Spam email: my UX culture shock in Japan

Laura Andrews
UX Collective
Published in
4 min readMay 28, 2019
Photo by Franck V. on Unsplash

Below is just a small sampling of the promotion emails I receive every day. I’m 99% sure every company in Japan I’ve bought anything from, or even visited the website of, is now sending me a daily email. Some companies send emails multiple times per day!

I’ve been living in Japan for about year and a half, but it only took a few months for my email to become buried under a mountain of promotions and newsletters from various Japanese brands. Every so often I go through and unsubscribe from each list, but it’s a long and daunting process, and before I know it, I’ve done something to trigger the emails being sent again.

If you’ve never had the pleasure of going through the unsubscribe process for a Japanese email, here’s a typical sample flow. It starts off how you’d expect. First, you have to scroll to the bottom of the email and look for whatever text the website has chosen for the name of the email unsubscribe link. It’s usually some combination of email, mail, magazine, distribution, discontinue, etc. If you’re lucky, there will be a link. Sometimes there is just instruction to go to “My Page” and to select discontinue there.

Step 1: Find the unsubscribe link. This one wasn’t too hard.

After clicking on the link, you are usually presented with a login page. For most of these sites, I can’t even remember signing up for an account. I probably bought something from them or one of their subsidiary brands and quickly entered a password during the check-out process. Sometimes this can detour into a whole “Forgot password” flow before you can get to the central part of unsubscribing.

What I suggest: Don’t make me log in just to unsubscribe. Many email lists already have 1-click-unsubscribe implemented, so those that don’t feel like they are stuck in the dark ages.

Step 2: Log in. That is, if you can remember what email address or username you signed up with. (Although maybe not everyone has multiple email address filtering into one Gmail inbox like I do!)

Once you’ve successfully logged in, you’re dropped into the top of My Page, not an email unsubscribe page. From here, you have to figure out which part of My Page the email unsubscribe is located under. Sometimes it’s part of your customer information, and sometimes it’s in its own page. In this example, it’s located under this link second from the top.

What I suggest: I should have been brought directly the page I was trying to reach before I logged into the site. Your users’ time is valuable! Don’t make them tell you twice when they want to do something.

Step 3: Find where email settings are kept. I definitely clicked through all these links before finding it.

On this page, you’ll find a summary of your customer information. One of the fields in this page allows you to turn your email subscription on or off.

For those proficient in Japanese, this flow for unsubscribing isn’t impossible, just annoying. For people who do not have a good grasp of the language, it could be a daunting task, especially considering the variations between different companies’ unsubscribe processes. Recently, I encountered one that sends you an email to start the unsubscribe process!

What I suggest: Don’t bury essential settings in a list of options. I have encountered Japanese sites with so much user profile and settings information that it’s hard to know where to start to find what you’re looking for. If I have to spend 15 minutes looking for the unsubscribe option, it starts to feel like a dark pattern.

Step 4: Select “Do not want” in the section for email magazine.

While it feels good to vent about a frustrating process, I’m hoping this rant can also serve to also assist others in understanding where and how a flow can go wrong. Japan is well known for and prides itself on “omotenashi” (encompasses the concepts of hospitality, selflessness, and anticipation), so it’s unexpected that there would be such a convoluted process when it comes to spam email. I’m not sure if this should be filed under dark patterns or just something that’s been overlooked?

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Published in UX Collective

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