In suburbs across the nation, homes filled to the rafters with hoarded junk are common enough to have an ironic idiom: gomi-yashiki (trash-mansions). And in areas where space is limited, cluttered residences and shops will often erupt, disgorging things onto the street in a semi-controlled jumble so ubiquitous that urban planners have a name for it: afuré-dashi (spilling-outs). This is an ecstatic, emergent complexity, born less from planning than from organic growth, from the inevitable chaos of lives being lived.
Tsuzuki dismissed the West’s obsession with Japanese minimalism as ‘some Japanophile’s dream’ in the introduction to the English translation of Tokyo: A Certain Style (1999). ‘Our lifestyles are a lot more ordinary,’ he explained. ‘We live in cozy wood-framed apartments or mini-condos crammed to the gills with things.’ Yet more than three decades after Tsuzuki tried to wake the dreaming Japanophile, the outside world still worships Japan for its supposed simplicity, minimalism and restraint. You can see it in the global spread of meticulously curated Japanese cuisine, the deliberately unadorned concrete of modernist architects like Tadao Andō, and even through minimalist brands like Muji – whose very name translates into ‘the absence of a brand’ in Japanese.
Millions around the world continue to turn to Japanese gurus for help in purging their diets, closets and living spaces of all but the most essential items. Books like Marie Kondo’s The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up: The Japanese Art of Decluttering and Organizing (2011) and Fumio Sasaki’s Goodbye, Things: The New Japanese Minimalism (2015) reframe clutter as a dire threat to mental health and spiritual growth. They have become colossal hits in the United States and other countries. However, as the world turns to Japan to tidy up, it’s important to remember that these books were originally intended for Japanese readers; they weren’t written for the world outside. If Japan truly were a minimalist paradise, why would it need Kondos and Sasakis in the first place?
Japan, then, isn’t really a paragon of refined simplicity. But if clutter is such an important part of everyday life here, why is it so often overlooked? The story of the world’s fascination with Japanese stuff is in many ways not about Japan at all. It is the story of our own changing desires, our social anxieties, our urges to consume and accumulate, and our realisation that possessing more things doesn’t necessarily translate into more happiness. In Japan, we believe we have found solutions to our problems.
The grass may seem neater on the other side, but Japan’s clutter tells a different story. It’s one that reveals a far more complex and nuanced relationship with stuff, one that suggests minimalism and clutter aren’t opposites, but two sides of the same coin.
Millions around the world continue to turn to Japanese gurus for help in purging their diets, closets and living spaces of all but the most essential items. Books like Marie Kondo’s The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up: The Japanese Art of Decluttering and Organizing (2011) and Fumio Sasaki’s Goodbye, Things: The New Japanese Minimalism (2015) reframe clutter as a dire threat to mental health and spiritual growth. They have become colossal hits in the United States and other countries. However, as the world turns to Japan to tidy up, it’s important to remember that these books were originally intended for Japanese readers; they weren’t written for the world outside. If Japan truly were a minimalist paradise, why would it need Kondos and Sasakis in the first place?
Japan, then, isn’t really a paragon of refined simplicity. But if clutter is such an important part of everyday life here, why is it so often overlooked? The story of the world’s fascination with Japanese stuff is in many ways not about Japan at all. It is the story of our own changing desires, our social anxieties, our urges to consume and accumulate, and our realisation that possessing more things doesn’t necessarily translate into more happiness. In Japan, we believe we have found solutions to our problems.
The grass may seem neater on the other side, but Japan’s clutter tells a different story. It’s one that reveals a far more complex and nuanced relationship with stuff, one that suggests minimalism and clutter aren’t opposites, but two sides of the same coin.
by Matt Alt, Aeon | Read more:
Images: Lee Chapman
