An ecstatic, emergent complexity

November 2, 2024 2:36 AM

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. For the nation of Japan is filled with spaces that are as meticulously cluttered as minimalist ones are meticulously simplified. These packed places, which are every bit as charming as the emptied ones, force us to question our assumptions and worldviews. What if we’ve all been wrong about clutter? from The joy of clutter [Aeon; ungated]
posted by chavenet (33 comments total)

That was interesting - thanks for posting.
posted by paduasoy at 3:00 AM on November 2 [1 favorite]

The tl;dr is in this excellent pull-quote:

Clutter isn’t really an East versus West thing,’ continues Tsuzuki. ‘It’s a rich versus poor thing. Wherever you go, anywhere in the world, the wealthy have the luxury of living in clean, minimal spaces, while the poor have to make do with small, cramped ones, without any way to hide their belongings.’

posted by rum-soaked space hobo at 3:41 AM on November 2 [53 favorites]

I was playing Katamari on my old PS2 only yesterday and this feels kind of apposite.
posted by Phanx at 3:51 AM on November 2 [7 favorites]

This is an interesting contrast to the post a few days ago about how children of Boomers are now being confronted with having to do something with all their parents' stuff after they pass.

We all seem to flail about when it comes to how much "stuff" we should have. I think William Morris had the best pithy rule of thumb, though - "Have nothing in your house that you not know to be useful or believe to be beautiful." It's okay to own things - the problem is when you own things just for the sake of owning them, and don't gain anything by the owning - if you don't use it or appreciate its aesthetics, then....what is it doing for you? Like, if you've bought a full leather-bound set of all the works of Charles Dickens and it just sits untouched in your living room bookshelf, then...you could have just painted some blocks. But if you bought the leather-bound set of all the works of Charles Dickens and you treat yourself to reading them often, you're getting double the joy - they look beautiful on a bookshelf, and you enjoy reading them.
posted by EmpressCallipygos at 4:07 AM on November 2 [18 favorites]

I now live in a small (European) space compared to what I used to have in the United States. I'm quite content with my balance of organized clutter and empty space.

For example: I've collected mollusk shells for decades, and only recently have I parted with the idea of keeping them hidden away in boxes. They now sit in little piles on my living room shelves, which is doable considering that I favor the small, colorful ones. (I don't live-collect mollusks FWIW - I just comb beaches and other mollusk-friendly places like riverbanks and pick up their vacant former homes.)

I pick them up now and again, contemplate how beautiful they are, then put them back. Just yesterday I was looking at my exemplar of this bleeding tooth nerite species , which I picked up somewhere in the Caribbean years ago. Not my photo, but you'll get the idea, God willing.
posted by rabia.elizabeth at 4:44 AM on November 2 [11 favorites]

I'm going to start referring to my wildly messy art studio/office/catch-all room as "Tokyo-style", which sounds way classier than "clusterfuck".
posted by Serene Empress Dork at 5:01 AM on November 2 [28 favorites]

As a related sidebar, I was at a gallery opening last night, and a bunch of fellow artists were discussing people visiting their studios and they all described the complete shock of the visitors as to how utterly messy the spaces were. It was a good laugh.
posted by Thorzdad at 5:29 AM on November 2 [8 favorites]

During the heights of its ‘bubble economy’, which began in 1985, foreigners were still a rarity on Japanese streets, let alone in Japanese homes. So it should come as no surprise that they might have missed just how wildly materialistic Japanese society had grown during this time – or how cluttered its domestic spaces were becoming.

This. 1985 happened to be my first spell of living and working in Japan. (And the first time, walking down a sidewalk in Nagoya, I heard digital music. A CD. A distinctively tinny sound back then.)

As tourists, we probably see those fabulously cluttered shops documented in Tokyo Style. But the interior of Japanese homes...not so much. And it's not just the clutter of little things. Imagine a couch and a TV in a 6-tatami mat room! In America, our homes grow larger and larger. It's all about square footage in our real estate market. Not the case in Japan, of course.
posted by kozad at 5:31 AM on November 2 [3 favorites]

I live with a hoarder. Caretaker for hoarder brother with ALS. When he passes I will have the largest yard sale ever. 20 - 25 Amazon or EBay boxes a week...Some he never opens.
posted by Czjewel at 6:51 AM on November 2 [4 favorites]

"a bunch of fellow artists were discussing people visiting their studios and they all described the complete shock of the visitors as to how utterly messy the spaces were"

Honestly I've gotten a LOT of ideas and inspiration from the chaotic jumble of my art supplies. A couple of pieces of unrelated ephemera or a combination of paint colors which happen to fall in proximity to each other often catch my eye and become the basis for a new collage or mixed media piece. Some of my favorite works have come about in this way.
posted by Serene Empress Dork at 7:00 AM on November 2 [7 favorites]

Clutter as a poverty issue - yes.

