KonMari on the Record with Dr. Jolyon Thomas (University of Pennsylvania)

Originally published: April 16, 2019.

To cite, please use:
Jolyon Thomas, interview with Tristan R. Grunow, Japan on the Record, podcast audio, April 16, 2019. https://jotr.transistor.fm/2.

[This transcript has been edited for clarity.]

Intro: By now, you’ve probably heard of Kondo Marie, the Japanese author and organizing consultant, known for her so-called “KonMari method” of tidying up. Her 2011 best seller “The Life Changing Magic of Tidying Up” sparked joy for millions around the world, and propelled KonMari, as she’s known in Japan, to international stardom.

[various clips from news shows, introducing Marie Kondo and her netflix show, are playing]

More recently, Kondo has been in the news again as her Netflix show “Tidying Up with Marie Kondo” brought the KonMari method to a new audience of Americans, fervently hoping to declutter their home through KonMari’s magic.

[clips from the intro of Marie Kondo’s show plays]

In response to the popularity of the show, there has been a chorus of detractors and defenders of the KonMari method. As someone aware of Kondo Marie, but not having read her book or watched her TV show, I was surprised by the almost religious following she receives. I wasn’t the only one.

I’m Tristan Grunow, and this is Japan: On the Record.

Dr. Jolyon Thomas is assistant professor of religious studies at the University of Pennsylvania, and studies religiosity and every-day life in contemporary Japan. Dr. Thomas was also cautious about the reaction of the popularity of “Tidying Up” and wrote about easy associations between the KonMari method, and Shinto animism, first in a long twitter thread, and then a post for the Los Angeles Review of Books called “Domesticity and Spirituality: Kondo is not an animist”.

I asked Dr. Thomas to weigh in, starting by introducing the KonMari method for the uninitiated.

Dr. Jolyon Thomas: As I see it, she sorta sits at the confluence of two streams of popular writing on lifestyle improvement in Japan. One of those is a sort of early 21st century stream called Danshari, which is basically a method of decluttering that involves refusing to buy things you don’t need, and getting rid of unnecessary superfluous crap, and then also tidying up what’s left. So that’s kind of this longer tradition, still very squarely centered in the 21st century. A slightly longer tradition is basically just lifestyle advice, generally speaking, that may have some connection with religious traditions but not necessarily so. And in that case it sits within this body of self help literature or self help practices that promise personal transformation.
Usually, it’s the promissory nature of this that characterizes it, so the thing is like, “if only you do this one thing, then your life will be utterly transformed”, and we can see this in various kinds of practices, like some religious movements, but then also things like yoga or healing practices like Reiki, and so forth.

So I think that’s the general cultural background, very much centered in the early 21st century. But Kondo Marie’s tidying method, which she calls the KonMari method, is really simple: you have clutter in your house, and it’s bothering you, so rather than do things step by step or a little bit at a time, she suggests that you tidy all at once, in one go, and if you do this, then you won’t ever backslide. And she claims that this will totally change your life. She’s very systematic about it: she suggests that people start with clothes, then move to books, then papers, then miscellaneous items like you might find in your kitchen or in your garage, and finally save sentimental items like photographs or diaries for last. She suggests that what you do is you take everything out, look at it all at once, and then touch each item physically, and figure out whether it gives you a sort of thrill when you hold it. The word in Japanese is tokimeku, which is a really hard word to translate, so, you know, I think whoever figured out the phrase ‘spark joy’ as a translation deserves an award, because this has become quickly the watch word in 2019, since her show aired on the 1st of the year.

The fact that she focuses on the tactile and the intuitive is, I think, what makes her method really appealing. What she’s doing is basically allowing people to do what feels right, but she’s also giving them a program for getting in touch with what feels right. So I think that this aspect of the show and her method both appeals to and irritates some audiences, and that’s why her show has been both wildly popular and very divisive at the same time.

Tristan Grunow: And so, her method has become something of a cultural phenomenon. Wired has an article “Tokimeku Unfollow: How to Declutter your Twitter Account.” Other cultural influencers like Martha Stewart, talking about “ways to declutter your home once, and never need to do it again.” And of course, KonMarie has her own Netflix series. I understand you binge-watched the entire show. So can you describe a typical episode for those of us who haven’t had the opportunity to see one?

JT: Yeah, so, this is not the type of television I normally watch, I have to say. And in fact, I had no intention of watching the show until I started seeing a couple of different reactions to it on social media. So the show follows a very predictable pattern: there’s a couple, or a family, that has a house that’s full of stuff, and they’re frazzled and frustrated with their clutter and their mess. And then Marie Kondo, who they know as “Marie” [said in an American accent], comes to their house along with her translator, Iida-san. She first talks to them about what their frustrations are and she sort of asks them what their vision is for their home. Then after introducing herself to their house in a moment that’s very ritualized, with soft piano music playing, she has them pull out all of their clothing, goes through each item one by one, figure out whether it sparks joy, and then from there, each episode sort of goes through her five step process, more or less in stages. Some of them eliminate, or omit some of the stages, and some of them kind of change the order a little bit, but, you know, you see all these people tossing out bags and bags of trash, or taking them to Goodwill, and then near the end of the episode, they’re totally moved and expressing how things have changed or family members show up and say “wow, I didn’t know your house could be like this” -- that can be parents, or children -- people say that their relationships are better and so forth.

