Crunchyroll strangely lacks Japanese subs, which seems strange as Netflix, Amazon Prime, and most others have them in addition to all the translations.
Japanese people as a whole never watch content with proper subtitles. And the subtitles that do exist in Japan for Japanese content are universally awful. It seems only foreign companies that promote being accessible have them. Unext, a Japanese company, never offers subs on Japanese content. It only have subtitles for foreign content... but it only offers subtitles if you're not watching Japanese dubs. It never, under any circumstance, allows the audio and subtitle language to be the same.
I feel like one reason is that subtitles in Japan never match what the characters actually say. A character may say "I've missed you so much. It's been so long." The subtitles will read "Hey. Long time. " (both quotes would be Japanese) Not sure why but the Japanese subtitle industry is just terrible in so many ways.
I agree there appears to be very little interest in subtitles in Japan from most Japanese people, but it is absolutely not true that Japanese subtitles are as haphazard as you say. The overwhelming majority of official Japanese subtitles I have seen (having studied Japanese for more than 5 years now) are not only word-accurate transcriptions, but also include transcriptions of noises (like あああああ for screams) as well as SDH-like notations for sound effects. Most include furigana for new/uncommon words as well. This has been the case for all anime, dramas, and movies I have watched with subtitles for the past 5 years (too many hours to count).
Funnily enough, the complaints you have here actually apply more to English subtitles in my experience. Modern English subtitles tend to accurately transcribe what was said, but if you look at official subtitles from the mid-2000s and earlier you'll see that most subtitles are made much shorter than the original text. Tom Scott's video on subtitling talks about this historical practice and how it is different today[1].
Are you sure that the subtitle services you used are actually using official subtitles, and that they aren't actually translations or from some other source? How old are the shows you're watching (I believe some movies from the 70s I watched were character-accurate but that might not have been as common in the past)?
>A character may say "I've missed you so much. It's been so long." The subtitles will read "Hey. Long time. " (both quotes would be Japanese)
This is standard in closed captions and is not specific to Japan. So perhaps the service you're talking about only has closed captions and is incorrectly marking them as subtitles.
I'm only familiar with Japanese TV.. there, subtitles work. They're actually CC, very close to the speech. My wife fiddled with the TV for a while until she got it working (always a bit of black magic there), and since then there's always been subtitles matching the speech. Pretty well too, as far as I can tell.
I think they are referring to text localization. I’m not sure if you actually can turn the subtitle track off on the Japanese language on crunchy roll, the rights holders have long been very concerned with reverse importation.
