The Art of Discarding

by Nagisa Tatsumi

  STUFFED UP

  I soon began to realize that this isn’t only a problem for my friends and their documents. It’s a phenomenon found throughout Japanese society. Economic growth means we’ve become used to a system of mass production and mass consumption. We’ve become good at buying things, at choosing things. We’re used to thinking carefully about what we want.

  And now, in our world of super-abundant supply, something has begun to go wrong.

  Take food, for example. Animals on the move are always looking for food: herbivores roam about eating constantly because vegetation has poor nutritional efficiency; carnivores chase their prey, and when they catch it they eat their fill, then sleep until they are hungry again. In the natural world, hunger is normal, and animals’ bodies have a system for responding to it.

  But humans have more food than is necessary. Surrounded by all this food, we have to control what we eat, manage our intake. Hunger is a vital, basic mechanism to which the human body responds, but there’s no signal when we eat too much. If something looks delicious, we eat; when it’s mealtime, we eat. There’s no end to it.

  And the situation with things is similar. Just as we should not accept too much food, so we should not allow too many things to accumulate around us. Food may be delicious and nutritious, but there has to be a limit; things may be cheap, good quality, and useful, but we can’t go on piling them up. Yet our senses have no signal to tell us we have too much.

  If you take a step back and look at the way we’re surrounded by things, doesn’t it seem unnatural, irrational?

  HAVING THINGS IS HUMAN NATURE

  Where does our desire to have things come from?

  The answer’s easy for food. Along with sex and sleep, eating is one of the acts from which individuals derive basic happiness and fulfilment. But our desire to possess objects other than food seems to me to be bound up with our sense of existence.

  Things are not simply physical objects. Once we possess them they become part of us. This is the fundamental logic of the consumer society—the feeling that self-realization is achieved through having the things we want. And if we lose something we’ve obtained, we feel pain at losing part of the self we’ve built up. When a toddler develops signs of ego, he wants to monopolize his toys and won’t let other children touch them. It’s only later, when he develops an awareness of others that he is able to play with friends or share with his little brother.

  I think the toddler’s impulse remains with us in adulthood, albeit concealed beneath a veneer of rationality. It makes us hoard things that we obtain, and when we get rid of something it makes us buy something better to replace it. This seems to be natural behavior.

  Yet at the same time, everyone seems somehow to feel that our glut of possessions is very unnatural—a sense of unease that manifests itself in an interest in environmental problems and economical lifestyles.

  While cutting waste and minimizing consumption are good things—kind to the planet and to household finances—I don’t feel that such a complete change of direction is possible for society as a whole.

  I think we should accept the fact of possessions and people’s desire to have them. It’s part of human nature. We can’t change it and it won’t change of its own accord. What should be changed, though, is the tendency to carry on possessing things without being aware of what we’re doing.

  THE IDEA OF “DISCARDING”

  We must stop simply having stuff and putting it away somewhere. We need to think more actively about our relationship with things. This means a major change in attitude, enabling us to engage with the idea of discarding, and to develop the skills that will help us to do it.

  The task of discarding isn’t just a question of chucking things in the garbage. Like the publishing friends I mentioned earlier, people often worry about it. But if, in spite of such uncertainties, you can be selective in what you keep, you’ll develop an idea of how much stuff is enough for you to live with. Then, once you have rid yourself of the excess, economical and environmentally friendly lifestyles (buying the bare minimum, recycling, etc.) can become useful methods of managing possessions.

  Having read this far you might now be inspired to think, OK, let’s get rid of this stuff! But where to start? How do you get rid of all the stuff you’ve accumulated? You may well throw your hands up in despair and give up before you’ve even started.

  To deter you from giving up, I’ll now talk a bit about my own experience. Then I’ll introduce a survey I conducted. Using examples from that survey, I’ll move on in the following parts to specific attitudes to and strategies for disposal.

  MOVING HOUSE AND THE IMPORTANCE OF DISPOSAL

  It was moving house that made me realize the importance of getting rid of things. At twenty-six I moved out of my parents’ house to a small one-room apartment with a lavatory, but no bath. From there I went to a two-bedroom apartment, then a two-bedroom house. Three moves in three years. Then I married and moved again. At first we rented a three-bedroom house and a separate small apartment for work, but then a few years later we bought a bigger house. All told, I moved five times in eight years.

  Awareness dawned during that first move to the independence of a small apartment. With my limited funds I arranged a small truck and, wanting to take the bare minimum, I began sorting through my possessions. As I decided what to take, I was surprised to find that many of the books, mementos, and even furniture that had seemed so important to me would be unnecessary in my new place.

  My new apartment felt good with just the essentials in it. But the volume of stuff in my parents’ house seemed almost the same as before—I’d left there all the things that I could have got rid of.

