Japan's internet often seems cluttered to outsiders due to its dense, information-packed designs shaped by cultural values and practical demands. This gap was stark at the 2025 World Expo in Osaka, where confusing digital interfaces hindered visitors. Professionals note that minimalism in Japan can convey underdevelopment or isolation.
When the author moved to Japan from the United States over five years ago, real estate websites overwhelmed with crammed details like walk times to stations, room codes such as 3DK, building ages, and non-alphabetical prefecture lists posed immediate challenges. The 2025 World Expo in Osaka, themed “Designing Future Society for Our Lives” and attracting over 25.5 million visitors, highlighted these issues through a frustrating ticketing system, long digital queues, and verbose instructional pages that felt both overcomplicated and simplistic.
Major sites like Yahoo! Japan, Docomo, and Rakuten feature heavy text, mascots, and links without clear visual guidance. Docomo's page resembles a font explosion accented by the yellow POiNCO Brothers parrots, while Yahoo!'s desktop evokes early 2000s aesthetics with 70 text links and slow loading. Many business, government, and even designer sites suffer from outdated looks and mobile incompatibilities.
Designers like Shoin Wolfe, who works with Docomo and Lifull Home’s, attribute differences to cultural biases: “The West has an aversion to information density,” favoring negative space for luxury, whereas in Japan, minimal designs appear underdeveloped or “lonely (sabishii).” Raphael Hode of Tokyo's Nowthen agency notes Japanese versions require more text—five or six lines versus two in English—and bilingual sites demand prioritization. Lawson's 2020 minimalist packaging drew Twitter backlash for indistinguishability, prompting a 2021 redesign with prominent images.
Freelancer Akiko Sakamoto explains kanji's compactness accustoms users to dense visuals, amplified by a safety-driven culture of overexplanation in signs and rules. Wolfe's tests on Lifull Home’s showed cleaner layouts reduced engagement, leading to reversion. Typography adds hurdles: CJK fonts, with 9,000 to 23,000 glyphs, slow loading 30-75 times more than English; text is often embedded in images for balance, hindering accessibility. Eric Liu, a typography expert, critiques Latin-centric tools ignoring CJK needs, like delayed Japanese InDesign support.
This maximalism mirrors chaotic TV ads emphasizing celebrities and slogans over direct product focus, and dense print layouts where readers scan entire pages. Companies accumulate features to avoid failure risks and backlash, perpetuating clutter amid undervalued digital efforts compared to physical engineering.
