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It's funny to me that both this woman and Kondo describe their methods as "The Japanese art of tidying." It's funny because if these methods were so characteris
by sequoia 2y ago
It's funny to me that both this woman and Kondo describe their methods as "The Japanese art of tidying." It's funny because if these methods were so characteristically or inherently Japanese, why would so many Japanese people themselves need so much help & training in the methods as to spawn a whole industry?
It's like calling Golang "The California programming language" or calling Newton's laws "The English art of explaining inertia." Is there really anything particularly Japanese about these women's methods or is it just Orientalist branding?
(You do see this sometimes around Brooklyn, or you used to, when Brooklyn's cultural cache was especially high.)
- Barrin92 2y ago> Is there really anything particularly Japanese about these women's methods or is it just Orientalist branding? I don't think these two are mutually exclusive, something can be authentically Japanese and be branded that way in particular to foreign audiences. Kondo's "spark joy" method doesn't seem that Japanese though, if anything it seems almost made for Western audiences which isn't suprising given that she's three decades younger than Yamashita but the latter seems to genuinely have Buddhist influences, as she says herself in the article. It's probably also the reason Kondo is more popular. But there really is a big emphasis on detachment, ephemerality and circularity in Japanese aesthetics, you can go back to writers like Tanizaki (In Praise of Shadows) and I think that comes through in the motivations that Yamashita gives for her method. edit: and by the way the observation about Newton isn't unfair at all. English is too narrow, but philosophically Newton's deterministic and mechanical laws of motion are the geographical and philosophical product of modern European thinking. They would not have made sense in the world of Aristotle, which is why it took so long!
- 0xdeadbeefbabe 2y agoJapanese clutter is awesome too https://aeon.co/essays/the-life-changing-magic-of-japanese-clutter https://aeon.co/essays/the-life-changing-magic-of-japanese-c....
- WXLCKNO 2y agoSome of my favorite parts when I visited Japan last year were the super dense specialized shops hidden away. 10 floors of vintage gaming stuff in small but hyper dense rooms, etc.