The United States wasn’t the only country to boom after World War II. And it’s not the only place struggling to find a home for excess stuff left behind by an aging population. In Japan, the population isn’t just aging—it’s declining. Often, there isn’t just a dearth of relatives to claim and clean up what’s left behind. Often, there isn’t even somebody to hire someone to perform the cleanout. Meanwhile, homes packed with belongings and garbage—hoarder houses, in the American parlance—are discovered daily.
That’s a state of affairs very much at odds with the image projected by Marie Kondo and other representatives of Japan’s minimalist and decluttering movements. But it’s worth noting that part of the reason those movements have achieved popularity in Japan is that the Japanese want decluttered homes as much as Americans do. In that sense, Marie Kondo is preparing her readers outside Japan for a future that few consumers outside Japan care to anticipate.
Jeongja Han rushes up the stairs at the Ebisu subway stop in Tokyo and greets me with a polite smile and a bow. She has a round, youthful face framed by a short bob of hair, and she wears a tan apron with two large pockets filled with pens, markers, and tape. She is the director of the Tail Project, a six-year-old company based near Tokyo that specializes in cleaning out and disposing of the property accumulated by Japan’s shrinking population. At age fifty, she is ten years retired from her first career as a flight attendant. But there’s a hurried efficiency in her words and manner that echoes her former life.
I am joined by Toubi Cho, who translates Japanese language and, often, culture for me during my visits to Japan. Except in cases where I explicitly note that a Japanese person speaks English to me, Toubi is the intermediary.
Han’s business card lists three professional accreditations: a government license to sell secondhand goods; a certification from Japan’s National Association of Cleanout Professionals, an organization representing eight thousand of Japan’s cleanout companies; and, from the same organization, an accreditation as a shukatsu counselor.
The last is unique to Japan. During the country’s post–World War II reconstruction and economic boom, shukatsu described the process of finding a job. But in recent years, older Japanese have changed the first Japanese character in shukatsu so that it takes on a new, grimly ironic meaning: the process of preparing for the end.
The need is acute. In 2018, Japan celebrated 921,000 births—and mourned 1.369 million deaths. That was the lowest number of births since records were first kept in 1899, and the eighth consecutive year of population decline. Despite decades of government efforts to encourage couples to have more children, Japan’s population could shrink by one third over the next fifty years. As a result, the business of preparing for death is growing rapidly. Shukatsu “fairs,” where Japanese familiarize themselves with vendors for everything from grave clothes to estate planning, are common. Workbooks for putting one’s end-of-life affairs in order are widely available, and entrepreneurs like Han are also available to consult on what to do with your stuff after you’re gone—or to send it off on behalf of your paying relatives after you’ve departed.
Today Han is cleaning out the apartment of a woman whose husband was recently killed in an auto accident. The couple had no children who’d want to salvage heirlooms, memories, or simply help with the process. So this one, like most, is total. “Some families say, ‘Keep something,’ ” she says as she hails a taxi for us. “But most say, ‘Get rid of it.’ ”
It’s a process that wouldn’t have made sense sixty years ago. Japanese families were big, mostly rural, nearby, and willing to do the duties surrounding death. But that changed quickly. During Japan’s post–World War II boom years, young Japanese could look forward to benefits-rich, lifelong “regular employment” in big cities far from their rural roots and families. It was a prosperous arrangement that fueled unprecedented levels of consumption for a historically conservative country. By the 1960s, affluent Japanese joked that Japan’s mythological three “sacred treasures”—the sword, the mirror, and the jewel—had been supplanted by three new sacred treasures: the television, the washing machine, and the refrigerator.
Eventually, Japan was so rich and its homes so full of stuff that televisions and washing machines were no longer sacred or worthy of self-effacing jokes. The jokes became even less funny after Japan’s asset bubble burst in the early 1990s, sinking the economy into a recession and a decades-long stagnation. Since then, regular employment has progressively given way to low-paying, benefits-poor, irregular jobs, especially for younger Japanese. Economic insecurity has forced those young Japanese to put off marriage and children—or skip them altogether.
What’s left behind is one of the world’s most aged societies, millions of homes filled with property accumulated during Japan’s boom years, and a dearth of heirs. Japan is already home to eight million unoccupied homes, colloquially known as “ghost homes.” By 2040, the total amount of vacated residential real estate in Japan could equal the total area of Austria, according to a recent government study.
The situation isn’t unique to Japan. Across affluent developed East Asia, populations are aging just as fast, leaving behind a similar legacy of stuff. Western Europe, too, is facing similar demographic challenges. What will eventually happen to those 3.8 million unused fondue sets that one U.K. insurance company estimated were stashed away in British homes in 2003? Even assuming that most of them still work, it’s hard to believe there will be enough population growth (even via immigration) to create a secondhand market.