Clutter as creativity booster - also yes!

Anecdata: the poorer I’ve gradually gotten, the more cluttered and smaller my living spaces have also gotten. I also generally care less after over a million people in my country have died of Covid in the last 4+ years and we’re on the brink of becoming a goddamn fascist state, so there’s that.

I think of author Shirley Jackson, and how messy she’d say her house was with 4 kids and 2 adults; evidently a disaster relative to then-prevailing tidiness norms. Jackson was ahead of her time deprioritizing housework in favor of her epic writing. That’s who I want to be like, honestly.
posted by edithkeeler at 7:05 AM on November 2 [14 favorites]

My first visit to Japan was when I really and completely understood Muji's appeal. The maximalist way of stocking or inventory at home or outside pretty much becomes a fact of life in everything - pharmacy aisles that would still need nearby storage bins, your typical Japanese ad print copy not leaving any blank or white space (and it carries over even in online copy). Suddenly you have this brand whose entire thing is being minimalist with beige and natural colours (but even then inventory creep happens because the other thing that I think contributes to the clutter is the marketing incentive to innovate hyper specific tools or design - nothing quite like the Japanese new product space). The store design doesn't quite pop outside Japan imo (the least evocative imo would be the London high street ones because of space issues), but you kinda need the contrast between the nearby convenience store or Matsumoto pharmacy (or a Donki if you really want the sensory overload) to appreciate how it carved out a pretty profitable niche, even if outside Japan it trades in that cliche of Zen Scandinavian spartan decor.

(Subsequent visits taught me that I need a Muji stop just to mentally and visually recuperate.)
posted by cendawanita at 7:27 AM on November 2 [4 favorites]

I'm going to start referring to my wildly messy art studio/office/catch-all room as "Tokyo-style", which sounds way classier than "clusterfuck".
I'm a big fan of Einstein's desk.
posted by MtDewd at 7:33 AM on November 2 [4 favorites]

This part is funny though:
Subtractive is contemplative; additive is stimulating. But, above all, the Japanese are master ‘editors’, he says, picking and choosing between polar opposites to suit the occasion. This is why Japanese people continue to remove their shoes indoors, even as they choose to live in Western-style houses. It’s why they continue to distinguish between Japanese-style and Western-style foods, hotels, even toilets. To Matsuoka, the subtractive and additive approaches aren’t inherently in opposition; the distinction is simply a matter of context. But, over the past century, one approach seems to have attracted more attention from outsiders

Two imperial cultural cores trying to explain each other in High Romance language 😂 as though other places aren't also master editors by virtue of economics and climate along with other factors too plebeian to simply be explained by taste.
posted by cendawanita at 7:35 AM on November 2 [12 favorites]

I really appreciate the insight into minimalism as essentially a class marker. It's a conclusion I've come to on my own, but the author and quoted authors make the point elegantly.

In my own life, I struggle with stuff. I love it and hate it. Clutter around me clutters my thoughts. It's less seeing the stuff, and more that it isn't organized, it's not living where it's supposed to be, it doesn't have a home. I desperately want a tidy house, and pour lots of time and energy into making it so, and yet, it's not, because I don't have a neatly containable life.

It doesn't help that I've spent most of my adult life designing and fabricating tasteful things for rich people who *do* have that kind of space. Easy to get into a spiral of comparisons when you're in those spaces in real life, frequently.
posted by jellywerker at 7:37 AM on November 2 [8 favorites]

Wandering Muji with my son is where we started reminding each other "you can't shop your way to minimalism." It's appealing -- although so very beige -- but strictly in an aspirational way, for me for now.
posted by The corpse in the library at 7:40 AM on November 2 [5 favorites]

I have this tiny book from when I was a bookseller - Tokyo: A Certain Style
from 1999 - it's been my reference for this view into Japan fir 25 years now, highly recommended if you can find a copy.
posted by djseafood at 7:48 AM on November 2 [7 favorites]

the wealthy have the luxury of living in clean, minimal spaces, while the poor have to make do with small, cramped ones, without any way to hide their belongings.’

I think that's only half of it. The other half is that if you are rich you can get rid of everything that doesn't give you joy or seem immediately useful. If you need it later, you can always buy more. The poor have to keep everything they have because they can't just go buy more. When you don't have lots of money in the bank, every bit of stuff you own is a much larger percentage of your total wealth.

That junk car in someone's driveway is a significant chunk of their net worth. Musk could own 50 cars, launch them all into outer space and then buy 50 more, but it's not because he's freed himself from greed and the grasping desire to own stuff.
posted by straight at 8:20 AM on November 2 [17 favorites]

I find subtractive highly stimulating, and I don't think I'm alone.

