Randomwire

I've lived in public housing in Singapore and have experienced the noise (and sometimes worse) of neighbors above and below. The cheapness of construction is definitely a factor in the experience - in nicer (private) apartments, there's less disturbance, and less chance of being dripped on by an air conditioner or hung-out washing.

That said, when I visited Hong Kong, I stood at the base of the gigantic blocks of housing there and marveled at how they were the equivalent of small towns. They're:

- significantly taller than most Singaporean public housing

- have more shops packed on their ground levels

- packed much closer (very little space between blocks)

so they really feel a whole different level of dense (and Singapore is very dense already). Staring up at their brutally uniform towering shapes is quite the feeling. If they were interconnected and had open corridors between blocks, I could imagine playing a rather interesting game of tag across many buildings. I guess that's pretty much what the Kowloon Walled City[1] was.

Dense megacities are interesting in their own right, even if they're not nice to live in (as dystopic cities in cyberfunk fiction show). Now I live in a house, but I miss the conveniences of being able to walk to a shop or bus stop/subway stop in 5 minutes.

[1] Incidentally, an arcade in Kawasaki, Japan recreated the Kowloon Walled City - check out the rather interesting photographs at http://randomwire.com/kowloon-walled-city-rebuilt-in-japan -…

It's reputational hangover from I would say maybe the 80s. My experience in Japan was totally the opposite. Most people's emails are something like abc3fa3a11fe.afj.kl@softbank.co.jp because that's the email their phone provider gave them, and they don't know how to check their email if they lose their mobile phone. Internet access is sparse - not even the starbucks at the famous shinjuku intersection had wifi when I was there in 2014. If you want internet, you need to go to an internet cafe - those places that people sometimes just move into as cheap apartments. To do that, you need to register for a card... with a Japanese phone number and a Japanese bank.

You want any paperwork done, it'll involve a fax. No, scanning and emailing will not work, sorry. No, you can't just bring the paper in, it must arrive via the fax machine.

Japanese websites: https://randomwire.com/why-japanese-web-design-is-so-different/

Etc.

Because most people accessed the internet on their clamshell phones and not through a PC/laptop. So most websites were designed to be mostly text and easily browsed from clamshell-phone internet browsers. Now that smartphones have become ubiquitous more sites are finally being designed to look nice on smartphones - sometimes still at the consequence of desktop use. It took a few years after the iPhone release (aka: for it to get widespread market adoption) for JP websites to start "catching up" with Western web design.

There are some other reasons too - but I'd wager the above is the #1 reason and others are more of an "in addition to that" type thing.

More info: https://randomwire.com/why-japanese-web-design-is-so-different/

Somewhat off-topic, but I find that Zoji Neuro Fuzzy rice cooker linked in the article[1] extraordinarily ugly — it looks more like a medical device than a kitchen appliance to me.

It's interesting to me that while Japanese design is generally very much appreciated and admired in the west, there are some areas where their design just doesn't translate to western aesthetics — and, at least to an outsider's perspective, seems almost an antithesis to the idea of Japanese design.

I'm thinking also of the recent article [2] about Japanese web design.

1: http://www.zojirushi.com/app/product/nszcc

2: https://randomwire.com/why-japanese-web-design-is-so-different/

I love that Shimadzu ad with the DeLorean in the Edo period later into the article.

https://randomwire.com/wp-content/uploads/japan-back-to-the-future.jpeg

江戸時代から科学の子ども。

"From the Edo period, science's children."

My translation here may not be super great - it's backed up by looking up and seeing that the Shimadzu Corporation has always made instruments for educational scientific measurement and was founded in the Meiji, 1875, which is only in the decade after the end of the Edo period.

I don't speak Japanese, nor do I know particularly much about their culture or how it might be changing - but there's a quite common topic of differences between "western and asian" web design. So maybe you should keep it separate and have a more targeted design for each language.

https://randomwire.com/why-japanese-web-design-is-so-different/

The product I work on has both English as well as multiple Asian languages but we keep them the same just using different languages for each.