I see you’re being downvoted but as someone who lives in Japan and had the misfortune to agree to doing a survey this week on tourism which entailed my looking at around 57 tourist websites that made me viscerally angry at how bad they were, I can say you’re right on the money. To say so is not racism or any such thing other than the ability to correctly describe a situation.
Stating the differences, especially the poor quality of the websites is normal. There’s a bunch of terrible web developers here, and they get paid to make terrible websites.
The racism starts whenever a foreigner starts explaining Japanese culture, and they will usually incorporate some old fashioned Japanese nationalism.
Japanese people are just people. There is nothing inherent to our culture, genetics, or soil that makes us like bad websites. We just have plenty of bad web designers.
You have to understand, Japan is an individualist country, unlike collectivist American culture. For example, in the US, there are large hospitals, because we expect to be treated together, but Japan has small clinics due to its individualism. Similarly, in the US, we build large highways for everyone with street signs and house addresses, but in individualist Japan, you have to navigate the subway alone through neighborhoods with no street names. Finally, the article shows that US websites are aimed at a collective culture, but Japan aims small websites geared towards ease of creation: collective readership be damned.
The article states some reasons under Cultural Differences that are inherent (though not unique as the Update 1 note shows) to Japanese culture that would explain the proliferation of bad web design. Maybe they're wrong but they at least seem reasonable. Are we going to argue that Japanese culture generally is going to have no effect on work style and commerce on the web, while we're also to believe it's just chance that led to 2 out of 71 (I checked) of the websites I looked at being adequate?
> The racism starts whenever a foreigner starts explaining Japanese culture, and they will usually incorporate some old fashioned Japanese nationalism.
I'm not sure about the old fashioned Japanese nationalism, but have you considered the possibility that they've experienced a modern type of Japanese nationalism and it's going to be incorporated into their assessment of life in Japan?
> we're also to believe it's just chance that led to 2 out of 71 (I checked) of the websites I looked at being adequate?
We all know it’s ugly. Nobody looks at those designs with approval and admiration.
> I'm not sure about the old fashioned Japanese nationalism, but have you considered the possibility that they've experienced a modern type of Japanese nationalism and it's going to be incorporated into their assessment of life in Japan?
There is no modern type. This is a country run by old men. They keep repeating their Japanese people propaganda, but you don’t have to believe it. In that sense, when I first arrived in Hawaii to study, my foster family felt very strongly about America being the best in everything, and they made sure I heard it all, but in the end, I never really believed what they said. It sounded too similar to what my family said back home.
> We all know it’s ugly. Nobody looks at those designs with approval and admiration.
Well, at least that's an insight. I wasn't sure that anyone Japanese does think it's ugly because, as the article points out at the very beginning, it's in contrast to other parts of the culture that are deemed part of the design world.
Other than that though, I'm not sure what your point is?
> They keep repeating their Japanese people propaganda, but you don’t have to believe it
Strangely enough, I have no inclination to believe it. I'm more worried about the insidious racism and xenophobia that it breeds in those who do believe it, which seems to find enough expression in the general population that there's an endless stream of anecdotes shared among foreigners here.
> my foster family felt very strongly about America being the best in everything, and they made sure I heard it all, but in the end, I never really believed what they said. It sounded too similar to what my family said back home.
Okay, it's just bad luck and foreigners are being mean by bringing up fax machines. Convenient how that argument insulates the culture from criticism and implies that nothing should change, which is a view that over-patriotic people would probably agree with.
