Shopping for Minimalism
Marie Kondo, Muji and commodifying minimalism
The phrase “less is more” and a minimalist lifestyle have gained their momentum in recent decades. While it is well-known that the consequence of over-consumerism affects the environment and our daily lives, living minimalist is believed to be a much-needed solution to fight against the obsession with material possession. Marie Kondo, a tidying and organizing expert from Japan, gained her global fame first with her bestselling book The Life-changing Magic of Tidying Up (2014). The Netflix show Tidying Up with Marie Kondo (2019) that followed further boosted worldwide popularity of the decluttering guru. Not only that her name became a synonym of decluttering; as social media was flooded with images of people decluttering their home, the media in the US also reported a “Kondo effect” to describe the problem of charities being used as the dumping grounds for decluttered consumer goods since the show released. (Ouelette 541) In the consumer market, it is also not uncommon to see Japanese brands, such as Muji and Uniqlo, gaining their worldwide success with their products of “minimalist design.” It seems that there is a cultural association between Japan and minimalism.
Tidying Up is a reality television series produced for and released worldwide on Netflix on 1 January 2019. In each of the 8 episodes, Marie Kondo visits different families in the US as a tidying consultant, and offers decluttering tips, known as the KonMari method, to the subjects. KonMari method advocates that we should only keep items that “spark joy”; things that are not joy-sparking should be discarded as it doesn’t bring value to our future. All the episodes begin with the same prologue introducing Kondo as bestselling author and tidying expert, followed by a few highlighted quotes from the episodes. One man says
Problematizing the problem of cluttering
Just like many other makeover reality shows, Tidying Up first presents the problem of the subjects, and then offers them a solution, which is always KonMari method of cleaning. The method entails a particular order: clothes, books, papers, “komonos” (miscellaneous objects), and lastly sentimental items. In the show, Kondo asks every subject to pile up all the clothes they have at a spot, so they can confront how much they own and reflect on their over-consumption. This “mountain of clothes” also adds a dramatic effect to the show, elevates the “problem” and poses an emergency for a product or service in need to solve the problem.
The show not only presents the problem, but also problematizes the problem. It relates cluttering as a cause to personal or relationship crises. In the first episode titled “Tidying up with Toddlers,” we meet the middle-class couple Kevin and Rachel with their two toddlers. Rachel hates tidying. She complains about not having enough time to tidy up and take care of the kids at the same time, but she would be “anxious about the house being not organized.” This causes her conflict with Kevin, who blames the messiness at home makes him fail to be a good father. He said, “I want to be a good dad, but I don’t know if I am doing that well with it. Because I am frustrated about the house…[Rachel and the kids] are getting the worst of me sometimes.” Their staged quarrels are also captured in the show to visualize and emphasize the couple’s frustration with their messy home and that affects their relationship and well-being. At the end of the episode, the now happy couple tells Kondo in tears, “We are really happy and looking forward to living in this way for the rest of our lives… thank you for your method, we could actually enjoy our home.” Here, the linkage between tidiness and happiness posed by Tidying Up is clear: a tidy house makes a happy family; messiness creates family crisis.
“Does it spark joy?”
Another strategy in KonMari tidying method, which Kondo emphasizes in every single episode, is to only keep items that spark joy. She explains that sparking joy is a warm and positive feeling, “your blood cells will be rising.” Such “spark joy” concept in fact echoes with Jane Bennett’s idea on the enchantment of objects in the modern world. As Bennett remarks,
“enchantment entails a state of wonder…to be enchanted, then, is to…be transfixed, spellbound.” (5)
She believes that enchantment’s importance depends on “the effect…that a cultural narrative has on the ethical sensibility of its bearers.” (12) Kondo seems to share such animist view with Bennett, that inanimate object has its own intrinsic power to human.
