How Marie Kondo Bucks Japanese Tradition
As a Zen Buddhist nun, I’ve learned a lot about Japan’s devotion to cleanliness — and how Kondo both embraces and deviates from it
I am a tentative Marie Kondo fan. While I don’t fold my shirts into neat rolls or divide my junk drawer into easily identifiable sections, I read The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up and thought, That’s cool. I threw away a couple of old shirts and sweaters, maybe a few old binders, and that was that.
Perhaps the reason I don’t find Kondo’s tidying-up strategies particularly shocking is because I spent five years in Japan, training as a Zen Buddhist nun. For three of those years, I lived and worked in a convent called Aichi Senmon Nisodo, sharing a room with five Japanese women. We spent all day cooking, cleaning, sewing, and performing ceremonies.
Reading the discourse, backlash, and backlash to the backlash surrounding Kondo’s methods, it has occurred to me just how little Western people understand about Japanese culture. They tend to fixate on and exaggerate Kondo’s innocuous suggestions (for example, to keep only 30 books), while overlooking the parts of her philosophy that deviate from the norms of her culture — in other words, the aspects of her practice that are quite groundbreaking.
