[tuppy]

I'm baffled because historically, Japan is all about using limitation to great effect. In terms of food, art, language (is there a more contextual language?), and engineering, Japan very much has an island-nation use-limited-resources-and-achieve-great-things approach.

The website thing that you mentioned is true. .jp websites are TERRIBLE in UX. I wonder if there is some part of Japanese culture that wants to embrace complexity for it's own sake.

And, let's be honest, the US/EU/Everywhere-Else designs for phones weren't very good pre-iPhone either. It had the same complexity problems and close to the same UX ridiculousness that the Japanese phones had. Perhaps it's a human thing, to marvel at too much to comprehend and consider it a good thing.

That being said, if any company were to come up with an iPhone, I would think it would be a Japanese one. But Japan is very traditional and Apple is unique in that it disregards a lot of conventions. I think this might be to Japan's detriment. I don't feel that they've embraced the current approach to UX, they are still stuck in the "complexity = more features = better" days of the Web during the dot-com-boom days (aka ancient history).

I hope there are some Japanese entrepreneurs out there ready to shake things up, the cultural seeds are already there for beautiful and elegant products.