Web design for Japanese users: what changes besides the language

“Japanese websites look cluttered.” It’s usually the first thing designers from outside Japan say, and I understand why. Then again, the people using those sites don’t see clutter. Show them a clean landing page with one headline and a “Book now” button, and a lot of them will wonder what it’s leaving out.

I build websites for small businesses in Osaka, Kyoto and Tokyo (a salon, a mahjong parlor and a yacht charter, among others), and part of my job at Vercel is explaining the Japanese market to teams in other time zones. Before that, I ran marketing in twelve markets for a cross-border e-commerce service that sells Japanese products abroad, which is the same problem in reverse. This is what I change when a site is for Japanese users, besides the language. The technical side (names, addresses, Intl, line breaks) is in Localization is not translation.

Density: answer every question on one page

Japanese users tend to read before they act, and they expect the details on the page: prices, what’s included, opening hours, days off, how to get there. A site that hides all of that behind “Contact us” comes across as evasive, however premium the design.

So long pages are fine. What matters is that they’re easy to scan:

• Prices in a table, tax included. Showing the total with consumption tax (総額表示) has been mandatory for consumer prices since April 2021, and people compare the tax-included (税込) number anyway.
• Access (アクセス): the nearest station and how many minutes it is on foot, a map, and a photo of the entrance if the place is on an upper floor or down a side street. For a salon or a mahjong parlor, I’d argue this section matters more than the hero.
• An FAQ (よくある質問) with the questions people would otherwise phone to ask. Can I come alone? Is there parking? Do I need to book?
• Anchor links at the top of long pages, so people can jump straight to the part they came for.

Now, don’t get me wrong. Density doesn’t mean giving up on hierarchy. Clear headings, space between sections and one idea per block still apply; you’re just allowed to have more blocks.

The trust signals Japanese users look for

This is where sites built abroad lose people. Before reading any of the copy, a Japanese visitor checks a few specific things to decide whether the business is real.

• A company profile, labeled 会社概要 (kaisha gaiyō): legal name, representative, address, founding date and what the business does. For a sole proprietor, the trade name and the owner’s name. It’s usually a small table linked from the footer, and people do check it.
• The legal notice for online sales, labeled 特定商取引法に基づく表記 (usually shortened to tokushōhō). If you sell online to consumers in Japan, the Act on Specified Commercial Transactions requires it: seller name, address, phone number, prices, shipping fees, payment methods and timing, delivery time and the returns policy. Buyers know to look for it, and a shop without one looks like a fly-by-night operation.
• A privacy policy (プライバシーポリシー), linked from every form. Many Japanese forms put a consent checkbox right above the submit button.
• A phone number, with the hours it’s answered (受付時間) and the days you’re closed (定休日). Plenty of customers, especially older ones, would rather call, and a business with no number at all is harder to trust.

Contact forms, and LINE next to them

A Japanese contact form has its own conventions, and people notice when they’re missing:

• Required fields get a small red 必須 (required) badge, and optional ones often say 任意. An asterisk works, but it looks imported.
• Name fields come with a reading in katakana (フリガナ); the details are in the localization article.
• After pressing submit, you usually land on a confirmation screen (確認画面) that repeats what you typed, with “Back” and “Send” buttons, then a thank-you page and an automatic reply email. Skipping the confirmation step is a reasonable call on a short form. Skipping the auto-reply isn’t: without it, people assume the form didn’t work, and they call.

Then there’s LINE, the messaging app nearly everyone in Japan already has. A lot of small businesses run a LINE Official Account (LINE公式アカウント) for bookings, questions and reminders. For a salon, an “add friend” (友だち追加) button or QR code can do more than the contact form, because asking something on LINE feels lighter than filling in six fields. Put it next to the form and the phone number, and let people pick.

Politeness in microcopy and error messages

Japanese has registers: the plain form, the polite form (desu/masu) and, on top of that, keigo (honorific language). Buttons can be short and neutral (送信する, 次へ). Everything that speaks to the user, including instructions, confirmations and errors, should be in the polite form, and consistently so. Mixing registers on one page is one of the quickest tells of machine translation.

How much keigo you add depends on the business. A yacht charter can be as formal as a hotel; a mahjong parlor that writes like a bank feels cold. What doesn’t change is how errors are written: say what happened and what to do next, don’t blame the user, and never translate a playful English error literally. “Oops!” doesn’t survive the trip.

Instead of	Write	Why
このフィールドは必須です	お名前を入力してください	Names the field
無効なメールアドレスです	メールアドレスの形式をご確認ください	Asks instead of accusing
おっと！問題が発生しました	送信できませんでした。時間をおいてもう一度お試しいただくか、お電話でお問い合わせください。	Gives the user a way out
成功しました！	お問い合わせを受け付けました。2営業日以内にご連絡いたします。	Says what happens next

Typography and line height

Japanese text is dense. Every character fills a full square, and there are no spaces to rest the eye on. Body text that looks fine at line-height: 1.5 in English feels cramped in Japanese, so I use 1.7 to 2 for body copy and keep lines shorter. A starting point:

html:lang(ja) {
  font-family:
    "Hiragino Sans", "Hiragino Kaku Gothic ProN", "Noto Sans JP", Meiryo,
    sans-serif;
  line-height: 1.8;
}

html:lang(ja) :is(h1, h2, h3) {
  font-feature-settings: "palt";
  letter-spacing: 0.04em;
  line-height: 1.4;
}

System fonts come first because a Japanese web font covers thousands of glyphs and weighs megabytes before subsetting. Google Fonts splits Noto Sans JP into slices so the browser only downloads the ones the page uses; if you self-host, do the same. palt switches the kana to proportional widths, which tightens headings nicely. Body text reads better without it.

Two habits from English don’t carry over. Japanese fonts have no italics, so the browser fakes a slant that looks broken; use bold or 「」 brackets for emphasis instead. And keep body text at 16px or more on phones, because kanji with a lot of strokes turn into smudges below that.

Imagery

Stock photos shot abroad are the fastest way to make a Japanese site look foreign. For a small business, real photos beat any stock library: the staff, the room, the view from the boat, the entrance people will be looking for when they arrive. Staff introductions with a photo and a few lines (スタッフ紹介) are normal on salon sites, and people use them to choose who to book with.

Illustration is also more accepted than in the West. Mascots and friendly drawings show up even on government sites, so an illustrated explainer won’t make a business look less serious. What I avoid is text baked into images. It’s common in Japanese banners, and it breaks screen readers, search, translation and small screens in one go.

The same problem from the other side

Marketing a Japanese service in twelve markets taught me that none of this is a list of Japanese quirks. Every market has its own list; Japan’s is just more explicit. A 会社概要 table means nothing to a buyer in another country, who looks for reviews, a returns policy in plain words and support in their own language instead. And the careful, polite tone that reads as respectful in Japanese sounds stiff, or even evasive, when it’s translated literally into English or Spanish.

The fix is the same in both directions: write for each market from the same brief, and have someone from that market read it before it ships.

A checklist before launch

• 会社概要, plus 特定商取引法に基づく表記 if you sell online
• A privacy policy linked from every form
• A phone number with hours, and LINE if the business uses it
• Tax-included prices in a table
• Access: nearest station, minutes on foot, map and a photo of the entrance
• Polite, consistent microcopy, and errors that say what to do next
• A line height of 1.7 or more, and no fake italics
• Real photos, and no text inside images

Then ask a Japanese friend to book something on it, and watch where they hesitate.