Design Matters: How to Make Your Book Cover Appealing in Japan

Yuka Ogasawara
Prototypr
Published in
12 min readNov 17, 2018

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What is context?

“the circumstances that form the setting for an event, statement, or idea, and in terms of which it can be fully understood and assessed.”

We’re always looking for clues, consciously or unconsciously, to decipher the world around us. Written language is more precise than drawing pictograms or making grunting noises like our distant ancestors, but it’s a lot less precise than we think. Just think back to the last time you got a text or email that annoyed you.

A simple message like “You’re late?” could be completely neutral, but depending on the situation, your relationship with the person, and your mood, it could also make you feel an emotion very strongly. For example, if it’s an important occasion, you might feel guilty or anxious. If it’s not, you might not think much of the message and respond with “Yep, sorry, be there in 5 minutes.” Of course, information can be left out in a text message, and we’re bound to misinterpret them at times.

Add in a different culture, different language and completely different history, and you get a lot of contextual clues that are very difficult to decipher unless you know what you’re looking for. What that in mind, let’s explore the cultural roots of context and then decipher how and why book cover design manifests the way it does in Japan.

Context in Japan

Cultural Origins

The Western perspective and much of what we consider ‘modern’ culture was shaped by Greek traditions of debate, logic and philosophy that were precursors to scientific empiricism. This has evolved over time, and now in the West we’ve come to believe that each individual has a set of characteristic, unique attributes that differ from others, that we are largely in control of our own behavior, and we feel better when we maximize that power of personal preference.

On the other hand, inherent in the Japanese view is a mix of Confucian, Shinto and Buddhist ideals that are common across many Asian cultures. These emphasize a greater connectedness with everyone and everything, the importance of relationships, and context. Blending in a group is more important than individual distinctiveness, and collective action is valued over individual action.

In his book The Geography of Thought, Richard Nisbett outlines the tangible effects of these fundamentally different views. These are fascinating and come in shades ranging from stark to subtle.

For example, If you show a picture of a cow, chicken and patch of grass to Asian children, they’re likely to group the grass and the cow together, “because the cow eats grass.” Western children tend to choose the cow and the chicken, because “they are both animals.” Furthermore, studies have found that Western infants learn nouns at a much higher rate than Eastern infants, whereas Eastern infants learn verbs at a much higher rate.

A study using eye-tracking technology found that when you showed a picture to Chinese and American students, the American’s eyes would more likely go to the focal point or object in the picture, whereas the Chinese students more often scanned the periphery of the picture. In other words, the Chinese spent time working out the context of the situation — whereas people in America tended to spend more time on the “main” part of the picture. Lastly, a linguistic factor: In English, we have one word for “I.” In Japanese, Chinese, Korean and many Asian languages there are several words to represent I. All of them are dependent on the situation, and the relationship you have to the person you’re speaking with.

In sum: the Greek world was made of classifying objects, the Asian world was made of emphasizing relationships.

Face to Face

You might all know that Japanese is a high context language. Reading the air, or “空気を読める” as they say in Japanese, doesn’t get too much easier in person. When communicating in person, Japanese people are relying on context and situation to determine their action. They rely on both verbal and non-verbal cues. They don’t talk too explicitly as it may sound too direct and aggressive.

For example, when declining an invitation (even amongst friends), there will seldom be a blunt “no” or explanation for why they don’t want to go. Instead, the proper and polite response is to say “Ahh, it’s a little bit….” Without every explicitly rejecting the offer. This is subtle, but it’s a virtually ubiquitous practice. In this situation, if you were to fail to read the context and demand a straightforward answer to your invitation, you’d likely embarrass or frustrate the other person — you might even lose a business deal (I’ve seen it happen).

There are a host of mannerisms like this that you’ll encounter — from how to hand your business card, to how to greet someone and where to stand in the elevator. While every culture has their own traditions, many Japanese people are not used to dealing with Westerners or non-Japanese people, even in our modern age. It’s still relatively secluded, although that’s changing steadily.

Non-face-to-face situations

When it comes to a non-face-to-face situation such as product descriptions, websites and brochures, Japanese people love details. They love text, lots of words, and very, very explicit messaging so that nothing is unclear. This may seem counter intuitive because as Japan is a high context culture, relying heavily on non-verbal cues without necessarily being straightforward. So you’d think that they would “get it,” whatever “it” is by the implied messaging might be.

But that’s not the case. They need details to be presented because they don’t know the context that they can rely on to interpret the facts. So, they need as much context as possible! This is at least one reason for the extremely cluttered and text heavy design you might see on Japanese websites and Japanese book covers.

