Marie Kondo and Minimalist Culture
Coming back to your room after being in the library for what seems like the entire day and seeing the mess that is your bed and desk can be a huge source of stress during a busy midterms week. Cleaning your room is one of the most basic tasks but can often be the hardest to start, especially if you’re like me and like to hoard random things from five years ago. This consumer and materialist mindset has been deeply imbedded in an American capitalist society and at its core has created large amounts of clutter and waste. With the rising popularity of Netflix’s new show, “Tidying Up With Marie Kondo,” many viewers have gained amore introspective outlook on life and their material possessions.
“Tidying Up With Marie Kondo” follows Marie Kondo, a professional organizing consultant, as she helps people clean up their lives. It’s based on her philosophy of “Konmari” where she encourages her clients to focus on things that spark joy: if they spark joy, keep them, but if not, thank them for their service and throw them out. In the show, it’s a simple yet effective way of cleaning and has inspired many to declutter their lives and think about what really gives them joy.
The methodology is largely based in Japanese Shinto tradition, which treats objects as valuable because of their essence and function rather than just their monetary value. In Shinto, kami are the natural spirits present in all things, including day-to-day inanimate objects. Following this idea of kami, people are allowed to see objects beyond their monetary and material value. Through Konmari, Kondo is not only helping people clean material objects in their lives, but also introducing a new way of thinking about their possessions. With the rise in minimalist aesthetics, particularly Japanese minimalism and stores like Muji, Konmari seems to be emerging at the right time for American audiences. Minimalism is as much an aesthetic as it is a philosophy for life. While bullet journals and white desk organizers look cute, minimalism also symbolic of an anti-consumer movement that questions the real value of materiality. However, there is a distinction to be made between minimalism and Konmari. While they do complement each other, minimalism is more about cutting things down to the essentials while Konmari is about organizing things based on whether they “spark joy,” and placing an inherent value, or kami, on all objects.
While Marie Kondo has certainly started a trend of decluttering and mass cleaning, she’s also received a lot of backlash for her “war on stuff” as one Washington Post contributor put it. Tweets calling Kondo a “monster” for throwing out books, using her “fairy finger” “woo-woo nonsense” to take away people’s stuff clearly ignore the point of Konmari while painting her as this foreign “other” forcibly imposing her backwards methods and depriving white people of their material possessions. There is a certain racialization imposed on Kondo as the stereotypical robotic and unfeeling Asian woman who pressures people to discard their things. It’s reflective of Western audiences’ insecurity more than anything and reveals their implicit beliefs about foreign culture and peoples, especially considering their demeaning descriptions of her as a “fairy finger” with “woo woo nonsense.” People have been especially angry about Kondo’s supposed “30 book rule” where clients are encouraged to only keep 30 books and throw everything else away. Such critics have contrived a narrative that Kondo is a menace to institutions of learning and attacking Western intellectual freedom. Whether this is the West’s fundamental incompatibility with anything anti-capitalist, a thinly veiled racism and insensitivity toward cultural differences, or a seemingly superior moral and intellectual standard is debatable, but there is evidently something deeply uncomfortable to Western audiences about Marie Kondo’s philosophy. Either way, people demonizing Marie Kondo aren’t necessarily morally superior, they’re probably just messy.
