https://aeon.co/essays/the-life-changing-magic-of-japanese-clutter
"In 1990, a young Japanese photographer named Kyoichi Tsuzuki began capturing a
rarely seen view of domestic life in one of the world’s most densely populated
cities. Over three years, he visited hundreds of Tokyo apartments,
photographing the living spaces of friends, acquaintances and strangers. These
images, eventually published in
Tokyo Style (1993), looked startlingly unlike
the rarefied minimalism that the world had come to expect from Japan. Tsuzuki’s
photos were a joyous declaration to the contrary, celebrating the vitality of
living spaces filled with wall-to-wall clutter.
In the late 20th century, Japan was known for its minimalism: its Zen arts, its
tidy and ordered cities, its refined foods and fashions. But Tsuzuki peeled
away this façade to reveal a more complicated side to his nation. And Tokyo was
the perfect setting for this exfoliation. Like the interiors he photographed,
it remains visually overwhelming – even cluttered. Outside, enormous animated
advertisements compete for attention against a jigsaw puzzle of metal, glass,
concrete and plastic. In the sprawling residential districts that radiate from
the city centre, compact homes are packed in formations as dense as transistors
on a semiconductor chip, while confusing geometries of power lines spiderweb
the skies above.
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?"
Via Kenny Chaffin.
Cheers,
*** Xanni ***
--
mailto:xanni@xanadu.net Andrew Pam
http://xanadu.com.au/ Chief Scientist, Xanadu
https://glasswings.com.au/ Partner, Glass Wings
https://sericyb.com.au/ Manager, Serious Cybernetics
