Comment by franciscop
3 years ago
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.
You mean because of MyNumber?
It's your responsibility to maintain a consistent katakana transliteration of your name. I don't think many banks would accept documents if your name was misspelt, no matter the country.
MyNumber's purpose is precisely to curtail white collar crime. Of course there would be tight regulations around that. But it's something that you make only once.
EU countries are economically and legally integrated to very high levels. Banking regulation is simplified for intra EU transfers. Japan is an isolate that is not part of any economic unions. Banking regulation focus on the domestic market and crime prevention. Different countries, different needs.
I agree that bad UIs are not a huge pain point. As I said, nobody cares. But that doesn't mean that bad UIs are liked or appreciated. They are tolerated.
Learn Japanese and get yourself a Resona bank account.
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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?
What hasn’t? USA has been transforming itself with technology for the last 200 years on an amazing pace. Cars, telephones, radios, television, airplanes, computers, Internet, smart phones, social media. The whole social fabric has been upended several times.
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Using technology broadly- first I was thinking of things like opioid painkillers- given out like candy in the 90s due to pharma marketing, then there was a huge backlash. Meanwhile I believe Japan has been pretty strict on medication. Amphetamines are strictly controlled there too while in parts of the US they are widely used as performance enhancers for studying.
Another change to the social fabric is due to globalism, shareholder capitalism and roboticization taking away US manufacturing jobs. Also big box replacing locally owned retail, and possibly internet shopping replacing bix box stores. Of course these are present in Japan too, but not allowed to dramatically change society quite so fast.
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Television created the suburbs.
(not the OP)
Facebook and other social media?
I think you are confusing internalization with localization. Internalization can be used for similar cultures, localization is required for different cultures.