One of the things that we can see in the show is this real emphasis on transformation. The focus is on the ‘life changing magic’ that’s in the title of her book. So in episode one, there’s this middle class white couple with two children, and near the beginning of the episode, this woman says “I want it to be strong enough to change me.” I think that’s a really powerful moment because she’s recognizing that she’s not as organized as she’d like to be, but she’s still interested in being transformed by this sagely person that’s going to come into her home. I think that’s emblematic of the perception that Kondo Marie is this sort of magical, sagely person who’s going to come into a home and provide the wisdom to this person who will then lead a totally different life from this point forward.

TG: And I think this really touches on this American desire for a quick fix [sound of affirmation from Dr. Thomas], but that’s something maybe we can circle back to. I had heard of Marie Kondo and her KonMari method -- there’s this big New York Times profile of her -- but I wasn’t really that familiar with her, her philosophy, or her TV show. But the reason I wanted to talk to you is I saw you had this long twitter thread unpacking and complicating some of the reactions to KonMari’s popularity. Can you tell us about what inspired you to write on KonMari, particularly about some of the responses to her outside of Japan, along with some of the cultural assumptions that are made about her method?

JT: Yeah. Like you, I was sort of watching with amusement as I saw American audiences coming to know of KonMari. But then on social media -- for me, mostly twitter -- I saw two sorts of trends happening, almost simultaneously. One was a misunderstanding of Kondo Marie on the part of a number of people who are taking issue with her alleged claim that people should have no more than 30 books. For my fellow scholars, I want to say that she actually says very explicitly in her book that scholars are a special case, and that we may find it necessary to have many books, and that she personally tries to have no more than 30. I didn’t know this at the time, because I hadn’t read her book, but I saw that there were all these people who were really hating this claim -- or this alleged claim of hers -- and saying you know, “books bring us joy”, “books are good”, and so forth. I’m very sympathetic to that, I have too many books myself.

But the thing that really got to me, the thing that sort of prompted me to write at length on twitter, was a kind of response to the haters. So the defenders of KonMari were saying, “hey haters, you don’t understand what’s going on; your claims are racist”. One of the things that came up in that defense of KonMari was a claim that was repeated over and over again, which was that her method was based on Shinto or as some people put it, on Shinto Animism. As I started seeing that, I thought this is really, really problematic for a number of reasons. First of all, I’m a scholar of Shinto. I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about Shinto, and I noticed that a lot of people had a very superficial understanding of the amalgamation of traditions that collectively go under the name of Shinto. And another thing is that there’s a politics to the word ‘Animism’ that people seem to be sort of unaware of, and I had just written a book chapter sort of on the politics of Animism. So I also had that in the back of my mind.

Alright, so let me just sort of unpack a little bit about this, because there are a lot of layers here. The first layer is the racism claim. One of the things that came up is, of course, some of the haters were making statements that seemed to be unnecessarily dismissive of this diminutive Asian woman who speaks either in very broken English or in Japanese with a translator. And there’s problematic optics of someone who is, say, a white journalist talking very dismissively of an Asian woman. Even at the beginning of the month of January there are already several pieces -- there’s one in the Guardian, they’re all over the place. I was keeping this list of the articles, and I got exhausted because they were just-like all of the ‘hot takes’ were coming too quickly to keep track of. At any rate, the defenders curiously used an essentialist claim to counter what they perceived to be a racist statement. Let me clarify: by ‘racist’ I mean, any statement that attributes a psychological attitude or personal disposition to an entire population based on perceived physical or biological similarities, right? So if you group everyone together and you say “all Japanese people are like this, Kondo Marie is representative of all Japanese people, and so when you critique her, you’re critiquing all Japanese people,” that in itself is a racist statement. So the people who are trying to defend Kondo Marie are actually making racist claims in the name of anti-racism. And that, I think, is just like, mind-boggling, if very wide-spread on social media, especially the social media of the left.

Another thing that came up as I started observing what we might think of as the ‘real’ racists, or the obvious racists: the people who are like outspoken white supremacists picked up on this debate and sort of latched onto it and started to praise Kondo Marie on sites like The Daily Stormer, saying things like she was going to teach white women how to be organized and docile and so forth. And that fits into this longstanding tradition of understanding Asian femininity as docile and demure and all that. And the white supremacist websites started to use this language of “White Shinto”. So that is, I think, really disturbing, and I’m not sure that all of the defenders are aware that their defenses are then being used in a sort of tongue in cheek fashion by the white supremacists. Nor do they seem to be aware of the fact that racial hierarchies work really differently in Kondo Marie’s native land of Japan where the pre-supposition is not that the most elite race (if you want to use that sort of understanding) is white, but actually there is a widespread pervasive understanding of Japanese supremacy. This comes up in Kondo Marie’s own book, at one point she says it’s in Japanese people’s genes to tidy and she says that Japanese people, more than any other people on Earth are inclined to be tidy, which on its face is a ridiculous claim because if that were true, she would not have a job. So there’s an essentialist claim which breeds an essentialist response, which breeds another essentialist response, which breeds yet another essentialist response. And basically all of that is racism. I think that the well intentioned liberals who are reacting to one particular knee-jerk reaction to her show are unintentionally reproducing these very problematic understandings about Japanese-ness.

