After Marie Kondo: the return of Japan’s joyful clutter

The world has long been in thrall to the idea that Japan is a haven of controlled, ordered minimalism. But the reality is much different - and far messier - than you might expect

• This essay first appeared under the title The Joy of Clutter on Aeon.co

In 1990, a young Japanese photographer named Kyoichi Tsuzuki began capturing a rarely seen view of domestic life in one of the world's most densely populated cities. Over three years, he visited hundreds of Tokyo apartments, photographing the living spaces of friends, acquaintances and strangers. These images, published in Tokyo Style (1993), looked startlingly unlike the rarefied minimalism that the world had come to expect from Japan. Tsuzuki's photos were a joyous declaration to the contrary, celebrating the vitality of living spaces filled with wall-to-wall clutter.

In the late-20th century, Japan was known for its minimalism: its zen arts, its tidy and ordered cities, its refined foods and fashions. But Tsuzuki peeled away this facade to reveal a more complicated side to his nation. And Tokyo was the perfect setting for this exfoliation. Like the interiors he photographed, it remains visually overwhelming - even cluttered. Outside, enormous animated advertisements compete for attention against a jigsaw puzzle of metal, glass, concrete and plastic. In the sprawling residential districts that radiate from the city centre, compact homes are packed in formations as dense as transistors on a semiconductor chip, while confusing geometries of power lines spiderweb the skies above.