Interestingly, there are plenty of ads on trains that can be a little bit unclear, which is a big no-no. If you Google them you’ll find that plenty of Japanese people are frantically googling “what is the meaning of X ad” to make sure that they understand what it actually means.

As a writer, you don’t want people to interpret your book with zero context (like just having a nice picture with practically no text), as there will be room for gross misinterpretation. You want them to interpret the book exactly the way you want them to see it. So it’s important for you to provide the details — it’s as simple (or as complicated) as that!

Why Is Japanese design text heavy?

Japanese Web UI

Passive Information gathering

To an untrained eye, Japanese messaging, from ads, to books and mannerisms can be hard to grasp. This is cliche, I know. The point, though, is that it’s not just about language. Context goes much deeper than that — from how kids are raised to how they ultimately interact with the rest of the world and their perception of their environment.

One reason is that Japanese people would like to get the information passively, instead of needing to poke around and search for the information. There’s an expectation from consumers that everything is going to be explained up front, no funny business. In Western countries we often assume the opposite and ask “what’s the fine print?” In Japan, everything is the fine print, or rather, it’s expected that the fine print is explicit.

In Japan reputation is everything. Once trust is broken, brands have a very hard time recovering; consumers don’t simply forget, they move on and switch products or services. Take for instance the launch of the Kobo e-reader (a kindle competitor) by e-commerce giant Rakuten. When they shipped their product in 2014, they failed to properly install the software on the e-reader devices, which resulted in thousands of recalls. This not only hurt the Kobo brand (which arguably never recovered in Japan), but also left a dark cloud over the entire ebook industry. It wasn’t until 2017 that sales and adoption started to grow at a healthier pace.

Mobile

Japan is a mobile-first country, meaning that the prevalence of mobile came way before desktop penetration. In other words, most people used their smartphones for reading and purchasing goods online, while people in the US had it vice versa. Many people don’t even own laptops in Japan.

For this very reason, when Japanese companies were building their websites, they all optimized them for mobile. It was often expensive to create both mobile and desktop versions, so they settled for what the majority of users would be drawn to: mobile-friendly websites.

While it’s a lot easier nowadays to create sites that work well across multiple devices, the historical legacy remains. You’ll find popular sites like Kakaku, Rakuten, and Hatena that dominate industries in Japan, all with websites seemingly stuck in the 90’s! (If you’d like dive deeper into mobile culture, here’s a great article)

Monozukuri

Craftsmanship

Monozukuri is the Japanese term for “creating things,” the closest translation being artisanship or craftsmanship. Historically craftsmen were higher on the totem pole than the merchant class — the sword smith was well respected but the sales man selling snake oil was seen as — well, just that, a sales man selling snake oil!

This mentality has continued to this day. Japanese companies remain highly product-focused, emphasizing their engineering capabilities. In fact, there is no word for ‘marketing’ in Japanese, just the word borrowed from English. Japanese companies reflect this mentality. Marketing is clumped together with sales and is equivalent to the lowly merchant. The artisans are the engineers and get the limelight.

A famous, almost apocryphal example comes from the stark difference between the Apple iPod and the Sony Walkman’s marketing. The Walkman’s advertisement outlined all of its technical specifications, memory color, weight and other minutiae. The iPod advertisement, on the other hand, only had one sentence: “1000 songs in your pocket.”

Examples

Book covers

Let’s look at how above information is applied to the book market in Japan. The recent trend for the business books in English seems like it can be quite text-heavy.

“Watcha Gonna Do with that Duck?”

This is one of Seth Godin’s books, Whatcha Gonna Do with that Duck? Godin is famous for his marketing/business books worldwide, and many of his books are localized and published in Japan too. Although the original book cover is very eye-catching and nice, it doesn’t have quite enough information to sell in Japan.

On Japanese book cover, what’s written in the black big font is the title of the book. The title is transcreated as The Power to Outsmart, so it’s understandable that now there’s no duck on the cover.

Above it is the name of the author, Seth Godin, and his name is attached by a balloon introducing him as “The genius of business strategy”. Even if you haven’t heard of him, now you know that he’s quite a famous person to talk about business. Again, reputation and credibility is key in Japan. (Most Japanese websites have a giant picture of their CEO on the about page).

Above the jumpy yellow arrow is the subtitle of the book, which says “What those who can predict the future are seeing.” We will talk about the title translation in another post, but it is quite common to use an explanatory subtitle especially for business books or how-to books.

