They are infamous for being old fashioned, note how they are still fundamentally Web 1.0 sites with columns and packed densely with content which is mostly text.

I love how I can just open a Japanese website up and have everything worth seeing right there in front of me. No need to scroll past a 1000 pixel tall, unrelated stock picture to then deal with "content" spaced 100 pixels apart and using only 600 pixels of my 1920 pixels wide screen and "dynamically loading in" as I scroll past them.

I love how I can just open a Japanese website up and generally have it load in seconds if not instantly. No need to wait tens of seconds or even minutes for a trillion lines of JavaShit to load and be processed and then wait on a trillion more assets to be loaded and processed.

Fuck minimalism, I want usability. Websites are carriers of information, not high school art projects.

Also to note: I'm Japanese-American. :V

How do they work on mobile viewports? I get what you are saying, I think many here prefer websites like HN that are simple, dense and fast but many old-fashioned sites are dense, but aren't really usable on mobile and not always fast.

No first hand experience, but I would hazard a bet they work well. Mobile device use is up up up and desktops/laptops down down down in Japan just like the rest of the world, and yet the Japanese internet largely remains the same.