  Inevitably, after each subsequent move to larger accommodation the amount of stuff around me grew. But by then I knew the importance of disposal and I never kept too much as I moved from place to place.

  MARRIAGE AND THE PLEASURE OF DISPOSAL

  Marriage brought a new problem. My husband had lived for almost ten years in the three-bedroom house we now shared. It was built in the early-twentieth-century Taisho Period, and was a generous size. It had plenty of storage and was full of nooks and crannies one hardly even noticed.

  Naturally enough, a lot of stuff had accumulated: light fixtures and flowerpots that might come in handy one day; vases and chests that had been placed here and there “for the time being”; the contents of said chests—bags, plates, cups, bowls…

  None of this was trash. All of it could be useful. But with another person coming to live there, available space inevitably shrank and things started to get in the way. And that other person was me—someone who had become aware of the potential for discarding.

  Naturally, I began to get rid of things. Looked at with an eye to disposal, it was surprising how almost everything seemed a suitable target. And since it was all stuff that had been accumulated by someone else, it seemed easy to decide. But my spouse resisted: “I want this”… “You can’t get rid of that”… “Don’t touch the books” and so on. I then had to persuade him how important it is to get rid of things—that while it is wasteful in one sense, this is outweighed by the value of securing more space.

  In the end, when hostilities were over, my spouse stopped complaining and began to be happy with how neat and tidy the place was becoming. And his happiness made me all the more happy myself.

  This experience made the idea of discarding even more significant than it had been before. I began to feel a sense of joy at seeing a place cleared of clutter. My mind was filled with phrases I’d heard about the beauty of use and functionality. I thought of the Katsura Imperial Villa in Kyoto, famous for its simplicity.

  At the end of the process, our home was a very pleasant place—one that others envied. And while there may have been one or two things that I regretted getting rid of, I have no recollection of that now.

  Nevertheless, when we moved on to our current house there were still piles of large items to be thrown away. It w
as enough to make me despair. Even after we’d left, I had to return to the old, empty house day after day to put out more trash. I gazed at the piles, disgusted at the idea that irrespective of our belief in getting rid of things, we’d still been living with so much unnecessary stuff.

  Is the situation any different at your house?

  CONFLICT WITH MY POST-WAR-THINKING MOTHER

  Another big factor behind my belief in disposal is my mother.

  My mother belongs to the generation that grew up during and after the Second World War. She married soon after leaving school and for the next fifteen years lived in a large house with an outside storage shed. She then moved to an apartment, where she has been living for twenty years.

  I recall my childhood home as a space that was constantly under the occupation of things. And even since her two children left and got married, the number of things in my mother’s home hasn’t decreased. On the contrary, there seem to be more now than ever.

  Take the china cabinet, for example. It’s jam-packed. There are remnants of the Western set my parents bought just after they were married, one cup from a Japanese tea set, a little pot received at a wedding, a glass obtained in a shop promotion, a lacquer bowl I’d given my mother… Even though she’s living alone, she has three times as much tableware as we have.

  If I suggest that she gets rid of some of it, she’ll say, “I know. I really should,” but doesn’t. If I suggest doing it for her, she says she’ll do it herself. And I understand why she feels she can’t. As children in the post-war years her generation knew real want. They were marrying at a time when the country had begun to produce a succession of new home-electrical and other products. Things are precious to them. They can’t throw away something useable without a sense of guilt.

  Old towels and chipped teacups—objects that other people would have thrown out long ago—are, for my mother, things that should still be put to use. There is certainly virtue in feeling this way. But unfortunately it’s a virtue that doesn’t count for much now, when new things come along well before older things have reached the end of their useful lives.

  I hope that the message of this book will reach people of my mother’s generation, people who share those same virtues and values. They must start to discard things, and come to see this as a virtue too.

  SO WHAT ABOUT THE ROOM I WORK IN?

  I expect you now think that I live a highly efficient, clutter-free life, surrounded only by the most carefully selected objects.

  Well, not quite. I keep getting rid of stuff, but it keeps on accumulating. I suppose that overall my home has less stuff in it than most others. But things proliferate in no time, slipping in through the narrowest gaps.

  Let’s take a look at the room where I’m writing now.

  On and around the desk:

  • A pen holder with too much in it: some of the pens have been there for years and no longer work at all; there’s a nicely designed letter opener that looks rather important, but I know I’m never going to use it; a little Miffy toy someone gave me has been hanging there for months.

  • A pile of floppy disks: since I now exchange data by email and store major items on an MO drive, I don’t use floppy disks. I don’t even know what’s been stored on the disks in the pile—bad organization means the labels haven’t been filled in.

  • Desk drawers: I’ve emptied them out and sorted through the contents every time I’ve moved, but still they’re full of old notebooks and documents. They’re not functioning as drawers. I only open them once a month at most.

