But it’s more than that. Russian websites, for example, are almost as incomprehensible to me as Asian ones. But I have much less difficulty finding decent non-corporate examples of quality russian webdesign. (By which I mean, I’ve casually bumped into such before on more than one occasion.) I can actually read Arabic with a little difficulty, and for the most part, their webdesign isn’t too bad either, when they’re not struggling with right-to-left issues. Their text is a sea of squiglies unless I’m putting effort in, but I honestly find http://www.aljazeera.net/ to be less busy than say, http://www.foxnews.com/. Compare both to, for example, Cyworld, on a good day. I mean, even Asian television shows are “busy”.

Then again, I started to say, that perhaps the examples you cited were consciously less busy simply because they were big corporate sites, but I immediately was reminded that that is true for virtually every corporate design anywhere, in any culture.

So perhaps the better question, is why popular media in Asian culture is so dramatically busy. Why all the pink? Why the chartreuse and yellow? Why the blinking red and purple?

That said… what I was -really- looking for, was something akin to thoughtful typography, but within the asian scripts. Given that calligraphy has such high regard, I wonder if typography gets anywhere near as much consideration.