The yellow text at the bottom seems to be the key discussion point of the book. “Use your brain a little bit more than others, and act on a perfect timing.” Above it is further explanation about the book with recognizable names; “Google, Apple, Starbucks, etc. This is the smart and high-return way of working that winning global companies are using effectively”.

As you can see, all the marketing copies and information about the book are on the cover. Of course, you can write those copies in the Amazon description as well, and you can write more about the content there, but putting key information of the book on the most visible place is an important marketing strategy in Japan.

For your reference, below is how the actual marketing material looks like for books.

Book ads on Japanese trains

This book is High Output Management by Andy Grove.

There is copy similar to Godin’s book, but on the top there are keywords like Silicon Valley and worldwide and legendary masterpiece. On the right hand side there are key points that you can learn from the book, and on the left there are testimonials with keywords in bold. The big font on the far left is the name Mark Zuckerberg, and “Applause!” in red. The left bottom says who are talking about this book (setting the target audience).

If you’re a bit overwhelmed, you’re not alone. This is a typical advertisement that you would see on trains in Japan.

Movie posters

“The Hateful Eight”

This is a poster for Quentin Tarantino’s The Hateful Eight. On the English poster, the copy says “NO ONE COMES UP HERE WITHOUT A DAMN GOOD REASON”, and the director’s name above the title. These are pretty much the only copies. However, on the Japanese version, it says “This year’s most likely winner for Oscar” on the top, which is a very eye-catchy marketing slogan for Japanese people who care about popularity and awards (of which most do).

Under that, it says “Locked-room mystery set up by Tarantino” which explains the type of the movie and the famous director. At the bottom, there is another line that says “8 rascals, all liars. Who is going to survive!” which explains the plot even more.

“In the Heart of the Sea”

We can see a similar trend in the poster of In the Heart of the Sea.

The copy on the top of the English poster is localized on the right side of the Japanese poster vertically (we will talk about horizontal/vertical writing system in another blog post), but the Japanese version says “The shocking true story of the masterpiece Moby-Dick, which has been kept hidden.” Quite intriguing, isn’t it?

On the left side, of course there’s more information about the plot; “The deadly fight with the legendary white whale. The ultimate decision that the men made in order to survive was…”. You may also have realized that actors’ faces are featured rather than the mysterious eye of the whale. Especially the marketers wouldn’t have missed using Chris Hemsworth as his was already recognized by Japanese people from Thor and Avengers.

As those examples showcased, Japanese people prefer to know the type of the movie, a little bit of plot, how great and exciting and popular it is, and if they recognize any face or name. Knowing that information will increase the interest and drive the viewing, compared to artsy or mysterious designs (regardless of how aesthetically pleasing they may seem).

Does it look too cluttered?

You might get worried after looking at these examples that your book cover would look too cluttered. But I assure you that it’s never too much for Japanese people.

Text flood everywhere

Inside Don Quijote

You already saw the examples of website and ads, but if you visit any big city in Japan, you’ll realize that stores are plastered in text. The picture above is Don Quijote, a Japanese version of Target.

The signs are not only the information about the aisle, but also ads, promotion, and even recommendations from the shop. That may sound annoying for you to see the written recommendation everywhere, but it is called POP in Japanese, and it’s quite popular. People love going to physical shops because they are excited about reading POPs — it’s kind of a thing, trust me on this one.

“POP”

Linguistic difference: Japanese texts look more cluttered

Last but not least, Japanese characters will tend to look even more cluttered to the untrained eye. If you’re only familiar with the Latin alphabets, it all looks like gibberish. This is simply because

1. it looks very foreign and each character look like just a complicated symbol

2. one character can be made with many strokes and dots. For example, “strategy” is 戦略, “index” is 指標, “depression” is 鬱, “chicken” is 鶏. It looks cluttered, right? When English is translated into Japanese, the length decreases from -10% to -50%, so it doesn’t get necessarily longer, but it looks more condensed.

Also, Japanese characters are double-byte, so each character looks bigger than single-byte alphabets.

In sum…

The Japanese approach to book cover design, ad copy and marketing in general is a reflection of various historical, cultural and contextual factors. The bad news is that it can require a whole redesign of your original idea or artwork just to be understood. The good news is that once you’ve got a decent grasp of this, there’s typically a pattern and format that appeals to the consumer, and that “tough cookie” is more like a “soft mochi.”

Thanks for reading. If you enjoyed this post, please share it with others. If you have any questions please comment below or contact us at sharestoryjp@gmail.com

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