Japanese web design

I kept landing on Japanese sites that just felt different, calm and spacious in a way Western pages rarely are, and I wanted to know why. So I took a few apart, read the people who design and set type for Japan, and put what I found in one place, made visual.

It is two stories. One is the look: ma (間), the charged empty space; three scripts sharing a line; type set vertically like a book. The other is the craft underneath it, the typography rules that make dense, square, space-less Japanese text actually comfortable to read.

Everything is set in real Noto Serif and Noto Sans JP. At the end you can grab a drop-in CSS file, a Claude Code skill, or the whole page as a prompt.