Three shirts, four pairs of trousers: meet Japan's 'hardcore' minimalists
Fumio Sasaki gave away the majority of his possessions and now lives with just the bare essentials
Fumio Sasaki’s one-room Tokyo apartment is so stark friends liken it to an interrogation room. He owns three shirts, four pairs of trousers, four pairs of socks and a meagre scattering of various other items.
Money isn’t the issue. The 36-year-old editor has made a conscious lifestyle choice, joining a growing number of Japanese deciding that less is more.
Influenced by the spare aesthetic of Japan’s traditional Zen Buddhism, minimalists buck the norm in a fervently consumerist society by dramatically paring back their possessions.
Sasaki, once a passionate collector of books, CDs and DVDs, became tired of keeping up with trends two years ago.
“I kept thinking about what I did not own, what was missing,” he says.
He spent the next year selling possessions or giving them to friends.
“Spending less time on cleaning or shopping means I have more time to spend with friends, go out, or travel on my days off. I have become a lot more active,” he says.
“It’s not that I had more things than the average person, but that didn’t mean that I valued or liked everything I owned,” says Katsuya Toyoda, an online publication editor who has only one table and one futon in his 22 sq metre apartment.
“I became a minimalist so I could let things I truly liked surface in my life.“
Sasaki and others believe there are thousands of hardcore minimalists, with possibly thousands more interested.
Some say minimalism is actually not foreign but a natural outgrowth of Zen Buddhism and its stripped-down world view.
“In the west, making a space complete means placing something there,” says Naoki Numahata, 41, a freelance writer.
“But with tea ceremonies, or Zen, things are left incomplete on purpose to let the person’s imagination make that space complete.”
Is this the way to go ? Do we have too many possessions ?
Yes one should try to reduce expenses and live a modest life. But the way these Japanese minimalists live is the other extreme.
There are folks very close where you are .... who eat air & wear sky ................ !!
Rizks is already a supporter.. He only has two Lungis and three T Shirts
acchbaccha: The reality is that we tend to hoard and accumulate possessions which are unneccessary..
Whilst i would not go to the extremes mentioned in the article, I do think that we need to look at our own possessions and realise that less can be better
No, it is definitely not. But every person has his own personal view of the world and how he should pass the days of his life here. Nature has provided us with bounties of beauty, food, fruits and raw material leading to production of items that make life enjoyable. But if one believes he should stay away from all these, he is just punishing himself, that's all.
This is exciting - will try it