“Tidying Up” is a new Netflix show by Marie Kondo, a professional organizing consultant. Her primary goal in this show is to help people who live in disorganized clutter. Kondo works to help these people by having her clients keep and organize only the objects in their homes that “spark joy”. She encourages people to donate or part ways with the things that do not spark this joy in them, but not before thanking the books and lamps and clothes for their service to a family that is seeking to declutter their homes.
In response to this show, Kondo has received a lot of backlash and taunting from those who do not understand the cultural significance behind her methods.
Margaret Dilloway, a writer for HuffPost, speaks of her own personal connection with the religion and culture that gave rise to Kondo’s method: its Shinto roots. According to Shintoism, kami, which are Shinto spirits, are present everywhere – nature, humans, and inanimate objects. According to Shinto animism, some inanimate objects could gain a soul after 100 years of service. This tradition of acknowledging and expressing gratitude towards normal, everyday objects, such as Dilloway’s childhood example of a spatula, would be normal and expected. Treasuring the things that you have and treating them as valuable, despite their monetary worth, is ingrained into the Shinto way of living, and, as Dilloway says, many Japanese people are culturally taught that “people and places and objects have kami.”
Dilloway’s article highlights what these demeaning and trivializing memes and tweets actually are: a cultural attack on Japanese people and the religious and cultural roots of Shintoism. Those who don’t understand the cultural meaning behind her method or that scoff at the idea of thanking inanimate objects and consider the idea “weird” suffer from ethnocentrism, the concept of evaluating other cultures based solely on the rules and standards of one’s own culture. Americans mainly gauge the personal value of an object by its monetary value, so we may struggle with the idea of seeing objects as more than just “things.”
To fight this, we must open our minds to accept that people see the world in different ways, and that everyone experiences the world differently. We must allow ourselves to recognize that just because someone sees the world differently, it does not mean that they are wrong, it simply means that they have had different experiences. Each of these experiences are valid, but we cannot simply base our view of the world on ours alone. If we do, we will always fall into the trap of ethnocentrism and the bigotry that we will cause along with it.
But don’t take my word for it, after all, I cannot speak for a culture that I am not a part of. Instead, check out Dilloway’s article: “What White, Western Audiences Don’t Understand About Marie Kondo’s ‘Tidying Up’” and watch the show for yourself.
