Marie Kondō, the tidying guru from Japan has become a Japanese culture icon, more so abroad than at home. What Murakami Haruki is to Japanese literature she is to self-help books. She is, I argue, one of the shrewdest (cultural) entrepreneurs of the last decades and that makes her an outstanding figure in the Japanese context.
How did she do it:
Identify a problem many people have: how to declutter when you are overwhelmed by too many material possessions. Check.
Provide a creative solution that can be summed up in one line: Ask yourself what you want to keep instead of asking yourself what you want to through out. Check.
Find the smallest viable audience with: American (aspiring) minimalists in California. Check.
The last one is particularly important because of the economic and cultural power accumulated in Silicon valley. If something becomes a trend there, it will likely spread all over the world. In a similar way, Murakami Haruki achieved his success in the West by strategically appealing to the literary scene of New York.1
While those three points are true for most successful self-help books, there are some additional factors at work here that make Kondō success even less surprising. A big factor is how she is makes clever use of existing stereotypes about Japan as a unique or even mythical place. Just an hour ago I attended an online lecture by Alisa Freedman. Ever since I took her Japanese literature class at the Sophia University summer session 8 years ago, I’m excited to hear whenever she is working on a new project. In her recent publication, Japan on American TV (2021), she dedicates the last chapter to makeover shows, focussing on the 2019 Netflix show Tidying up with Marie Kondō. In her talk, Freedman points out how remarkable it is that Kondō became a cultural icon in the US without speaking English (when she is on a show, she actually does speak English well and lives in LA). Kondō, so Freedman in her talk, presents herself as a Yamato Nadeshiko, an idealized Japanese woman, the kind of woman you would find as lead character in a Japanese TV drama.
Kondō makes use of the authority that comes with the preconceptions (or rather misconceptions) of an essentialist idea of “Japaneseness”. Her recent book, for example, is called Kurashi at Home, a title so ridiculous it almost sounds like a parody. To anyone who studies Japan, that title is cringe, but it is clever marketing nonetheless. There are more books and articles that I can count, which try to sell a basic Japanese word like Kurashi, which just means day-to-day life, and present it as some sort of uniquely Japanese concept. But coming from the Japanese Kondō, who worked as a Shintō shrine maiden as a student (a detail that often comes up in portrayals of her), sells this title with an air of authority and it works. I don’t blame her for making many from the stereotypes about Japan prevalent in the US that she didn’t create.
I wrote Kondō is an outstanding figure in the cultural economy of Japan and that is mainly because Japan still remains hesitant to export its culture. Despite the global appeal of Japanese popular culture, Japan remains focussed on national sales instead of trying to appeal to an international market. Anime, manga etc. are often globally successful despite Japan being hesitant to export its cultural products. Every distributor of Japanese popular culture can tell a tale on the difficulty of licensing and distributing Japanese media. This leads to some pretty ugly displays of jealousy towards South Korea, a country that has massive global success by aggressively marketing its popular culture abroad. A particularly embarrassing example is this rant from Japanese TV icon Matsuko Deluxe.
Matsuko’s reacts to the critique of a Korean idol that J-Pop does not have the global success K-Pop has and should change that. Matsuko argues that this is because J-Pop does not even try to appeal (行こうとしていない) to American audiences (by imitating American trends, which is what Matsuko accuses K-Pop of doing アメリカのパクリにしか見えない). The rant goes on and is summed up with the line: “Is this all that matters to you, appealing to America?” (アメリカで評価される事が全てなの、あなた達は?). There surely is a point to be made here,2 but it is covered by a blatant display of jealousy (and the typical: get out here if you don’t like the way we do thing here).
Marie Kondō is the extreme counterexample to Matsuko who just puts into words what many people in Japan think. “Why should we try to appeal to American audiences? Isn’t the national market enough?” But Kondō knows where she can have the biggest impact (and make the most money). She is known as a tidying guru, but more than that she is a shrewd entrepreneur. That is what fascinates me about her more than her actual product, which is selling the fantasy of living an organized life. Her tremendous success is not a coincidence. Sometimes I wonder what had become of the Cool Japan initiative if it had been executed by a marketing genius like Marie Kondō.
You can read more on this topic in Who We’re Reading When We’re Reading Murakami by David Karashima.
Adam Torel of Third Window Films offers a critical explanation of the critical implications of Matsuko’s rant: “I loved Korean cinema as I felt they were making their films for the Korean market and the tastes of their audience, but as Korean cinema became more and more popular in the West and Japan they started to make too many films for other markets. As their popularity grew, their budgets grew and so did their asking prices, but it wasn't the high costs that put me off as much (though of course that was an issue), it was the fact they started making their films more for the international market instead of their own.” https://screenanarchy.com/2010/12/video-home-invasion-third-window-films-korean-collection.html