In a world of minimalist designs and large clean images,

websites in Japan seem to mirror

the language and culture of their home,

colorful and a little cramped.

At least that's according to a theory I read back in 2013

and have shared with a bunch of people since.

There's just one problem.

I don't know if it's true, so let's fix that.

In this video, we use an AI to figure out

what's so special about Japanese web design

and how even across an ocean it impacts you today.

I think I might give up.

Thank you to Hostinger for sponsoring this video.

Let's start off with how I realized

that I may have been lying to people for the past decade.

I was setting up a website to document an old project.

While scrolling through the templates,

the following three thoughts passed through my head.

One, "Wow, these themes are really minimalist."

Two, "Remember how Japan, a nation known for minimalism,

ironically has really cluttered webpages?"

And three, "How did I know that?"

Has that ever happened to you?

Like you accept something as fact when you're a kid,

but now that your prefrontal cortex has finished developing,

you think back and you're like,

hold on, my spider sense is tingling.

What could possibly be so special about Japan

that they just decide to have different web design practices

than the rest of the world apparently?

And even if the article was true, it came out 10 years ago.

I don't know if it's still true. This is the internet.

Twitter was normal one day

and then it might be dead by the time you watch this,

to be honest.

The internet moves fast.

So in this video, I wanna put the theory to a modern test.

I wanna see if there is something unique

about Japanese web design, and if there is, why?

Am I just overcompensating

because I realize I've been doing misinformation?

Probably.

Let's do this.

So I tweeted this, "Are you in Asia?

Have you been using the internet

over the past 5 to 10 years?

Please hit me up."

And it worked, my DMs are completely destroyed,

but I have been chatting with a bunch of awesome people

and no one really knows what I'm talking about.

I am so worried this video's gonna go nowhere.

I took those replies to mean that this web design thing

really might just be isolated to Japan.

So I decided to verify

by checking out the most popular websites

in every country in the world.

So many of these websites are just Google

or manga reading websites.

Are we just all weebs who don't know things?

I categorized the websites based on their contents.

Okay, I know that this shouldn't surprise me,

but the internet is full of a lot of not great stuff.

Just looking at some of these categories,

we've got explicit, illegal, spam, suspected malware.

I'm just gonna whoop.

I then accessed each website using a web crawler and a VPN

to take screenshots of the local page.

So because of GDPR,

websites will ask you if you want cookies, which I respect,

except that popup blocks the entire freaking webpage.

So I need to figure out

how to say accept cookies or allow cookies

or, okay, cool, cookies in every language.

I thought computers were supposed to make things easy.

Just look at this.

Also, the way that they've implemented

these buttons are different.

So I don't just need to know the language,

I need to find the specific button element to click

and then code it in.

I think I might give up.

Okay, so I now have 2,671 screenshots

of websites across like 200 countries.

Ideally, I'd like to know how each website

compares to every other website,

but that would mean doing like

3 million comparisons.

My brain is too soft and small to do that,

but luckily we have computers.

So I ended up using machine learning

to extract the most prominent features

of each website screenshot.

I then compared those extractions to one another

using a statistical method of dimensionality reduction

called t-distributed stochastic neighbor embeddings.

Please come back.

All you need to know is that this lets us see

how our AI organizes and groups our website screenshots.

The closer it puts screenshots together,

the more similar their designs,

and the further apart means more dissimilar.

That's all I'm doing.

So now let's run this.

Kind of anti-climactic.

So this is how the AI organized our websites.

So many pictures, so little resolution.

But if you look closely,

there are clumps that have started to form.

We've got Facebook, Google,

websites that would not let me in.

Twitter and Wikipedia.

But the thing is,

is that these websites are more exception than the rule.

They aren't representative of any nation's design style

because they are in basically every nation.

So I'm not gonna care about them.

Instead, what I do care about is this thing,

what I like to call the clump of interest.

If we look closely at this clump,

we can see that it's sorted along two axes.

Vertically, it's pretty obvious, it goes from dark to light,

but horizontally, you probably can't tell

because you can't see anything.

But on the left side,

we've got images with a lot of empty space,

a little bit of text, very simple images.

As we move to the middle,

we have larger images and two or three columns of content.

