Thanks to hip-hop and Hollywood, the United States is still the world’s leading cultural exporter. But, in recent years, American culture has increasingly been following a playbook made in Japan. Consider the fascination with “the Japanese art of decluttering.” Its guru, Marie Kondo, lives in Japan. She generally relies on an interpreter, and it has been four years since she published a book in the U.S. While she has largely fallen off the radar in her home country, her popularity shows no signs of waning among Americans. One video of Kondo folding clothes, dubbed in English, has close to four million views on YouTube. On Valentine’s Day, Netflix sparked joy among fans with an announcement that it had greenlit a Kondo reality show.
Stripped down to its most minimalist outlines (an approach that Kondo would surely approve), a life of uncluttered simplicity represents a fantasy. Why should Americans be so compelled by one from Japan? Close to twenty years ago, the answer would have been “because Japan is the global imagination’s default setting for the future,” as the author William Gibson wrote in 2001. “The Japanese seem to the rest of us to live several measurable clicks down the time line.” Gibson was referring to a Japan of trendy gadgets and services, such as high-tech cell phones and robot sushi bars, the flashy products of a hyper-consumer metropolis that inspired the creators of such films as “Blade Runner” and “The Matrix.” But what Gibson wrote about products was just as true about other, less visible trends in Japanese society: economic stagnation; a plunging fertility rate; a dramatic postponement of the “normal” milestones of adulthood, such as getting married or simply moving out of the family home; a creeping sense of ambivalence about what the future might hold. Seventeen years later, America has finally caught up. We don’t buy into Kondo’s life-changing magic just because we think Japan is cool; we also buy because our country is, in many ways, increasingly like Japan.
A cynic would point out that the life-changing Japanese magic of tidying up is a ploy to divest ourselves of all the Walkmans and Tamagotchis and other tchotchkes that Japan convinced us to buy in the first place. But Kondo didn’t write her books for us; they were the product of a training seminar, a sort of literary incubator, for the Japanese marketplace. And she is only the most internationally successful of many writing on the topic in Japan. Kondo’s first book appeared at the tail end of a fad for things danshari—a Buddhist term for tidying up that is written with the characters for refusal, disposal, and separation—that swept Japan in the aughts. The first salvoes in what might be called Japan’s “war on stuff” date back even earlier, to the first half of the nineteen-nineties. That is when the sudden crash of the Japanese real-estate and stock markets ushered in twenty years of stagnation so severe that the period is now known as the Lost Decades.
Amid the suffering economy and the collapse of social safety nets such as the promise of lifetime employment, younger Japanese lost the ambition for acquiring things that fuelled an earlier, more financially stable generation. Hiroshi Aoi, the president of the Marui Group, which operates Japan’s largest retail chain, was uniquely positioned to see how drastically consumers cut back. In an interview in 2016, he told me that the Lost Decades represented a “turning away from outward expressions of fashion.… The idea of personal fulfillment became the product, with things like foods, dining out, and leisure experiences rising to the forefront.” If this sounds familiar, it is because the same pattern is now repeating among America’s millennials. Some call it the “experience economy.” Others call it “post-materialism.” But this great turning inward in the face of economic uncertainty could just as accurately be called Japanization.
“Japanization” (and the related “Japanification”) is a term as loaded as it is fluid. During the dark colonial period of the nineteen-thirties and forties, it evoked yellow peril, conjuring images of Japanese imperial forces conquering their Asian neighbors and compelling them to adopt Japanese ways. By the late nineteen-eighties and early nineteen-nineties, Japanization had taken on a wholly different meaning: “the diffusion of Japanese management systems and practices” in non-Japanese organizations, as the researcher Barry Wilkinson put it, in a paper written with Jonathan Morris and Nick Oliver, “Japanizing the World: The Case of Toyota,” from 1992. Two decades later, the word took on a sinister pall once again, at least among economic pundits. “Few words strike greater fear in the hearts of economists and politicians,” William Pesek, the author of the book “Japanization” wrote. In that book, he defines the term as a “a noxious mix of trifling growth, high debt, falling consumer prices, waning confidence, and political dysfunction.” (Paul Krugman, of the Times, is a fan of the term, frequently invoking Japanification in his descriptions of slowing growth and ageing populations in the U.S., the E.U., and China.) (...)
Yet when the bubble burst, in 1990, plunging Japan into its Lost Decades, this marginalized community proved a resilient incubator of trends. Chief among these was the Pokémon video-game series, whose creator, Satoshi Tajiri, is a self-proclaimed otaku. (“Everything I did as a kid is kind of rolled into one thing,” the then thirtysomething told Time in 1999: “Pokémon.”) That the geeky exports dreamed up by people like Tajiri retain their appeal today is a testament to the passions of their creators. But it’s also a testament to the fact that all of us now spend huge amounts of time the way they did: sitting in front of screens, rummaging through our own pop-culture databases, obsessing over our virtual identities while indulging in our own childlike pleasures, which range from the aughts fad for cupcakes to cosplay or the latest Marvel superhero flick. The resounding box office success of Steven Spielberg’s cross-cultural mash-up “Ready Player One” is only the most recent affirmation of a societal trend: we’re all otaku now. Japan was, once again, simply ahead of the curve.
