Well, let's not forget the popularity and success of sites like Craigslist and Drudge Report. Plus don't those images basically look like Amazon or ebay, only somewhat more cluttered and with more-saturated colors?
I think this is a good article; those really are some of the biggest reasons the Japanese web by and large looks so horrible.
At an HN Tokyo event I once met an American engineer from Rakuten.
Of course we asked him wtf was up with how ugly it looked. He laughed and swore that they did A/B test it against modern designs, but that ugly won.
My wife is Japanese, and she totally prefers shopping on Rakuten's site to say, Amazon. She says, "it is ugly, but it's more convenient to use." That blew my mind, but there it is.
Many people can argue a lot about what's beautiful and what's not in western design based on Latin and Latin-like scripts, however I think that the web design has become more streamlined and easier to consume during the last decade. Although the new trends with parallax effects and weird scrolling hacks certainly don't help, but aside from that many websites look really nice on the eyes.
Since I find randomwire.com a nice looking website, I decided to see what it would look like in Japanese: https://translate.google.com/translate?hl=en&sl=en&tl=ja&u=h.... I don't know Japanese and probably the translation is quite a bit off, so I can only speak about the visual aspect of it. I think Japanese characters really don't help the design but overall it doesn't look bad either. Certainly much better than Japanese websites.
It's intriguing to see how language influences design and how one design can have multiple meanings. Language is the only thing that stands in a way of a international community. It's clear that logographic has the advantage over phonographic language when concerned with mobile design and wearable technologies where visual real estate is limited.
It's also because designers in the USA copy each other.
A couple of trend setters declare that "flat design" is best, and now everyone is doing flat design. In 2 years it'll be another style where everyone is copying each other.
