In my experience Japanese site are way more cluttered than Chinese sites. Even with the large number of links and pictures Chinese sites look more organized and designed where Japanese sites are just a plain mess. My theory is that Japanese writing relies on the comparatively simple hiragana for &quot;grammar&quot; (not to go too deep into the topic) in addition to the complex chinese characters. As such it gives the text a kind of weird rhythm without which it is pretty difficult for them to read text (only presenting hiragana loses the meaning while only presenting kanji would be very hard to skim) As a result even when somewhat deliberately designed, the end result seems like a jumbled mess of characters with varying contrast randomly flowing together. Additionally words that would for example  appear in a menu are of either writing system and as a result of varying length, thus difficult to align.<p>Combine this with the sofware industry here being absolutely driven by incompetence (&quot;as long as you shut up and work hard [= long hours] you are a good employee&quot;) in most places you get no willingness to risk changing the status quo that is stuck in the late 90&#x27;s.<p>Compared to that Chinese sites look pretty refined to me, with the same sort of characters of usually very similar length and while there is no whitespace the contrast between characters is much less varied and looks much more pleasant in my opinion. I can see contemporary patterns are also used a lot more too which suggest China in general is more aware of and willing to incorporate the latest trends. Taobao vs Rakuten might be a good example. Yahoo US vs CN vs JP (the latter run completely by Yahoo Japan and has nothing to do with actual Yahoo anymore) is another.