A Latin webfont is forty kilobytes. A Japanese one covering the same text is several megabytes, because it has to carry thousands of characters.
Nothing else on a Japanese page comes close to the weight of the type, and most advice about web fonts was written for alphabets.
A full Japanese font carries thousands of glyphs and weighs megabytes. Subsetting to the characters a page actually contains turns the largest asset on the site into one of the smaller ones.
Japanese layout uses features that reflow differently from Latin text. Pages are cached whole rather than assembled client-side, so the layout does not settle in front of the reader.
Signed-in pages always reach the origin, and a European one is a fifth of a second away before it starts working. The origin sits in the Asia region instead.
Japan's regime asks who handles the data and where it goes when it leaves the country. Those answers are given as facts rather than as a region name.
A large share of Japanese traffic is on mobile networks where the first byte matters more than raw bandwidth.
Optimise images on a Japanese site and you have addressed the second-largest thing on the page. The font is first, usually by a wide margin.
The measure on a Japanese site is when readable type reaches the screen, and that is decided almost entirely by how the font was packaged.
One fact dominates: the writing system needs thousands of glyphs, and shipping all of them is the default.
| Setting | What we do | Why |
|---|---|---|
| Font delivery | Subsetted to the characters each page uses | A complete Japanese face carries thousands of glyphs and runs to megabytes, making it larger than every image on the page combined. |
| Font loading | Sequenced so text is readable before the face arrives | A multi-megabyte font blocking first paint leaves a Japanese page blank for exactly as long as the download takes. |
| Origin region | Placed in Asia rather than fronted by an Asian edge | Cached pages are served locally either way, but signed-in and transactional pages always reach the origin wherever it happens to be. |
| Markup caching | Full HTML cached rather than assembled in the browser | Japanese layout features reflow differently from Latin text, so client-side assembly settles visibly in front of the reader. |
| Data handling | Stated for APPI including cross-border movement | Japan's regime asks specifically what happens when data leaves the country, which is a question about facts rather than about a provider's region names. |
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