I'm baffled because historically, Japan is all about using limitation to great effect. In terms of food, art, language (is there a more contextual language?), and engineering, Japan very much has an island-nation use-limited-resources-and-achieve-great-things approach.
The website thing that you mentioned is true. .jp websites are TERRIBLE in UX. I wonder if there is some part of Japanese culture that wants to embrace complexity for it's own sake.
And, let's be honest, the US/EU/Everywhere-Else designs for phones weren't very good pre-iPhone either. It had the same complexity problems and close to the same UX ridiculousness that the Japanese phones had. Perhaps it's a human thing, to marvel at too much to comprehend and consider it a good thing.
That being said, if any company were to come up with an iPhone, I would think it would be a Japanese one. But Japan is very traditional and Apple is unique in that it disregards a lot of conventions. I think this might be to Japan's detriment. I don't feel that they've embraced the current approach to UX, they are still stuck in the "complexity = more features = better" days of the Web during the dot-com-boom days (aka ancient history).
I hope there are some Japanese entrepreneurs out there ready to shake things up, the cultural seeds are already there for beautiful and elegant products.
The website thing that you mentioned is true. .jp websites are TERRIBLE in UX. I wonder if there is some part of Japanese culture that wants to embrace complexity for it's own sake.
And, let's be honest, the US/EU/Everywhere-Else designs for phones weren't very good pre-iPhone either. It had the same complexity problems and close to the same UX ridiculousness that the Japanese phones had. Perhaps it's a human thing, to marvel at too much to comprehend and consider it a good thing.
That being said, if any company were to come up with an iPhone, I would think it would be a Japanese one. But Japan is very traditional and Apple is unique in that it disregards a lot of conventions. I think this might be to Japan's detriment. I don't feel that they've embraced the current approach to UX, they are still stuck in the "complexity = more features = better" days of the Web during the dot-com-boom days (aka ancient history).
I hope there are some Japanese entrepreneurs out there ready to shake things up, the cultural seeds are already there for beautiful and elegant products.