Kissing Your Socks Goodbye

By her own account, Marie Kondo was an unusual child, poring over lifestyle magazines to glean organizing techniques and then stealthily practicing them at home and school, confounding her family and bemusing her teachers.

As she writes in “The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up: The Japanese Art of Decluttering and Organizing,” which comes out this month in the United States and is already a best seller in her native Japan and in Europe, she habitually sneaked into her siblings’ rooms to throw away their unused toys and clothes and ducked out of recess to organize her classroom’s bookshelves and mop closet, grumbling about poor storage methodologies and pining for an S-hook.

Now 30, Ms. Kondo is a celebrity of sorts at home, the subject of a TV movie, with a three-month waiting list for her decluttering services — until recently, that is, because she has stopped taking clients to focus on training others in her methods. Last Friday, I brought her book home to practice them.

What better moment to drill down and ponder the fretful contents of one’s sock drawer? Global and national news was careering from the merely hysterical to the nonsensical (the Ebola cruise ship incident was just peaking). Closer to home, other anxieties beckoned. But in my apartment on Second Avenue, the world was no larger than my closet, and I was talking to my T-shirts.

Let me explain. Ms. Kondo’s decluttering theories are unique, and can be reduced to two basic tenets: Discard everything that does not “spark joy,” after thanking the objects that are getting the heave-ho for their service; and do not buy organizing equipment — your home already has all the storage you need.

Obsessive, gently self-mocking and tender toward the life cycle of, say, a pair of socks, Ms. Kondo delivers her tidy manifesto like a kind of Zen nanny, both hortatory and animistic.

“Don’t just open up your closet and decide after a cursory glance that everything in it gives you a thrill,” she writes. “You must take each outfit in your hand.”

“Does it spark joy?” would seem to set the bar awfully high for a T-shirt or a pair of jeans, but it turns out to be a more efficacious sorting mechanism than the old saws: Is it out of style? Have you worn it in the last year? Does it still fit?

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The contents of one of Ms. Kondo’s own drawers.

You can find YouTube videos of her technique, but it’s not so hard: Fold everything into a long rectangle, then fold that in upon itself to make a smaller rectangle, and then roll that up into a tube, like a sushi roll. Set these upright in your drawers. And pour your heart into it, Ms. Kondo urges: Thank your stuff, it’s been working hard for you.

“When we take our clothes in our hands and fold them neatly,” she writes, “we are, I believe, transmitting energy, which has a positive effect on our clothes.”

She proposes a similarly agreeable technique for hanging clothing. Hang up anything that looks happier hung up, and arrange like with like, working from left to right, with dark, heavy clothing on the left: “Clothes, like people, can relax more freely when in the company of others who are very similar in type, and therefore organizing them by category helps them feel more comfortable and secure.”

Read more at NYTS.

Rising Sun-Japan and the Art of Survival

Three years ago this March, a 9-­magnitude earthquake, the strongest ever known to hit Japan, created a tsunami that killed more than 15,000 people outright, displaced hundreds of thousands more and removed entire villages from the map. By triggering the failure of the Fukushima nuclear plant, it also left the landscape contaminated and led to Japan’s curtailing of its nuclear-power system.

I was living in Beijing when the quake hit, and I saw Chinese coverage shift from its normal churlish outlook on Japan to growing respect for the stoic discipline with which its people bore hardship. One photo ran on TV and front pages across China. It was an aerial shot of the Japanese, very young to very old, forming a long, snaking but always orderly line for disaster supplies. The amazed Chinese reaction was: Imagine a society in which people would patiently wait their turn for hours rather than rushing pell-mell to the front.

David Pilling, who from 2002 through 2008 was The Financial Times’s bureau chief in Tokyo, also learned of the earthquake in Beijing, his new post. He quickly returned to Japan to report on the disaster and its consequences. He conceived of this book, whose ambition, he says, is “to create a portrait of a stubbornly resistant nation with a history of overcoming successive waves of adversity.”

As anyone familiar with Japan knows, tenacity is highly celebrated as an individual and a collective trait. Words like ganbaru (“to endure”), ganbatte (“keep going”) and gaman (“plucky resolve”) pop up ­routinely in conversation. In Japan’s accounts of its own history, setbacks and the resulting brave rebounds play a central narrative role (much as the constant ­movement westward does in America’s understanding of its past). This is also the way Pilling structures his story, with opening and closing sections about destruction and recovery in the devastated Tohoku region. Between them come extended ­discussions about Japan’s long record of dealing with adversity, and the recent politics and economics of what is often — and, as Pilling shows, misleadingly — referred to as Japan’s “lost decades” following its 1980s boom.

The book author David Pilling

The ground-zero disaster reporting will command the attention of any reader. ­Pilling vividly recreates the waves of ­different sorts of destruction. First the earthquake itself, which “went on for a time-stopping six minutes.” Then the tsunami, which was not the single cresting “Great Wave” famous from Hokusai prints but a rise in sea level of as much as 130 feet in some ­areas. Pilling describes a multistory gymnasium where towns­people were waiting out the tsunami. Water filled the building, and more than 60 people were trapped and drowned. Pilling arrived in Tohoku in time to witness the next stage, in which survivors walked across a flattened landscape searching for any sign of the people, belongings, entire neighborhoods that had disappeared. For me, these scenes powerfully recall John Hersey’s “Hiroshima” — and although the causes were obviously different, in each case the longest-lasting source of damage came from radiation.

At the end of the book, Pilling returns to Tohoku and, of course, finds people defying hardship and persevering. They include a photographer friend who ­daringly makes repeated trips into the “exclusion zone” around the failed nuclear plant, to document what has happened there.

Please read the while book review by James Fallows at Tmagazine. 

Bending Adversity: Japan and the Art of Survival ,by David Pilling

 Penguin Press HC, (March 13, 2014),$20.15