  On the floor:

  • A bamboo foot massager someone gave me is lying under the chair, always getting in the way.

  • Piles of faxes, photocopies, and magazines have merged into a single mound. At the bottom somewhere must be the remnants of last month’s work.

  • Piles of books: one comprises some that aren’t worth keeping and others I’ve borrowed from the library; another, belonging to my husband, has been sitting next to the bookcase for two years, ever since we moved. I knock into it sometimes and it collapses, but I just stack the books up again.

  On the wall:

  • A summer coat that wouldn’t fit in the closet has been hanging on the wall since last autumn.

  In the closet:

  • Paperbacks and the vacuum cleaner are neatly stored at the bottom, but the top is full of clothes I never wear and bags I never use.

  I’ll stop there. If I describe any more, I’ll begin to feel ill! But bear in mind that I dispose of at least one large bag of burnable trash every week. If I didn’t, the situation would be far worse.

  THE “CAN’T-DISCARD” SURVEY

  That’s enough about my personal experience. Now let’s take a look at what other people feel they can’t get rid of.

  I conducted what I call the “Can’t-discard” survey—an informal investigation of the items in everyday life that caused people problems in terms of storage, tidying up, or disposal, based on my publisher’s editing department and my own circle of acquaintances. This means the sample is mainly urban, white-collar, but there is no other specific bias in terms of lifestyle, income, or job. The majority of responses were from the Tokyo area, but some were also from Osaka, Kyushu, Shikoku, Chubu, and Hokuriku. Although the data-collection methods and number of participants mean that the results are not valid statistically, it does give a good picture of the attitudes of contemporary city dwellers.

  Respondents were asked:

  • Are there any things in your everyday life you find difficult to store?

  • Are there any things or places that always seem untidy?

  • When you see a particular thing or look in a particular place, do you always feel you should do something about it?

  Almost all respondents (100 percent of men and 98 percent of women) answered “Yes” to these questions. This high “Yes” response rate was expected. It seemed to me that people were almost bound to have this kind of problem. In fact, I found it remarkable that anyone at all said “No.”

  When asked what particular types of things caused difficulties, in terms of what to do with them, it became clear that the top three problem areas were books, clothes, and magazines. For men, books were first and clothes second. For women, clothes first, books second. Magazines were in third position for both genders. Although I expected people to have problems with these items, I was surprised to find that books and clothes caused difficulties for about half of both gender groups.

  The next question helped clarify their psychology:

  • Are there things you feel you should discard, but can’t bring yourself to?

  Eighty percent of men and 95 percent of women said “Yes.” Looked at from the opposite angle, this means that just over 10 percent of the overall sample couldn’t think of any items to classify in this way. This contrasts with the response to the previous question, to which almost everybody responded that there were things they didn’t know what to do with. Thus, it seems that some people don’t know what to do with things, but never consider discarding them.

  For men, books topped the list of things that they felt uncomfortable getting rid of. This was followed by magazines and clothes. For women, it was clothes, followed by books and then photographs. The items that people feel uncomfortable getting rid of overlap substantially with those they don’t know what to do with. As I expected, there was a bias toward information-related items for men and clothes for women.

  If you don’t know what to do with something,

  disposal is an option

  In this book I want to suggest that you keep the option of disposal in mind—“Don’t know what to do with it = think about discarding it.”

  When the decision to discard something is not that difficult, everybody does it. If you don’t like the idea, consider the survey results. Respondents identified things they made a point of getting rid of to avoid accumulation. Top of the list were magazines (third on the list of items that people didn’t know what
to do with)—40 percent of men and 60 percent of women get rid of magazines quickly to avoid them building up.

  Perhaps for women, the limited content of fashion and information magazines makes them comparatively easy to throw away (they rank only fifth in the list of things women found tough to dispose of).

  Other things that people make a point of discarding include advertising and junk mail, supermarket and department-store bags, pamphlets, catalogues, and newspapers. It is easy to decide that these things are no longer necessary, although a more powerful factor behind their disposal is the fear of accumulation. Knowing this fear is the discarder’s first step.

  Things that cause problems

  Having taken a quick look at the results of the survey, I’d like to go back and look in detail at some of the examples respondents gave.

  As I’ve said already, the items that people most often have difficulty dealing with are books, magazines, and clothes. If we consider these, together with the many other examples that respondents gave, some overall patterns start to become clear:

  1. Things with high information content—books, magazines, documents (including work documents), pamphlets, and catalogues. People find it hard to get rid of these because they worry there’ll be a problem later—that they’ll become necessary at some stage. But the volume of such items just keeps increasing. What’s more, if you don’t have a good indexing system, you won’t be able to use them efficiently in any case, so a lot of effort has to go into storing them.