The material waste we have is a sickness. Sure, there are some nicely designed things in the world, but they are in the extreme minority. We are shitting where we eat.
posted by Reasonably Everything Happens at 8:38 AM on November 2 [5 favorites]

A friend of mine said he once had a real argument with a "minimalist" type who insisted that latching on to objects and clutter was materialist waste that hurt the environment, and he insisted back that throwing things away to achieve a "minimal" space and relying on disposable resources is materialist waste that hurt the environment.

I feel like I'm more sympathetic to the latter, these days. Most "minimalists" who showed off their lifestyles on youtube seemed to eat out a lot and burn a lot of energy just to avoid having anything in their kitchenette.
posted by rum-soaked space hobo at 9:18 AM on November 2 [2 favorites]

eat out a lot and burn a lot of energy just to avoid having anything in their kitchenette

I don't track this genre, so maybe there's a whole wasteful contradiction that you're referring to that I haven't seen. But I have pans in my kitchen and forks, etc.

The pictures in the linked article are mostly not overflowing with a fully stocked kitchen. It's fifty stuffed animals or 500 magazines or w/e. People are allowed to love lots of a thing, but let's not pretend it's functional...it's consumer junk.
posted by Reasonably Everything Happens at 9:40 AM on November 2 [2 favorites]

The poor have to keep everything they have because they can't just go buy more.

I was about five years into my adult life when I stopped hauling around bags of worn-out clothing for future cutting up into rags (for cleaning), as my mother did.
posted by praemunire at 10:26 AM on November 2 [5 favorites]

Minimalism is a scam by Big Small to sell more less.
posted by ivan ivanych samovar at 10:31 AM on November 2 [27 favorites]

EmpressC nailed it (on several points). This topic is a great counterpoint to the boomer stuff thread.

"Meticulously cluttered" is the key phrase. I was lucky enough to score a business trip to Japan in the early 90s, and one day we got out to see some of the famous Akihabara shops, like the one in the article's opening photo. Sure, every square centimeter of space is used, but it's still got some organizing principles. Just about very tiny bin on that counter has a yellow label and price tag. The owner knows the locations of just about everything, and the customer also becomes familiar with finding what they need, and are not put off by the density or profusion.

I'm also defensively supportive of the idea that disorder often accompanies creativity. I think I'm pretty good at much mechanical and electronic work. My workbench is a friggin messy part-strewn horror, but I generally know where most of my tools and parts are at, and I can get stuff done. (Ok. My desk and my bench are way too messy, and my work and sanity suffers for it; i gotta do better here)

The lesson for me is that there should be some intent to how you have stuff. Curate your mess. The useful/beautiful test should always apply. With winter coming, I'm all inspired to sell/recycle/pitch unloved and useless stuff, and to reorganize my spaces so that I'm only looking at stuff that I like or use. Wish me luck.
posted by Artful Codger at 10:38 AM on November 2 [8 favorites]

“Curate your mess.” Words to live by. I am trying! Good luck to both of us, Artful Codger.
posted by Bella Donna at 12:49 PM on November 2 [4 favorites]

Great post, chavenet. Thanks!
posted by Bella Donna at 1:09 PM on November 2 [2 favorites]

For such a long essay, written by someone who lives here, I was pretty disappointed that they left out/didn't consider one of the key reasons for clutter in Japanese homes. Getting rid of garbage here can be difficult. One of the standard tropes for any foreigner trying to get used to life in Japan is the complex systems for sorting garbage. Even in Chiba, which is pretty lax, there's burnable (twice a week), can/glass/PET recycling (once a week), and cardboard and unburnable garbage (each twice a month). Unburnable garbage must fit inside the (pretty small) clear bags sold by the city. Roughly frying pan sized. Anything larger, and you need to make an appointment with the garbage collection agency and purchase stickers (from 290 yen up) for outsized garbage (そだいごみ). On the morning of collection for outsized garbage, it needs to be out in front of your home to be picked up (the only time garbage collectors actually come to your home directly, everything else you need to carry to your assigned garbage collection point).

Getting rid of stuff in Japan is a hassle for any able bodied person. Add age or disability, and it becomes inordinately harder. My wife and I happened to come back just in time to see an elderly neighbor (in her 80s, rail thin, and tiny) who lives alone, trying to move a hutch out of her home to prepare for garbage pick up. We managed to handle it for her, and we got up in the morning of the day pickup was scheduled to put it out front of her home. Without us randomly seeing her, I can't see any way that she would have managed that by herself without risking significant injury. The pick-up sticker was for 1200 yen, which might not sound like a lot, but for people on fixed incomes/pensions, it can be a significant cost.

