[Broco]

ja.wikipedia.org doesn't have images because copyright law is much stricter in Japan. Fair use is a legal concept that exists pretty much only in the United States. Actually, most of the non-English Wikipedias have few images for this reason.

As for Japanese web design in general, I do agree that it is inferior to what we are used to here. It is like 5 years behind the English web in design sensibility (to the extent that the difference can be measured in "years"; of course they diverge and do things that we never did here). That the Japanese don't notice how backwards they are in this respect can give an idea about how rarely they ever visit any English websites.

It is interesting how ghettoized the web is, despite its ostensibly cross-border nature. For example, I hear that in Korea websites commonly use crappy ActiveX plugins, which is very rare here.