While I agree with the vast majority of your criticisms, I wouldn't be surprised if you're underestimating the language barrier issue.

>Is the claim that the Japanese are technologically behind the rest of the world? Why would web development/design be different than almost every other technical industry?

Many programming languages are based on English and the Latin script. Programming, and more specifically web programming, requires a level of fluency with English and its alphabet that I would expect significantly decreases the available talent pool in non-Anglo countries, especially countries with different writing systems[1].

No other technologies lean so heavily a specific language. Math and science are universal and independent of any language. Computer science is universal. Computer programming is not.

[1]Comparing a country like Vietnam (that uses a Latin script) to another equivalent Asian country might be interesting.

I would expand this to include the sciences. I did a 2 month industry internship in Japan a few years ago and I was blown away by the effects of the language barrier. They are incredibly disconnected from the rest of the world. While the rest of the world is publishing their results in English, they are publishing in their own Japanese trade journals. It's kind of ironic, b/c in a less developed country (China), or a less populous country (European countries) you wouldn't have the local base to support the publishing of local language journals and technical books. So they're victims of their own success.

Sure they can go read an IEEE article, but 9/10 times they'll go to a Japanese source b/c it's so much easier for them.

For programming it's probably only worse. I imagine there is a Japanese equivalent to Stack Exchange, but it will have a tiny fraction of the help you get on the English language one. It's probably like programming in the 90s! =)

Well Ruby came out of Japan. So in 1995 some of Japan's coders were programming like it was 2005.

This is an interesting case. A new programming language is a frail thing, and can only grow and prosper if it finds an unoccupied niche. Japan was the perfect environment for Ruby to develop until it was ready to take on the world.

It's as if mammals evolved on an island without any dinosaurs, and then swam over to the mainland.

Mouahaha you killed your argument with this example. Matz is not really a typical Japanese. He is a mormont, he's fluent in English, and lived extensively overseas. There's almost no Japanese like him. So let's forget about this case.

Well, one of Japan's coders. Matz was kind of revolutionary.

Ruby isn't exactly revolutionary. See: Smalltalk. RoR, however, was.

Apart from having Latin-like script I don't think there is much similarity between English and Vietnamese.

Either way, isn't Japan also famous for its engineering prowess? I doubt that country with such high engineering competency will lack talent for web development simply because of the language barrier (if there is actually the lack of talent at all). I'm not saying language barrier doesn't exist but if language barrier didn't prevent them from having companies like Konami, Square Enix, Namco, Bandai, Nintendo or Sony then why would it prevents them to have more web developers?

Ruby was created by a Japanese for that matter.

Unsurprisingly, the companies you listed churn out some pretty terrible code. Square Enix for example has pretty big problems with ffxiv because hacking and botting is so easy. Maintenance windows have gotten longer and are occurring more often in an effort to patch vulnerabilities. Just last week players who were in a specific city accessing their retainers (personal bankers) had their money flushed from their characters by hackers who compromised the trade cluster and transfered it to their bots by listing bogus trash items for millions of gold.

Sure, but it's not like companies in western world don't make similar mistake. WoW/DB3 have plenty of exploits too. Bad code are produced by everyone regardless the cultural or native language background.

Japan's engineering prowess - very distinct from any sort of design prowess. Look at the classic example of Honda and Toyota, two great engineering companies who succeeded in spite of their design. The early Toyotas were derided as ugly little box cars, and their only redeeming value was that they were cheap and well engineered.

Or possibly that is good design prowess - if you're Japanese.

I would argue it's less 'good' design and more that design is a secondary, or ever tertiary concern - which, from an engineering standpoint, it is.

>Many programming languages are based on English and the Latin script.

Because UX/design = programming..?

> Why would web development/design be different than almost every other technical industry? This sounds much more like surface intuition than considered insight

I'm not the OP, but I am working on side projects here in Japan with two guys working for local large internet players, and I personally worked for another very large one where I was close to technological decisions at the company level, so I'll offer more than "surface intuition".

Language barrier exists. Not only the lack of documentation (which is real), but the lack of Japanese stackoverflow (&co.) answers, fewer people on the mailing lists, and other language related problems seriously hamper the adoption of new technologies. It is also one of the many factors behind the large amount of NIH seen around. Using open source maintained libraries in your software makes less sense if no one on your team will be able to read the docs, changelogs, & co. NDAs prevent me to cite examples, but I'm sure you get the point.

Katakana can be used for emphasis much like italics. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Katakana#Usage

That's true, but it would feel very weird to use katakana as a way of denoting hierarchy.

You can bold, color, and shadow Japanese text just fine though, so I don't really see the author's point.

The bigger issue I think is limited font choices.

Look at Western design/font choices - Helvetica. Helvetica everywhere.

> Italics and capital letters have little or nothing to do with how 'Western' web layouts are generally created, and are far from the only way to create emphasis or hierarchy in text.

They are key to graphic design. Though even in the West, web designers have only been waking up to formal graphic design in the last few years.

> Haven't Google, MS, Yahoo, Facebook, Twitter, everyone demonstrated that this is the goal of what they're doing?

The real money now is in commerce, and Japan is well-known for being behind in online commerce due to trust issues with plastic money. I guess that leaves them with old model of ads which would explain the 'million-dollar homepage' look.

There may also be something to these sites appearing noisier to Western eyes because Japanese characters, being more complicated, appear aesthetically noisier than Roman characters.

Just a guess though.