Comment by layer8
3 years ago
From one of the YouTube comments:
I live in Japan and personally I think it's cultural and has more to do with the aversion to change and also the critical shortage of competent IT professionals and foreign-language speakers in this country. Often times websites aren't just designed differently, they are lacking basic functionality. Any foreign resident has a story about how some important website like their bank or a government site wouldn't let them in because their name was too many characters to enter into a text field or something. The government released this contact tracing app for covid and it didn't come out until like 5 months later that the app was broken on android and just literally didn't do anything. Japan's former cyber-security minister was outed as having never used a computer in his life after admitting in front of some committee that he didn't know what a USB drive is. Just look at the difference between Amazon jp and the local version, Rakuten, and it's clear how dated and non-functional Japanese sites are.
The problem is these companies are all headed by septuagenarian nepotism hires who can never be told they're wrong, staffed by programmers who have no idea of industry best-practices because they've been trained by these old guys who don't have a clue either and just want to keep doing what they've been doing since they learned to code in the 90s and can't read non-Japanese documentation, and the consumers also are tech illiterate enough not to notice or care that the websites are dogshit because they're used to it and again never access any non-japanese content because of no foreign language skills. And also old tech is rampant in major companies for the same reasons, which means often times these ancient devices are too slow to run modern websites well.
This is basically what I thought a while back (front-end dev living and working in Japan) but it cannot be the whole true because we foreigners have been saying this for a decade, and the obvious conclusion is that foreign websites that are "better" would come in and sweep the local competition. If Japanese were also horrified with these local designs, they'd JUMP as soon as a decent design comes, right?
But that just doesn't happen, and except in a few cases (so little that could be attributed to luck or natural competition, a big example being Twitter) what usually happens is the opposite, foreign companies come in blazing and get smashed into the ground. See Uber or Airbnb, the former disappeared and the latter is used almost exclusively by foreigners.
So I have two/three extra possible points that might happen, could also be a combination:
- Japanese are used and expect the density of websites here. As others said, look around Tokyo city and it's all hyper-dense, menus in restaurants have multiple layers of information within a page, the TV looks actually like the websites and we foreigners also meme about it[1]. So it might be the cultural norm and expectation, even if we foreigners find it ugly. And saying "consumers also are tech illiterate" about Japan is ignorant at best, condescending at worst.
- It is just a dinosaur thing, and those same dinosaurs use anti-competitive measures to stifle competition. A big one I've been waiting and I'm sure 99% of my friends and I would jump is a BANK with a decent UI. I cannot make international transfers (in EU it's literally like a national transfer) without signing for a different company which is a subsidiary (I believe) and cannot make recurrent payments, which are my two main complains, but it also just sucks in general. Laws based on a strong nationalistic feeling get passed to make e.g. Airbnb or financial companies harder.
- Companies entering Japan don't treat it with respect as a big market, but just as a "let's slap a bad translation on top and expect numbers as strong as in the USA", which is an issue I've seen first hand multiple times as well. For very similar cultures this might work, but for vastly different ones like USA vs Japan you'll need to do i18n besides just translation.
[1] this is really painfully brilliant: https://i.kym-cdn.com/photos/images/original/002/418/147/086...
- Uber Eats is super popular, what do you mean with disappeared?
- TeamLab’s design of the Resona Bank app is modern, lovely, functional, and full of features. All done by locals, for a local bank, to be used by locals. Don’t confuse lack of investment with a cultural effect.
- International transfers are difficult in any non European country, that’s why Wise became so popular. Shinsei makes a lot of their money on their antiquated but easy to use transfer system, for example. But Wise is the most popular international transfer app in Japan. Which also has a modern, easy to use UI. Both support recurrent scheduled payments.
- A lot of well designed UIs were jumped at, including iPhones, Apple TVs, Balmuda appliances, the new touch screen 7-11 ATMs, Uber Eats, etc.
It seems to me that you got trapped in the “I can’t criticise my host country and need to assent to every one of its quirks” attitude that plagues most foreigners in Japan. Most Japanese people find those websites fucking ugly, they just don’t care. I believe that this is the cultural effect at hand here - a lot of locals really don’t care if the design is good or not.
How do I make recurrent payments in Shinsei? There's no option from what I've searched. For transfers yes a transfer from Spain to the USA or UK is a bit harder than intra-EU, but it's trivial compared to Japan where you need to apply to some gvmt card to even qualify to apply to the int transfer service, which of course I got denied 4 times because of my name.
Your whole comment seems trying to find the worst interpretation of what I said on purpose... I mean Uber taxi of course. I said some modern UIs were adopted, but still IMHO not enough to clearly show it was a huge pain point as we think (saying people "jumped" to the iPhone in Japan because of the UI also doesn't make sense, considering how long it took to be adopted and how high Android was for a very long time). Etc.
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> Companies entering Japan don't treat it with respect as a big market, but just as a "let's slap a bad translation on top and expect numbers as strong as in the USA", which is an issue I've seen first hand multiple times as well. For very similar cultures this might work, but for vastly different ones like USA vs Japan you'll need to do i18n besides just translation.
While I can’t speak for software going into Japan, I can absolutely believe it having seen this exact thing in reverse for a game coming out of Japan. You could give yourself a banner with a customisable name, but there was only room for one character on that banner. Great if your language has “狐”, not so much if 20% of your users pick “E” and another 10% pick “T”.
Even with much smaller cultural divides, I’ve faced “Knopf” being incorrect placed on a German naughty words filter because someone literally translated “knob” without asking a native speaker. (And you might be surprised how often IRL Germans ask me, in English, if I drove the train to work, though I do also appreciate that in reverse I probably sound like Crabtree: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ilhJvFngWcY)
This is also true, another very famous and memeable case on the inverse of what I said are videogame translations, "All your base are belong to us" :)
On the unwillingness of Japanese to change- I think its actually Americans who are more unique because we are willing to upend large institutions and our whole social fabric when new technology comes along. Faith in progress and willingness to replace old systems to try something new is historically part of our national DNA, for better or worse. Japan values stability and generally only wants to use technology in a way that fits into the existing heirarchical social structure.
What new technology upended the whole social fabric?
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I think you are confusing internalization with localization. Internalization can be used for similar cultures, localization is required for different cultures.
I would love to work in Japan on their websites. I would take a pay cut if I could become a Citizen. But they don't want Hispanic people over there; which I understand their needs to be insular and homogeneous.
Plenty of hispanics in Japan.
If you tried in earnest to go live in Japan and it didn't happen it's not because of racism. Yes there are some xenophobic tendencies, but they don't play into it. Money and "skills" on paper do.
If you don't tick the right boxes (e.g. graduated 4 years of university education, have demonstrable skills in a technical field, work experience, etc.) it's going to be difficult, of course. But that's the same anywhere.
If you do have those things it’s in fact easy to immigrate to Japan. For white collar jobs there is no “tried to hire a local first” test like most countries have.
You give me hope and a dream. Maybe when the kids are in college we can share a coffee in Osaka. See you there
Govt/traditional big corp related IT jobs are crappy. Generally competent IT professionals aren't happy to work for it.
Sounds like a lot of government signs in the US.
I wonder if their backend systems are also ancient and it's hard to bring that to the web.
Very interesting comment thank you