- The internet in Japan looks different.
In a world of minimalist designs and large clean images,
websites in Japan seem to mirror
the language and culture of their home,
colorful and a little cramped.
At least that's according to a theory I read back in 2013
and have shared with a bunch of people since.
There's just one problem.
I don't know if it's true, so let's fix that.
In this video, we use an AI to figure out
what's so special about Japanese web design
and how even across an ocean it impacts you today.
I think I might give up.
Thank you to Hostinger for sponsoring this video.
Let's start off with how I realized
that I may have been lying to people for the past decade.
I was setting up a website to document an old project.
While scrolling through the templates,
the following three thoughts passed through my head.
One, "Wow, these themes are really minimalist."
Two, "Remember how Japan, a nation known for minimalism,
ironically has really cluttered webpages?"
And three, "How did I know that?"
Has that ever happened to you?
Like you accept something as fact when you're a kid,
but now that your prefrontal cortex has finished developing,
you think back and you're like,
hold on, my spider sense is tingling.
What could possibly be so special about Japan
that they just decide to have different web design practices
than the rest of the world apparently?
And even if the article was true, it came out 10 years ago.
I don't know if it's still true. This is the internet.
Twitter was normal one day
and then it might be dead by the time you watch this,
to be honest.
The internet moves fast.
So in this video, I wanna put the theory to a modern test.
I wanna see if there is something unique
about Japanese web design, and if there is, why?
Am I just overcompensating
because I realize I've been doing misinformation?
Probably.
Let's do this.
So I tweeted this, "Are you in Asia?
Have you been using the internet
over the past 5 to 10 years?
Please hit me up."
And it worked, my DMs are completely destroyed,
but I have been chatting with a bunch of awesome people
and no one really knows what I'm talking about.
I am so worried this video's gonna go nowhere.
I took those replies to mean that this web design thing
really might just be isolated to Japan.
So I decided to verify
by checking out the most popular websites
in every country in the world.
So many of these websites are just Google
or manga reading websites.
Are we just all weebs who don't know things?
I categorized the websites based on their contents.
Okay, I know that this shouldn't surprise me,
but the internet is full of a lot of not great stuff.
Just looking at some of these categories,
we've got explicit, illegal, spam, suspected malware.
I'm just gonna whoop.
I then accessed each website using a web crawler and a VPN
to take screenshots of the local page.
So because of GDPR,
websites will ask you if you want cookies, which I respect,
except that popup blocks the entire freaking webpage.
So I need to figure out
how to say accept cookies or allow cookies
or, okay, cool, cookies in every language.
I thought computers were supposed to make things easy.
Just look at this.
Also, the way that they've implemented
these buttons are different.
So I don't just need to know the language,
I need to find the specific button element to click
and then code it in.
I think I might give up.
Okay, so I now have 2,671 screenshots
of websites across like 200 countries.
Ideally, I'd like to know how each website
compares to every other website,
but that would mean doing like
3 million comparisons.
My brain is too soft and small to do that,
but luckily we have computers.
So I ended up using machine learning
to extract the most prominent features
of each website screenshot.
I then compared those extractions to one another
using a statistical method of dimensionality reduction
called t-distributed stochastic neighbor embeddings.
Please come back.
All you need to know is that this lets us see
how our AI organizes and groups our website screenshots.
The closer it puts screenshots together,
the more similar their designs,
and the further apart means more dissimilar.
That's all I'm doing.
So now let's run this.
Kind of anti-climactic.
So this is how the AI organized our websites.
So many pictures, so little resolution.
But if you look closely,
there are clumps that have started to form.
We've got Facebook, Google,
websites that would not let me in.
Twitter and Wikipedia.
But the thing is,
is that these websites are more exception than the rule.
They aren't representative of any nation's design style
because they are in basically every nation.
So I'm not gonna care about them.
Instead, what I do care about is this thing,
what I like to call the clump of interest.
If we look closely at this clump,
we can see that it's sorted along two axes.
Vertically, it's pretty obvious, it goes from dark to light,
but horizontally, you probably can't tell
because you can't see anything.
But on the left side,
we've got images with a lot of empty space,
a little bit of text, very simple images.
As we move to the middle,
we have larger images and two or three columns of content.
But finally, as we move furthest to the right,
we have a lot going on.
A whole bunch of columns, really tiny images,
often of content that I cannot show you.
I tried so hard to filter.
The internet just has so much...
I'm sorry.
Anyway, those are the visual patterns that guide this clump.
