Kondo's first life-changing magic arrangement was well received in Japan as early as 20 1 1 year. In an interview with Barry Yourgrau, a reporter from The New Yorker, writer and photographer Kyoichi Tsuzuki suggested that the rise of "Uniqlo, Muji and all those companies that sell fast fashion"-"You wear it for a season and then throw it away"-may be one of the reasons why Kondo's organizational stars were so dazzling at that cultural moment. After all, her KonMari method (because in Japan, the first name comes after the last name) not only allows you to discard things you no longer like, but also implies that if you grab a pleated polymer coat with a hole burned on the dresser, you will take the initiative to hurt yourself.
You can also give a similar example to explain why Kondo's book was so warmly welcomed in the United States after it was translated into English at the end of 20 14. The subsequent worship of Kondo led to the sequel of 20 16 similar pictures. Now, in the aforementioned reality show, Kondo visited eight families in the Los Angeles area and allowed them to stay at home.
Organize their lives from the outside, whether consciously or unconsciously, Los Angeles is a suitable place to shoot the program Cleaning up Clutter 2. Less than ten years ago, the Center for Family Daily Life (CELF) of UCLA completed a nine-year project in greater los angeles area, which recorded more than 30 middle-class families with dual-income families and school-age children's major research on the material culture of American suburban families.
It has a history of more than 40 thousand years. Intellectually, modern human beings have lived on the earth, but no society has ever accumulated so much personal property before. The interdisciplinary team wrote in the book Family Life in the 265,438+0 Century: 32 Families Open their Doors published in 2065,438+02. Although suburban families, especially those in Los Angeles County, are famous for their spaciousness-"the refrigerator is bigger than other places on the earth", they find that "food, toys and other shopping items go beyond their home and flood into the garage. In the first room, they recorded two, and only the first three rooms had 260 visible items, and then they stopped counting.
The conclusion of this study won't surprise you: American families have a lot of sundries.
The definition of what constitutes sundries varies greatly. "For centuries, humans and animals have not only hoarded and accumulated food, but also hoarded things because of scarcity," joseph cook, director of the British Institute of Hoarding, wrote in Understanding Hoarding. However, hoarding is related to one's mental health, which makes the process of getting rid of property very painful. If Tomoto only focuses on this, then he has the ability to free himself from irrelevant things.
She is not the first person to do so.
/kloc-In the 20th century, the word "mess" in English developed linguistically. As oval Lofgren, an ethnologist, wrote for Consumer Market and Culture magazine, "chaos" has more negative meanings from the original "place where food is provided, or a plate of (mixed) food", from the mixing of unpalatable food to occupying more vivid negative space in language, in 185 1.
This progressive era, from 19, from the 1990s to the 20s, is about those messy people, families and lives. Scholar Scott Helin wrote in the book "Hoarders: Material Deviation in Modern American Culture": "It is the health reformers or family economists who advocate the clean living movement who lead this personal and family clean revolution." . Women, because they are usually women, mostly middle-class and white, call on housewives to eliminate bacteria in their homes (technological progress has only recently appeared) and throw away sundries. However, many times, clutter is not just clutter. On the contrary, when reformers encourage people to "appreciate" family property in an orderly manner, in order to "urge Americans to do housework well", their information, like the medical reform movement itself, is conveyed through the perspective of racism and anti-immigration, making sundries the body of property, which is not in line with Herring's "clean, hygienic and middle-class white material cultural concept".
It's the fear of immigrant property. Interestingly, American middle-class families gained more than before. As shown in a chart in Time magazine's special report on clutter in issue 20 15, this rapidly industrialized country has promoted the growth and widespread adoption of Montgomery Ward and Sears' catalogues and physical department stores. This in turn leads to a kind of "new consumerism", which "provides a unique American concept, and you can aspire to become a different social class through acquisition."
Perhaps unsurprisingly, in 1925, Caroline Bartlett Crane, an American monist, feminist, civil reformer, educator and journalist, adopted an obvious and easy-to-understand way of asking questions when talking about home design: "Is our house full of disguised debts? We don't have rooms that are effectively used, so we can't see (? Get rid of?
Crane, who is known as "American housekeeper", won a wonderful competition organized by the movement "Better Home in America" at 1924. The initiative aims to "cure family neglect" through an educational project, which combines the values of thrift and self-reliance of the Party in the19th century with family technology in the 20th century, "said Janet hutcheson, a scholar published in Perspective of Local Architecture. Every year, a national model house competition is held, which can best meet the needs of modern women. Crane's award-winning work "The House of Ordinary People" finally inspired a "new architectural style". Although her book about her design concept is not like Kondo's, more than 20,000 people have visited the "little house". When it first appeared, herbert hoover, then Minister of Commerce and President of the American organization Better Home, praised it as "beneficial to the public".
Crane's call for "less" is a counterattack against Victorian excesses. According to Sarah Levitt, director of the National Architecture Museum, in the book "From Catherine Beecher to Martha Stewart: A Cultural History of Domestic Counseling", a telephone call led by domestic consultants can be traced back to the 1980s. Levitt wrote that these experts "attacked gadgets in half a century."
Elsie Devolf is one of them. She created the early art of interior design. She reminded readers to remember the most important point in an influential book, House of Taste, published by191. This suggestion was echoed by other experts at that time, who lectured on what family should and should not be. "Don't talk nonsense! A critic wrote in 19 16: "This is the voice of the New World. She said in a sentence that still makes people feel mean: "Those homes that can't be freed from trivial and useless things are the silent declaration of the creator on the hypocrisy of elegance and exquisiteness. It's hard for Sps not to doubt that this time, the mission of Kondo and her reality show team will be louder than that of family counselors in the 20th century, or, if again, the appeal of cleaning up will be ignored by the public, and they will order their bows and statues instead, which will now help to increase the convenience of click shopping. "