Over the years, I have had many encounters with Japanese websites — be it researching visa requirements, planning trips, or simply ordering something online. And it took me a loooong while to get used to the walls of text, lavish use of bright colors & 10+ different fonts that sites like this one throw in your face:


Though there are numerous examples of sites with a more minimalistic and easy to navigate design for someone used to Western websites, it is worth examining why this more convoluted style remains prevalent in Japan.
And just to be clear, these are not remnants from the past, but maintained sites that — in many cases — were last updated in 2023.

There are several angles from which we can analyze this design approach:

• Fonts & Front-End Website Development Constraints
• Technological Development & Stagnation
• Institutional Digital Literacy (or the lack thereof)
• Cultural Influence

As with most topics, it is likely that there is no one right answer, but rather that this website design is the result of various factors interplaying over time.

Fonts & Front-End Website Development Constraints

Whereas creating new fonts for romanized languages can be an enjoyable challenge everyone with a basic understanding of typography, an appropriate program & some time on their hands, can take on, doing the same for Japanese is an endeavour on a whole other level.
To create a font from scratch in English you’ll be looking at around 230 glyphs — a glyph being a single representation of a given letter (A a a counting as 3 glyphs) — or 840 glyphs if you want to cover all languages based on the Latin alphabet. For Japanese, as a result of the three different writing systems and countless Kanji, you will be easily looking at 7,000–16,000 glyphs or even more. So, creating a new font in Japanese requires both an organized team effort and a lot more time than its Latin counterparts.
It won’t come as a surprise then that similar workloads ensue for Chinese and (Hanja) Korean fonts, leading to these languages being often covered in what are called CJK fonts.
And with less designers rising to this particular challenge, there are less fonts to choose from when building a website. Add this to the lack of capitalization and Japanese fonts being accompanied by longer loading times due to referencing larger libraries, and you end up with having to use different means in order to create visual hierarchy.

Sources & further reading

Fonts & Typography
Interview with Font Designer Akira Kobayashi: https://www.smashingmagazine.com/2015/04/interview-with-akira-kobayashi/
A detailed breakdown of the creation process behind a Chinese font: https://qz.com/522079/the-long-incredibly-tortuous-and-fascinating-process-of-creating-a-chinese-font
An example of a Japanese font including glyph count from Adobe Fonts: https://fonts.adobe.com/fonts/source-han-sans-japanese#fonts-section
CJK Fonts: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_CJK_fonts
Japan & Technology
An article on Japan’s fading hi-tech image and where it came from: https://thenextweb.com/news/japan-loves-fax-machine-techno-orientalism
Bloomberg on the effects of the Internet Explorer shutdown in Japan: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2022-06-15/end-of-internet-explorer-era-spells-trouble-for-japan-businesses#xj4y7vzkg?leadSource=uverify%20wall
The Guardian on the 2018 statement made by Japan’s former Cybersecurity Minister: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2018/nov/15/japan-cyber-security-ministernever-used-computer-yoshitaka-sakurada
Reading up on the Lost Decades: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lost_Decades
Cultural Influences
Wired on several studies about perception differences: https://www.wired.com/2008/03/japanese-more-s/
A study on the same topic: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/11645680_Attending_holistically_vs_analytically_Comparing_the_context_sensitivity_of_Japanese_and_Americans_Journal_of_Personality_and_Social_Psychology_81_922-934