This article is entirely focused on sites built by corporations. In my opinion, Japanese and English sites are more similar than ever today, as more of the web is dominated by blog and social media platforms, but there used to be more interesting differences.
I spent a lot of time on the Japanese web about ten years ago, when there were still a lot of self hosted amateur sites for fiction, tech, and other hobbies. These sites were spartan compared to their English counterparts, with a much higher ratio of text to images. What few images there were were often original photos or illustrations. It's hard to express how different the aesthetic was, but it was as though everyone from artists to meme makers to TV show fandoms were taking design cues from 90's programmers.
In comparison, the equivalent English sites of the time had a strong aversion to emptiness. Every page needed banners and buttons decorated with copyrighted images that had been cropped and filtered. Authors were more concerned with elevating the best work taken from elsewhere than showing one's own work, and one could participate in that work by remixing it.
Seeing this cultural difference changed how I thought about copyright. Copyright is easy to enforce when social norms and cultural aesthetics don't treat content as a commodity everyone needs to have. This isn't a popular opinion among tech libertarians, but I'd rather live in a world where private content creators had more control, but where everyone was doing more creating than sharing.
I spent a lot of time on the Japanese web about ten years ago, when there were still a lot of self hosted amateur sites for fiction, tech, and other hobbies. These sites were spartan compared to their English counterparts, with a much higher ratio of text to images. What few images there were were often original photos or illustrations. It's hard to express how different the aesthetic was, but it was as though everyone from artists to meme makers to TV show fandoms were taking design cues from 90's programmers.
In comparison, the equivalent English sites of the time had a strong aversion to emptiness. Every page needed banners and buttons decorated with copyrighted images that had been cropped and filtered. Authors were more concerned with elevating the best work taken from elsewhere than showing one's own work, and one could participate in that work by remixing it.
Seeing this cultural difference changed how I thought about copyright. Copyright is easy to enforce when social norms and cultural aesthetics don't treat content as a commodity everyone needs to have. This isn't a popular opinion among tech libertarians, but I'd rather live in a world where private content creators had more control, but where everyone was doing more creating than sharing.