But finally, as we move furthest to the right,

we have a lot going on.

A whole bunch of columns, really tiny images,

often of content that I cannot show you.

I tried so hard to filter.

The internet just has so much...

I'm sorry.

Anyway, those are the visual patterns that guide this clump.

Now, where does Japan fit in?

Oh, yeah, I've just changed

all the screenshots to little circles

to make it easier to see things more clearly.

So, Japan, ta-dah.

It's the red dots.

We've got a little Google over there.

Right off the bat,

we can see that it kind of avoids this sector up here,

but we don't know if that is a common distribution.

Maybe a bunch of other countries avoid this corner.

We need to compare.

So let's see how it compares against the United States,

Canada, the UK, Ukraine, Indonesia, Mexico.

Are you seeing this?

All of the countries have wide varieties of web design

except for Japan.

Japan seems to be avoiding this sector

that is defined by dark, empty spaces.

In other words, Japan's websites

are brightly colored and dense, just like the theory claims.

Did I just prove something?

I'm genuinely surprised that we found something.

I just wish you could see it better.

Oh, wait, you can.

I made a website.

It has everything that has been

and will be in this video and more.

Is this my methodology of the project from start to finish?

Are those side by side comparisons over time?

A full resolution photo of the plot I projected?

And here's how I did it.

I went to Hostinger, who's sponsoring this video,

and I checked out their plans.

They have Minecraft servers?

Hostinger is a web hosting provider

and internet domain registrar.

Basically what that means is that they take

all of the technologies necessary

to create a secure website or host a server,

and they bring it into one place.

If that sounds confusing to you, don't worry.

They have tutorials and dedicated 24/7 customer service

and they make it so easy.

I decided to use their WordPress hosting plan

because I made a website from scratch before

and it did not go well.

Couple of you had some issues.

Just everything was wrong with it.

Another issue, it seems completely

or mostly unoptimized for mobile.

Building a website is hard, but Hostinger makes it easy.

WordPress has a bunch of themes

and plugins available for free

and there are no limits on design or functionality.

So you can fully customize your website

without even knowing how to code.

But why am I making a website at all?

Why not just post it somewhere?

With my own website,

I'm not competing with other content for attention.

I get to make my own design options

and also I get to make it pretty welcoming

for people who aren't super familiar with code.

It was super easy to do and it let me focus

on the thing I actually care about, the content.

I love making these videos,

but it sometimes sucks because I need to cut out so much

because it's not super relevant

or it's not super interesting.

Like, it makes a better video,

but it's just kind of frustrating.

But now I have this website.

Okay, it's time for me to pitch you on Hostinger.

I really recommend that you make a personal website.

It's a really great way to set yourself apart

if you have a CV or a portfolio or a resume.

It's a very small investment in yourself,

yet it does so much.

If you use our code ANSWER at checkout,

you can get 10% off on top of ongoing offers

like their massive Black Friday sale going on right now.

Thanks again to Hostinger for sponsoring this video.

Now that we know that Japanese internet looks different,

let's figure out why.

So I've just spent the past few weeks doing more research.

I really thought that I had finished the hard part, but no.

I actually ended up turning back to the original theory

because if they were right

that Japanese web design is different,

I might as well see if their reasoning is true as well.

Now, the author had a bunch of ideas,

but the three that really stood out to me

were characters, culture, and technology

because these also kept coming up in my Twitter DMs.

So let's test them out one by one, starting with characters.

Did you know that Japanese characters

are literally built different?

You see, Chinese, Japanese, and Korean writing systems

share a bunch of logographic characters.

These are individual symbols that represent whole words.

The sheer amount of these CJK characters in existence

lead to massive font file sizes.

For comparison, this is a font that's designed to support

Greek, Cyrillic, and Latin-based writing systems.

It contains less than 4,000 glyphs.

That's typography speak for a representation of a character.

These are three different glyphs.

Now let's look at a font that supports

all of those languages

as well as Chinese, Japanese, and Korean.

Keep in mind,

these writing systems do not have capital letters.

It's so much more.

So this means that Japanese websites

have significantly fewer font options,

since not many designers want to take on this challenge.