In the series, however, there are a few subjects who encounter a hard time to use let go of clothes or items that they once loved. Kondo advise them to show gratitude to these clothes that fail the spark joy test by saying “thank you”, and throw them away gently. In this way, they can “lessen the feeling of guilt.” While green advocates would disagree with her emotional-over-practical approach, Laurie Ouelette also criticizes KonMari method of filtering items is “discarding surplus goods as a means to a quasi-minimalist lifestyle based on volition, not necessity.” (540) In her view, Kondo is only giving advice on how to discard unwanted items, but offers no solution on recycling or reusing items that once had value to the individual in a particular point of history. As she remarks,
“the series promotes sorting and discarding as a path to well-being and does not encourage secondhand reuse. This allows privileged consumers to adapt a throwaway ethic with no concern for societal impact.” (540)
Indeed, as we can see from all episodes, as much the series intend to be inclusive as possible, — by including different ethnicities, heterosexual and homosexual family — it cannot avoid the fact that all subjects appear to be financially privileged, if not middle class. Mike Featherstone also suggests that the privileged who are able to choose a lifestyle “have the capacity to broaden and question the prevalent notions of consumption, to circulate images of consumption suggesting alternative pleasures and desire, consumption as excess, waste and disorder.” (21)
“Japaneseness” as a strategy
Despite that it is unusual for a US production to feature a non-white woman as the “hero” of the show, Tidying Up was featured on the Netflix homepage when it was launched, followed by her rising popularity in the US and other Western countries. While her success attributes to many factors, one of them could be the foreignness or even exoticness that is maintained and manifested in the show. As Ouelette observes, “what is particularly novel about the KonMari method for Western audience, is its engagement with Eastern spiritual traditions including the Shinto religion and animalism.” (542)
Shinto is an indigenous faith practiced in Japan that advocates “celebration of events of daily life, great and small,” which also shapes Kondo’s animistic attitude to objects. In all episodes, Kondo would start her meeting with the subjects with a mystic ritual of greeting the house. She would choose a place in the house to kneel down, offer a moment of silent worshipping. During the 10-second ritual, the audience hears a piece of spiritual background music to elevate the auratic moment. The camera would then shift to the subjects, looking perplexed and gazing at Kondo, but at the same time respecting her method and the spiritual moment. Without anyone explaining details of the rituals, the tidy up process goes on.
Even though Kondo is the “hero” of the show, in the Western society context where the show is set, she is still being positioned and gazed at as “the other.” Therefore, such engagement with Japanese spiritual tradition is essential. As Ouelette comments, “this incorporation of indigenous Eastern spiritual traditions lends some credence to Kondo’s characterization of tidying up as a type of ‘magic.’” With the US and western audience as target audience, it also “appropriate the ‘other’ for their own pleasure and purposes.” (hooks, qtd. in Ouelette 541)
Japanese as “the other” is not only appropriated by the Western society but also appropriated and practiced by Kondo as a Japanese, which resonates Koichi Iwabuchi’s observation on the self-Orientalizing tendency of Japan:
“Japan is represented and represents itself as culturally and racially homogeneous and uniquely particularistic by way of a strategic binary opposition between two imaginary cultural entities, Japan and ‘the West.’” (547)
This strategic self-Orientalization could be one of the reasons for the worldwide success of Tidying Up, especially among the western audience.
By the same token, the minimalist imagination of Japan also comes into play as support of Kondo’s credence. Minimalism, in a broad definition, is the concept of owning less in life. It is a concept believed to be inspired by Japanese Zen Buddhism’s idea that “nothing is permanent,” craving for materials will only lead to more suffering. Minimalist as an artistic style has been widely adopted by artists, designers and brands worldwide, while Japanese and Scandanavian are claimed to be the most representative cultures of such aesthetic. In recent years, the concept further evolves to be a lifestyle that responds to over-consuming culture in late capitalism. Images of ultra-tidy home space with very few furniture pieces, often made in wood to emphasize the “close to nature” aesthetic, are flooded in social media and advertisement, conveying a “less is more” mantra.