Stripped down to its most minimalist outlines (an approach that Kondo would surely approve), a life of uncluttered simplicity represents a fantasy. Why should Americans be so compelled by one from Japan? Close to twenty years ago, the answer would have been “because Japan is the global imagination’s default setting for the future,” as the author William Gibson wrote in 2001. “The Japanese seem to the rest of us to live several measurable clicks down the time line.” Gibson was referring to a Japan of trendy gadgets and services, such as high-tech cell phones and robot sushi bars, the flashy products of a hyper-consumer metropolis that inspired the creators of such films as “Blade Runner” and “The Matrix.” But what Gibson wrote about products was just as true about other, less visible trends in Japanese society: economic stagnation; a plunging fertility rate; a dramatic postponement of the “normal” milestones of adulthood, such as getting married or simply moving out of the family home; a creeping sense of ambivalence about what the future might hold. Seventeen years later, America has finally caught up. We don’t buy into Kondo’s life-changing magic just because we think Japan is cool; we also buy because our country is, in many ways, increasingly like Japan.A cynic would point out that the life-changing Japanese magic of tidying up is a ploy to divest ourselves of all the Walkmans and Tamagotchis and other tchotchkes that Japan convinced us to buy in the first place. But Kondo didn’t write her books for us; they were the product of a training seminar, a sort of literary incubator, for the Japanese marketplace. And she is only the most internationally successful of many writing on the topic in Japan. Kondo’s first book appeared at the tail end of a fad for things danshari—a Buddhist term for tidying up that is written with the characters for refusal, disposal, and separation—that swept Japan in the aughts. The first salvoes in what might be called Japan’s “war on stuff” date back even earlier, to the first half of the nineteen-nineties. That is when the sudden crash of the Japanese real-estate and stock markets ushered in twenty years of stagnation so severe that the period is now known as the Lost Decades.
Amid the suffering economy and the collapse of social safety nets such as the promise of lifetime employment, younger Japanese lost the ambition for acquiring things that fuelled an earlier, more financially stable generation. Hiroshi Aoi, the president of the Marui Group, which operates Japan’s largest retail chain, was uniquely positioned to see how drastically consumers cut back. In an interview in 2016, he told me that the Lost Decades represented a “turning away from outward expressions of fashion.… The idea of personal fulfillment became the product, with things like foods, dining out, and leisure experiences rising to the forefront.” If this sounds familiar, it is because the same pattern is now repeating among America’s millennials. Some call it the “experience economy.” Others call it “post-materialism.” But this great turning inward in the face of economic uncertainty could just as accurately be called Japanization.
“Japanization” (and the related “Japanification”) is a term as loaded as it is fluid. During the dark colonial period of the nineteen-thirties and forties, it evoked yellow peril, conjuring images of Japanese imperial forces conquering their Asian neighbors and compelling them to adopt Japanese ways. By the late nineteen-eighties and early nineteen-nineties, Japanization had taken on a wholly different meaning: “the diffusion of Japanese management systems and practices” in non-Japanese organizations, as the researcher Barry Wilkinson put it, in a paper written with Jonathan Morris and Nick Oliver, “Japanizing the World: The Case of Toyota,” from 1992. Two decades later, the word took on a sinister pall once again, at least among economic pundits. “Few words strike greater fear in the hearts of economists and politicians,” William Pesek, the author of the book “Japanization” wrote. In that book, he defines the term as a “a noxious mix of trifling growth, high debt, falling consumer prices, waning confidence, and political dysfunction.” (Paul Krugman, of the Times, is a fan of the term, frequently invoking Japanification in his descriptions of slowing growth and ageing populations in the U.S., the E.U., and China.) (...)
Yet when the bubble burst, in 1990, plunging Japan into its Lost Decades, this marginalized community proved a resilient incubator of trends. Chief among these was the Pokémon video-game series, whose creator, Satoshi Tajiri, is a self-proclaimed otaku. (“Everything I did as a kid is kind of rolled into one thing,” the then thirtysomething told Time in 1999: “Pokémon.”) That the geeky exports dreamed up by people like Tajiri retain their appeal today is a testament to the passions of their creators. But it’s also a testament to the fact that all of us now spend huge amounts of time the way they did: sitting in front of screens, rummaging through our own pop-culture databases, obsessing over our virtual identities while indulging in our own childlike pleasures, which range from the aughts fad for cupcakes to cosplay or the latest Marvel superhero flick. The resounding box office success of Steven Spielberg’s cross-cultural mash-up “Ready Player One” is only the most recent affirmation of a societal trend: we’re all otaku now. Japan was, once again, simply ahead of the curve.
by Matt Alt, New Yorker | Read more:
Image: Daniel Boczarski / Getty
