mother company in Japan (I'm in the US), the slides are cluttered and colorful... Last summer I got to spend 2 weeks in Japan and it helped me understand why their presentations are the way they are, it's exactly like their TV. Even the basic news is cluttered with graphics. Sometimes I had a difficult time distinguishing between the actual tv show and a commercial (I only speak a few words of Japanese). It's not surprising to me their web pages are built in the same manner.
"Action without philosophy is a lethal weapon; philosophy without action is worthless."
Look at Japanese cars: same thing. If they design a car for Europe, it'll be underdesigned in our view. This is because a westerner tries to look at the whole and form a feel for the car/website. A Jap however will look at all the details seperately, and unite them to a whole in his head. Something like that.
i sorta think the author of TFA is looking at a page full of kanji and is equating that to being a busy mess of a design. I wonder if the same exact page, translated to English, would evoke the same feelings.
frog blast the vent core
Japan has a strong cultural preference for simplicity in design? Who is this hack Jeffrey Zeldman? Clearly spoken by someone who doesn't know the first thing about Japan outside of the tired old stereotypes. Visit Japan and tell me Japanese prefer simple design. They prefer clean design about as much as American or European designers do. I'd say Europeans, in fact, are the kings of minimalist design with everyone else inevitably copying their style, including the Japanese. Simply walking the streets of Japan you're greeted to a massive clutter of architecture with all kinds of markings and signs fighting for attention. Japan is the antithesis of minimalism.
Japan does have artistic styles founded in minimalism, but then so do the Chinese and no one accuses them of minimalist design. Contemporary Japanese design is actually quite busy and can be, at times, rather loud. Take a look at the busy lines, odd compound shapes, and fussy taillight and headlight design of Japanese cars over the past decade or so and tell me they favor simple design.
The reason why Japanese sites have been a mess for so long is because they simply don't care about the web. Management doesn't see the value and just gets someone to throw a site together just to have a presence. So if they don't get employees to build the site, they'll find a nephew and worst case probably hire some design company to do it on the cheap. And regardless of who built the site originally inevitably some employee will be responsible for maintain it and there will be no attempt whatsoever to preserve the original look and feel.
And frankly, I can't blame them for not focusing on the web. Their internet browsing habits differ dramatically from much of the rest of the world. They've been heavy mobile phone users for over a decade now. Most of their web browsing has been on that. So web design, if you can call it that, has been focused on providing an optimized experience on phones, conventional websites have languished.
Also important is the demographic of web designers in Japan. This is something I heard from a few people who've lived in Japan. Men in Japan very rarely get into design, like much of Asia actually. Guys tend to get into interior or product design, and those that get into graphic design still tend to focus on branding and maybe print. Web design, as a consequence is primarily a female-driven field. And culturally in Japan there's a heavy emphasis on cute. So inevitably those kinds of elements find their way into designs. It could be subtle, the generous use of color, or more direct in the form of cutesy cartoons.
There is also a tendency to make everything dramatic and overdone. With everything fighting for attention. And that is today's Japanese design aesthetic, not minimalism.
Japan web design is basically stuck in the '90s. No puzzling there from obsessive otaku implication perpsectives. It's just old. Most still use frames, centered typing, and excessive animated gifs, which of course are EXCUSED because Japan will be Japan, though if it were in english hosted on american soil, it'd be blasted for being stupidly out of the times.
How a web design goes straight to hell
Web design that gets filtered through large / medium corporate entities that are largely by and for the Japanese market are usually pretty bad. On the other hand individuals and a few small design shops can do really excellent work - astonishlingy good actually.
I looked at the websites. Typical 3-column layout with sectional organization. I saw very little in the way of clutter, as long as you take into account the visual difference between Kanji and Western characters. The sites *look* more cluttered to the Western eye because the Kanji are much more square and, because of the uniform spacing, seem more dense. In addition, being abstract to those who don't know the language, the brain processes them as abstract graphical elements rather than the main text for the site. The bottom line is that there's little difference between the layout of jal.com and ual.com (or mora.jp and amazon.com). Look at it, and tell me there's a huge difference once you see that the Kanji is text - if anything, the main difference is that the Japanese sites use too much text and not enough big, gaudy graphics.
That is all.
The complexity of pubic hair on their porn stars could definitely be reduced.
your references aren't worth much.
There are three primary ways Japanese is written: Kanji, Hirangana and Katakana
Kanji is constructed in layers until the ideograph is complete. (Think of it as being able to write this entire sentence with over strikes. [non destructive ^Hs :-]) Being based on ideograms means that there can be thousands of these.
Katakana and Hirangaga are syllabarries where the ideogrammatic representation of the :-}])
five vowel sounds (a, e, i, o, u, [or a, i, u, e and o in Nihongo {Japanese}]) are paired with
fifteen consonant sounds (v, k, g*, s, z*, t, d*, n, h, b*, p**, m, y, r, w
[* and ** are constructed by adding diacritical marks to the preceding sound {note NO L sound!
There are some rules about voicing, or leaving unvoiced, vowel sounds but its pretty straight forward.
There is no rule for radix (or sortable value,) or at least there wasn't until the late 1990s, early 2000s, when UNICODE was finalized.
Due to the construction of the written representations of the language being done in layers and having diacritical marks Japanese calligraphy is DENSER than the equivalent text using any western alphabet.
That said, the density is only achieved at tremendous cost.
There are almost NO Japanese who are totally fluent in their own language as written.
MSBPodcast.com The opinions expressed here are my own. If you don't like 'em... Think up your own stuff.
It only looks confusing if you can't read Japanese. My ex-gf's DIRECTV remote was the most complicated thing I'd ever seen until 5 years later when I actually bought a DIRECTV unit myself. It's not complicated at all. Those websites are nothing. This article was written by a ignorant wannabe.
regardless of how they were spoken.
Thus you might not be able to make yourself understood while speaking but you were quite clearly understood with the written word.
How else could the emperors and the entire bureaucratic apparatus, who spoke Mandarin, have made themselves understood, and obeyed, out on the provinces who spoke in the hundreds of dialects and tongues all over Asia.
What the US achieved through force of arms, everybody in th 'States SPEAKING, however poorly, some form of English, the Chinese achieved over all of Asia without having to bat anyone about the head. (That they did so however is not in dispute. :-)
MSBPodcast.com The opinions expressed here are my own. If you don't like 'em... Think up your own stuff.
haven't read the whole thing, but what seems odd to me is that they would compare web design with the (tradition-influenced) *architectural / interior* design culture in Japan, rather than popular graphic design, which is the clear inspiration for Japanese web design. Sure, if you look at Japanese interiors (traditional ones, rather than the average kid's bedroom...) and furniture, you might be confused, but if you go look at Japanese magazines or concert fliers or billboard ads or any other facet of modern graphic design you'd probably be a hell of a lot less surprised by the websites.
Knows that most are cluttered and crowded. The outside may be beautiful, but the inside is strictly utilitarian in most cases (except for the most wealthy). Web pages reflect this. Also, advertising has a lot to do with this. Japanese print advertisements tend to be cluttered and over the top, "bounding with enthusiasm" much the same way employees and street hawkers in Japan scream at the top of your lungs to acknowledge you, thank you, get your attention, etc. The minimalist design aesthetic of traditional Japanese culture is about as popular in everyday Japanese life as the simplicity of greek columns are in everyday western architecture (in other word, almost nothing).