Now, where does Japan fit in?
Oh, yeah, I've just changed
all the screenshots to little circles
to make it easier to see things more clearly.
So, Japan, ta-dah.
It's the red dots.
We've got a little Google over there.
Right off the bat,
we can see that it kind of avoids this sector up here,
but we don't know if that is a common distribution.
Maybe a bunch of other countries avoid this corner.
We need to compare.
So let's see how it compares against the United States,
Canada, the UK, Ukraine, Indonesia, Mexico.
Are you seeing this?
All of the countries have wide varieties of web design
except for Japan.
Japan seems to be avoiding this sector
that is defined by dark, empty spaces.
In other words, Japan's websites
are brightly colored and dense, just like the theory claims.
Did I just prove something?
I'm genuinely surprised that we found something.
I just wish you could see it better.
Oh, wait, you can.
I made a website.
It has everything that has been
and will be in this video and more.
Is this my methodology of the project from start to finish?
Are those side by side comparisons over time?
A full resolution photo of the plot I projected?
And here's how I did it.
I went to Hostinger, who's sponsoring this video,
and I checked out their plans.
They have Minecraft servers?
Hostinger is a web hosting provider
and internet domain registrar.
Basically what that means is that they take
all of the technologies necessary
to create a secure website or host a server,
and they bring it into one place.
If that sounds confusing to you, don't worry.
They have tutorials and dedicated 24/7 customer service
and they make it so easy.
I decided to use their WordPress hosting plan
because I made a website from scratch before
and it did not go well.
Couple of you had some issues.
Just everything was wrong with it.
Another issue, it seems completely
or mostly unoptimized for mobile.
Building a website is hard, but Hostinger makes it easy.
WordPress has a bunch of themes
and plugins available for free
and there are no limits on design or functionality.
So you can fully customize your website
without even knowing how to code.
But why am I making a website at all?
Why not just post it somewhere?
With my own website,
I'm not competing with other content for attention.
I get to make my own design options
and also I get to make it pretty welcoming
for people who aren't super familiar with code.
It was super easy to do and it let me focus
on the thing I actually care about, the content.
I love making these videos,
but it sometimes sucks because I need to cut out so much
because it's not super relevant
or it's not super interesting.
Like, it makes a better video,
but it's just kind of frustrating.
But now I have this website.
Okay, it's time for me to pitch you on Hostinger.
I really recommend that you make a personal website.
It's a really great way to set yourself apart
if you have a CV or a portfolio or a resume.
It's a very small investment in yourself,
yet it does so much.
If you use our code ANSWER at checkout,
you can get 10% off on top of ongoing offers
like their massive Black Friday sale going on right now.
Thanks again to Hostinger for sponsoring this video.
Now that we know that Japanese internet looks different,
let's figure out why.
So I've just spent the past few weeks doing more research.
I really thought that I had finished the hard part, but no.
I actually ended up turning back to the original theory
because if they were right
that Japanese web design is different,
I might as well see if their reasoning is true as well.
Now, the author had a bunch of ideas,
but the three that really stood out to me
were characters, culture, and technology
because these also kept coming up in my Twitter DMs.
So let's test them out one by one, starting with characters.
Did you know that Japanese characters
are literally built different?
You see, Chinese, Japanese, and Korean writing systems
share a bunch of logographic characters.
These are individual symbols that represent whole words.
The sheer amount of these CJK characters in existence
lead to massive font file sizes.
For comparison, this is a font that's designed to support
Greek, Cyrillic, and Latin-based writing systems.
It contains less than 4,000 glyphs.
That's typography speak for a representation of a character.
These are three different glyphs.
Now let's look at a font that supports
all of those languages
as well as Chinese, Japanese, and Korean.
Keep in mind,
these writing systems do not have capital letters.
It's so much more.
So this means that Japanese websites
have significantly fewer font options,
since not many designers want to take on this challenge.
The fonts that do exist might load in a little more slowly
compared to other writing systems
since they're pulling from libraries that are massive.
And finally, that lack of capitalization
means that graphic designers lose a tool
for creating visual hierarchy.
These are all factors that could realistically
cause design differences between regions
that use CJK characters and the rest of the world,
except it doesn't.
From what I found, other regions that use CJK characters
don't exhibit the same design patterns as Japan.
So we learned something interesting, which is useless.
Put that on my tombstone.
Anyway.
But what about culture?
This was a tricky one because I was a STEM student,
so I don't have a lot of the domain knowledge necessary
to accurately identify and compare global cultures.
