Early on, I ran into a culture clash between the aesthetic of the West and that of Japan. The president and others wanted everything to be crammed as full of content as possible and felt that white space made it look sparse and like we were lacking in content. One of my former students is a freelance graphic designer and she told me she has similar problems dealing with clients who want everything to be crammed and cluttered in layout and design.
This visual clutter is ugly and more stressful to look at. I don't miss this crowded graphic design aesthetic which I encountered not infrequently in Japan.
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I am sorry that this comment is completely irrelevant to this post, but I looked at your contact information, and it seemed the e-mail provided was mainly for business inquiries. I was just wondering how you were able to get your job in Japan. Many people end up as assistant teachers, so I was just curious as to how you obtained your position? Were you originally working in an American company that went overseas?
ReplyDeleteThank you for your time and sorry if I have bothered you.
Hi, Dragon Girl. You can e-mail me privately at that address, but I didn't want people to e-mail me comments.
DeleteRegarding how I got my job, I found it in a newspaper advertisement. The first job (at Nova) was listed in the Japan Times as a full time job. The second job at the correspondence school was a temporary position which became full-time. It was also listed in a newspaper, but it may have been the Daily Yomiuri or the Asahi Evening News. Many people get jobs these days via Gaijinpot or other online job listings and the magazine Metropolis used to be fairly popular for job listings.
I worked in social services in the U.S., so it wasn't the sort of job that translated well to work in Japan.
Thanks for reading!
Their website design is just as horrible! Everything looks tawdry and 1990s. I swear half the reason I've stopped learning to read Japanese is that I can't stand to look at anything in print here.
ReplyDeleteI'm right with you on the web design. If the clutter weren't bad enough, the fact that a lot of the text is contained in graphics and is therefore unsearchable. That just drives me crazy!
DeleteThanks for commenting!
I've noticed the cluttered design - which is kind of ironic, since a lot of the traditional aesthetics, like ikebana, value the empty spaces as much as the filled spaces.
DeleteWeb design, at least, was driven by the fact that for a long time, it was far more common for people to browse the internet using their phones than using a computer.
I'm currently living in Japan and I constantly rant about the same thing. My Japanese husband does as well. Part of the main reason we avoid shopping on Japanese websites online is because we hate having to wade through all the crap just to get to what is relevant for us.
ReplyDeleteI current do work in documentation and I have also noticed that the same thing ends up in business documentation as well. So much information (some of which is relevant and some of which is not) is crammed into these documents that half the time I can't even decipher the purpose of the document. It is like you said, there is much more emphasis on quantity of content and not quality.
The kitchen sink approach was also something my former boss and I fought. When you mentioned all of the information tossed in for no reason, it reminded me that, yes, that was another battle we had to fight!
DeleteI did wonder what, if anything, it said about the Japanese mind and how people were acculturated to think about things. Completely unrelated things were added to books and we had to battle to keep them organized in a meaningful fashion.
I made the observation that the more crammed the design and the more dynamic the Kanji drawing style is, the less intelligent is the subject at hand. The Japanese yellow press and right-wingers are an example for this completely unscientific observation ;-)
ReplyDeleteI add my voice to your unscientific observation as one I would have had as well, had I actually thought about it. ;-)
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