If you ever get the chance to stay in any kind of traditional Japanese ryokan in any sort of remote area, I can almost guarantee that there will be a visible electronics graveyard somewhere in one of the building's open spaces. Generations of televisions, broken washing machines, old video game consoles, anything and everything that broke, but the owners can't manage to get rid of. Our neighbor lives in a medium sized Japanese city with regular and frequent services. A small hotel on a mountain top finds it orders of magnitude more difficult to dispose of things.

There's a knockon effect to this, too, sort of a fascinating garbage version of the asteroid belt: at a certain point between urban and rural, you might come across an area that's just sort of become the place that people dump their old appliances. It'll usually be alongside a rarely traveled road, probably with some trees around so people won't be seen dumping their washing machines or refrigerators. In some ways, it's parallel to the increasing amount of liter in popular areas in Tokyo and other large cities (since there are almost no public garbage cans in most areas these days). If there's a barrier of any kind to doing something necessary, there will be people who can't or won't follow the directions, and a lot of that comes down to the economics of it.

Garbage collection can be expensive here, which leads to accumulation, which leads to clutter. It's not romantic, it's economic. The article only sort of touches on that, then immediately jumps back into romanticizing clutter.
posted by Ghidorah at 6:16 PM on November 2 [31 favorites]

Garbage collection can be expensive here, which leads to accumulation, which leads to clutter. It's not romantic, it's economic
As a first time tourist to Japan, I noticed the relative lack of litter - as well as the tendency/obligation that people had to take waste home with them to dispose of themselves. Given Japan’s ability to organise public services such as transportation or zoning to an awe inspiring level- the decision to handle waste disposal in that manner seems no accident. Is it considered somehow a morally positive thing for Japanese people to suffer in getting rid of trash?
posted by rongorongo at 6:00 AM on November 3 [1 favorite]

rongorongo, kind of? People are just sort of expected to treat daily life as a sort of camping excursion, like leaving no trace. Convenience stores used to have garbage cans out in front of the shop, though those have largely disappeared, or been moved indoors, which means most people don’t take advantage of them. Train platforms used to have garbage cans as well, and even when those went away, there were usually garbage cans inside the station. Those, too, are mostly gone.

If you look closely, you’ll see the receptacles next to the ubiquitous vending machines are often crammed with garbage, especially in busier areas. They’re essentially the only public garbage cans left, and it’s not uncommon to see them overflowing. There’s a lot that could be better in modern Japanese society (a fiscal policy that has anything to do with the needs of the average worker in the country would be a start), but the utter abdication of the government’s role in sanitation is pretty infuriating.
posted by Ghidorah at 6:27 AM on November 3 [3 favorites]

Train platforms used to have garbage cans as well, and even when those went away, there were usually garbage cans inside the station. Those, too, are mostly gone.

IIRC wasn't the justification due to the Aum Shirin Kyo sarin gas attack? Agreeing with the larger point about trash though - and the packaging landscape doesn't help matters.
posted by cendawanita at 7:15 AM on November 3 [2 favorites]

The Aum thing was the reason given, even though Aum didn’t use garbage cans at all. Later, it became a recurring thing. Any time there was a big thing, G7 summit or whathaveyou, the garbage cans around town would be sealed off for “safety” reasons.

Time goes on, and instead of temporarily blocking off garbage cans, the cans just got removed. Now, it’s a handy bludgeon for conservative groups to complain about foreigners (especially in Kyoto, currently), regardless of the fact that Japanese people dump their garbage just as much as anyone else.
posted by Ghidorah at 7:43 AM on November 3 [5 favorites]

“Marie Kondon’t!? The Life-Changing Magic of Japanese Clutter!”—Matt Alt’s Japan, 19 October 2024
posted by ob1quixote at 8:52 AM on November 3 [3 favorites]

Yeah, I lived in and outside Tokyo 1989-95, and the whole article resonates, but especially the points made above (by Ghidorah and Rongorongo) about how hard it is to through things away. It definitely leads to sub optimal outcomes - I recall tromping through the forests outside Fuchu, or biking across Yamanashi, and coming across just massive piles of old appliances thrown away out of sight of any house...but clearly everyone knew where to go. It's jarring to say the least. I think we (westerners) do tend to fetishize the Japanese for things like tidiness, politeness, etc. Not at all sure it's justified.

I visited again just a few months ago after 30 years away, and I felt right at home again - in ways both good and sad. Traveling from Haneda to downtown Tokyo at rush hour filled with a million sad workers putting in one more day in their decades long career and heading back to their tiny apartments, just like I used to. It was actually quite depressing. Japan is a hard place to not be rich.

But the food! So delicious.
posted by MorganMaverick at 12:24 PM on November 3 [6 favorites]