However, being a STEM student also means
that that didn't stop me from trying.
I started off by using geographic proximity,
but that failed.
So then I used a binary identifier
for if a country was part of the global north
or global south.
Also no pattern.
But like I said,
I don't know if this is the best way to compare cultures.
However, given what I've found,
I'm just not convinced that culture
is the primary cause of Japan's unique web design.
Thus, all we're left with is technology.
How hardware and software
shape the way websites are designed today
and why Japan didn't follow that path.
So let's start from the beginning
and go on a journey through time.
The worldwide web is invented
as a way for nerds to share documents,
which is why every website looked like this.
Not good.
But the people knew it could be so much more.
It could share ideas, house businesses, share pictures of...
At a whopping 0.05 megabits per second,
the average person could access
a whole new world of information pixel by pixel,
but that didn't stop people from enjoying the internet.
I mean, if you don't know any better,
I guess it's not its own circle of hell.
However, the internet takes off.
In just two years,
we go from 2000 websites to over a million
with no signs of slowing down.
Scripting languages make websites more interactive,
almost too interactive.
This is the internet. I'm not here to interact.
And Flash gave designers so much freedom
and gave children so many iconic games.
The question wasn't what can we do,
it was what can't we do?
And sure, if you were using
the wrong browser or browser version,
some websites might not work,
but when they did, it was glorious.
So why don't websites look like this anymore?
Why aren't they diverse and chaotic and beautiful?
Well, two reasons.
One, a lot of those 90s websites were unstable,
unsecure, and inaccessible.
So standards were established to make sure websites
use the same building blocks and, two, search engines.
While early search engines used information
submitted or curated by webmasters and web users,
they evolved to use bots
that crawled the internet, scraped information,
and informed search results.
Initially, search engines just checked
if a website's contents contained search terms,
but then webmasters just started spamming key terms
to get to the top of search results.
So then search engines started valuing
how often a website is referenced by other websites.
But then companies started paying
to be linked on random websites
to get to the top of search results.
This cycle continued until eventually
search engines became so powerful and so sophisticated
that websites had no choice but to play by the rules.
Web design became more structured and uniform
to make it easier for search engines to find them.
Now, you might think that the differences
in how search engines work
is what caused websites to look different around the world,
except Google is basically the only search engine
and it's been that way since 2005.
In every country except China,
websites would wanna optimize for Google search.
So what else could have caused Japanese web design
to fracture off?
Well, we need to consider this.
The rise of smartphones.
It's 2007, and suddenly all of these websites
that were designed for desktop viewing
are too difficult to navigate on small phone screens
and too data-heavy to load on limited plans.
- You know, you can help me out,
if you're on wifi, if you could just get off.
- The easy answer was to start simplifying navigation,
reducing content, making things bigger.
This all resulted in this minimalist design
that we're all familiar with, that we call modern.
So it seems like it wasn't language or culture
that caused Japan's web design
to fracture off from the rest of the world.
Instead, it's that their websites
never adopted the practices for mobile-friendly web design.
But why?
And that's because the Japanese smartphone revolution
happened about 10 years before the rest of the world.
Their phones had email in '99, cameras in 2000, 3G by 2001.
They were so far ahead of the rest of the world,
but domestic companies didn't feel the need to spread abroad
because they were already profitable enough in Japan.
But when the Western web began simplifying for the iPhone,
Japanese web designers didn't need to do that
because Japanese people weren't using the iPhone.
Now, there are a couple of other reasons
like risk aversion that might influence this,
but it really seems
like Japan's relationship with technology,
specifically outdated technology,
is the main reason why Japanese internet looks so different.
And after looking at thousands of websites
and learning the history of the internet,
I realized that this isn't just fun trivia.
This is relevant to us even if you're not in Japan,
even if you never intend to go to a Japanese website,
because these websites are artifacts
of how hardware and software,
the infrastructure of the internet
tangibly shapes the way we consume information.
I can't process this because I don't read Japanese.
But similarly, I get overwhelmed when looking at old Reddit.
The small images, the amount of text,
it's hard for me to understand
because I'm not used to to it.
Now, I want you to think about today's web technologies.
Infinite scrolling, algorithmically selected content,
cuts every two seconds.
I'm not saying it's good or bad,
but it sure as heck seems like it can impact us.
And with the internet
constantly in our pockets or our hands,
it can shape the way we see the world.
Yes, I'm just saying the medium is the message.
But either way, have a lovely day.