TG: As you were saying, if this is really something integral to Japanese-ness, then Marie Kondo wouldn’t have a job. So, as you mentioned there is this conflation of Marie Kondo, Japanese-ness and Shinto. I even see one article here that says “Seven Ways to Declutter Like a Goddess with the KonMari Method.” But this idea seems rooted in this too-easy association between Japanese-ness and Shinto as the animistic native religion of the Japanese islands. And certainly this is the popular understanding of Shinto, but is it not quite that simple after all?

JT: It is not quite that simple, in a word. So, let’s see here, I think if you were to go to a dictionary or wikipedia the first thing you would find is “Shinto is the indigenous religion of Japan.” The problem is that’s an outdated understanding of Shinto, and the most recent research on Shinto basically has called this premise into question. Well, why is that? We do have evidence that from even prehistory, there is something called “Kami veneration” in Japan. It seems that for as long as there has been anything that we might call Japan, people have been venerating these entities called Kami. What they are, how people understand them has changed a lot over time -- as is true of any long-standing cultural tradition. But the notion of Shinto really doesn’t come into clarity until the 15th century at the earliest, and it does so in opposition to a tradition that’s understood to be foreign, which is Buddhism. Let’s just let that sink in for a second. The notion of Shinto emerges in, at the earliest, the 15th century, in relationship to a tradition that’s perceived to be foreign. So already from its inception, Shinto is understood in relation to perceptions of foreignness. Moving forward in time to around the 17th century or so we have people who are theorists now of what Shinto is and what are they doing to establish what Shinto is. They’re looking at how other cultures establish their cosmology and how other what we would now call religions establish their cosmology. So they’re looking at Copernican cosmology and then they’re saying “well, that obviously doesn’t work; let’s rework it so that it’s more Japan-centric.” And then if we get to a little bit later, [in the] 19th century it’s in interaction with countries like the United States that Japanese people decide to reconfigure Shinto yet again in their foreign relations and again during the Allied occupation of Japan. And more recently Shinto has been reconfigured again in terms of the global environmentalist movement. So my point is that even if we have Kami worship has been going on in Japan since the earliest recorded times, the notion of Shinto has always been constructed in relation to foreign Others. This is also true of the concept of Animism.

Now, Animism seems timeless or seems like -- if we had some word that would describe early human ritual and religious practices or worldviews, Animism is that word. And I think that that’s the sort of garden variety understanding. But Animism emerged in the 19th century as anthropologists were trying to figure out a way to categorize and basically hierarchically organize the various religions of the world. And they placed that, through the influence of people like Charles Darwin, on an evolutionary scale, where Animism was always seen to be kind of a false understanding of how the world really worked. The assumption was that eventually Animists would always become monotheists and that Animism was this sort of vestigial remnant of an earlier age, and that anyone who still happened to be an Animist was just a monotheist waiting to emerge. And so this is an idea that I just saw earlier today -- somebody on Twitter making this exact same claim -- this is a really persuasive, pejorative understanding of Animism. Next to that pejorative understanding today, I think the defenders are using what I call a recuperative idea of Animism where they think Animism is this intuitive understanding of a personal relationship with objects or with the natural environment. And when they do so, they’re trying to suggest that Animism, unlike monotheism, might help people connect with inanimate objects in a better way. A lot of times people will say that Animists, or when they’re talking about Japan, Japanese people, all believe that spirits reside in everything. And I think that’s a bit of a specious claim. You know my own experience with Japanese people suggests that sometimes they may treat certain objects with veneration and sometimes they will treat objects just as anybody else would treat objects: with utter disdain or disregard. So I think these sorts of essentializing claims about Japanese-ness and Animism deserve to be called into question because of the politics of that word. There’s one other aspect of Animism that I want to problematize: that it can function in an obscurantist way, and by that I mean it can serve to mask one’s motivations or to render one’s motivations or one’s attitudes as something that’s beyond critique. So if somebody says “well, I do this because I’m an Animist,” then it’s really hard to know what that means. It’s really hard to peek behind the curtain and see what someone is saying. And I think that a lot of KonMari’s defenders have been using Animism in a combination of this recuperative mode and also in this obscurantist mode, where they say “okay, Animism, done” and they kind of dust their hands off and feel like it’s been explained away. But I think we need to look at the word Animism itself and figure out what political work it’s doing for those people, and for my part I think it’s actually letting people off the hook from doing serious thinking about what kind of assumptions they’re making about race and religion.

TG: I’m Tristan Grunow, and this has been Japan on the Record, a podcast where scholars and academics bring their expertise to bear on issues in the news. Japan on the Record is hosted and produced by Tristan Grunow at the University of British Columbia and Vancouver, B.C. Thank you for listening.

Japan on the Record is hosted, produced, and edited by Tristan Grunow. Transcripts by Maggie Trettin.