Like Kondo, Japanese brand Muji also gained worldwide success in luring consumers who pursue a minimalist lifestyle. On the homepage of Muji’s US and European websites, a sizable image of a Buddha statue is displayed as the main visual. Interestingly, this Buddha image cannot be seen in the brand’s Japan, Hong Kong or other Asian sites. Through the image of the Buddha, we can see the intention of Muji portraying a kind of Zen, spiritual and minimalist connotation to its consumer, particularly those in the West. Such cultural imagination and self-Orientalizing approach, I argue, are crucial factors for Muji’s success in the Western markets.
Commodifying minimalism
As mentioned earlier, by problematizing cluttering, the KonMari method becomes a solution, which is also a service available with a price, that can satisfy the desire of decluttering. But the chain doesn’t just end here. The branded KonMari now forays to an online shop that sells not only organizing tools and professional decluttering certificate course, but also other “well-being” items such as oil diffuser and organic hand soap. (Kingston) Followers who took her advice to declutter, are now encouraged to consume and purchase more, in order to satisfy the desire of maintaining a minimalist, “ideal” lifestyle that is represented through the images manifested in Tidying Up or other media platforms.
Similarly, Muji, which now owns over 700 stores worldwide, carries more than 7,000 items ranging from household products to furniture pieces. The mantra of “less is more” advocated by these consumer brands now seems to be contradicted by the vast range of products that are promoted as a tool to maintain a minimalist lifestyle. Both Kondo and Muji are strategically converting an aesthetic value or an “ideal” lifestyle into a form of product. In other words, they are both commodifying minimalism.
The cases of Marie Kondo and Muji reflects what Karl Marx called “Commodity Fetishism.” Marx’s defines a commodity as a product that satisfies human needs or desires, but he also points out that, in a capitalist society, in addition to the use and exchange value, commodity also entails a mysterious character of a commodity that drives market interest, and that magic is the “social relation” among things, one desires what other people desire. Revisiting the Marxist idea, Guy Debord further illustrates that commodity is a spectacle, which is
“a permanent opium war which aims to make people identify goods with commodities and satisfaction with survival that increases according to its own laws.” (Debord #44)
With over-consumption being perceived as a social problem, a minimalist lifestyle is manifested as not only a desire to pursue but also a necessity to achieve holistic happiness and well-being. In other words, the products sold by Kondo and Muji is therefore perceived by consumers as an essential to fill the gap between reality and the desire of living minimalist.
Conclusion
As Debord observes,
“the spectacle is the moment when the commodity has attained the total occupation of social life…Modern economic production extends its dictatorship extensively and intensively.” (Debord #42)
Today, channeled by technology and globalization, this “dictatorship” of commodity is even more severe. In this essay, we have looked at how minimalism can be exploited by media or brands as an arguable act of anti-consumerism. Through Tidying Up, we understand how cluttering is first problematized, and later being solved by a “quasi-minimalist” method of decluttering. KonMari and Muji has successfully expanded overseas by leveraging the minimalist imagination of Japanese culture through the process of self-Orientalization, but, ironically, they are also the classic examples of how minimalism being commodified. Many have attempted to introduce a new way of thinking or practices to combat over-consumption, but perhaps the more important question is whether it is possible at all for us to escape from consumerism. As Bennett remarks,
“the issue is not whether to live with commodities but how to participate in commodity culture, for there is no vision of capitalist or noncapitalist economy today that does not include some role for the commodity form. The pertinent questions become how to reform commodity culture to render it more just and more ecologically sustainable and how to extract the ethical potential within commodity culture.” (Bennett 113)
While it is useful to reflect on our consumption habit with Marx’s or Debord’s critical view on commodity, it is even more realistic, practical, and productive to share Bennett’s vision in reflecting on our consumption culture and our relationship with objects, which may lead us to achieve a more sustainable society.