Fortunately, there are many clean and environmentally secure options for recycling or trashing unwanted objects. If a fondue pot doesn’t make its way to a metal scrapyard—and it probably won’t—it will be safely turned to ash in a technologically advanced, environmentally secure trash incinerator (especially in Japan, home to the world’s finest trash incinerators). It’s just a matter of delivering it to the flames and paying the disposal fees, which can be considerable. A twelve-gallon garbage bag filled with stuff will incur a fee of around fifty dollars at the incinerator; a futon, twice that. Some of the to-be-burned stuff might have resale value, but the trouble of sorting it is worth less than the value of having more time to charge for another cleanout.
At least, that’s what Jeongja Han thought. But recently she’s found that her clients have different ideas. “They want to know that somebody is using their things,” she says. “It makes them feel good.” As a businesswoman, she’s obliged to provide the service.
On the second floor of a Doutour coffee shop not far from Ebisu, I meet Rina Hamada, the editor of Japan’s Reuse Business Journal and Japan’s foremost expert on everything related to the country’s secondhand-goods industry.
It’s a big job.
In 2016, secondhand was a $16 billion industry in Japan. That’s roughly 4 percent of Japan’s overall retail market. But the actual impact on Japan is much greater. For example, according to Hamada’s data, Japan had twenty million used-clothing consumers in 2016—or roughly one sixth of the population. And even though used clothing sells for substantially less than new, it still accounted for 10.5 percent of the total retail apparel market. Among younger Japanese, secondhand is a taken-for-granted method of assembling an identity.
Hamada is physically tiny—generously five feet tall. On her left shoulder is a massive handbag into which she’s stashed several copies of the Reuse Business Journal for my use. It looks like the Wall Street Journal, and its contents are just as thorough and serious. There are articles on auction houses, online secondhand start-ups, and market prognostications; they are bordered by hundreds of advertisements for auctions, pricing data, and newly opened resale shops.
“Mottainai,” she says to me, invoking a difficult-to-translate Japanese word that expresses a sense of regret over waste, as well as a desire to conserve. “Before the 1960s, Japanese had this feeling,” she explains. “Even during the Edo period [1603–1868], a kimono would be reused.” But everything changed in the 1960s as the country entered its proud era of hypergrowth. “Japanese forgot who they were and just bought, bought, bought.”
In her view, that ethos faded over the last two decades, thanks to Japan’s slowing economic growth and changing demographics. Hamada also cites another factor: the March 2011 Tohoku earthquake and tsunami that caused the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear disaster. “After that, we remember who we are,” she explains. “People start to send their things to Tohoku because the people in Tohoku have nothing. People think, ‘Maybe we should reuse things.’ ”
The Japanese home-cleanout industry predated the earthquake, and—initially, at least—had little relationship to the secondhand industry. Instead, it was about getting rid of stuff quickly and efficiently. In that sense, it was the perfect offshoot of Japan’s go-go economy of the mid-twentieth century. But that changed in the early 2010s, too. Several cleanout companies in Hokkaido, the northern Japanese island renowned for its beauty and tourist economy, were caught dumping objects culled from cleanouts into natural areas (rather than paying the high disposal fees). The resulting press coverage produced an uproar—and a noticeable uptick in the public’s awareness of the cleanout industry’s services. The Association of Cleanout Professionals was formed in response to both. It’s worked hard to change the industry’s image, in part by offering in-depth training on how to profit from recycling and reuse markets.
These days, even Buddhist monks are getting into the business. As Hamada explains it, Japanese Shinto and Buddhism posit that spirits come to inhabit objects that have been used for years. “Families go to the monks and temples after the death for prayers,” Hamada says. “And then the monks go to the home and clean it out.” It’s such an attractive business model that some cleanout companies are working directly with the temples, offering to tie up the deceased’s spiritual and material needs in one simple package.
But despite Japan’s re-embrace of its traditional values, its more contemporary values retain their power. “Of course in Japan we have the mottainai spirit,” Hamada acknowledges. “But the living standard is high.” She raps her knuckles on the wooden table separating us. “This table is a good one, but if it’s dirty, Japanese won’t use it.”
“So who will?”
“Developing countries.”
Jeongja Han steps out of our taxi on a quiet, affluent street lined on one side by expensive apartments and the other by a park filled with cherry trees shedding their blossoms in a late-spring breeze.
I follow her into the lobby of an apartment building, up four flights of stairs, and into a two-room apartment in an advanced state of disassembly. Two Tail Project crew members are lifting a wardrobe, preparing to transport it down the stairs. A third crew member is kneeling on the floor, pulling up cables carefully secured to the floor years ago. To the right is the kitchenette, with several boxes filled with kitchen utensils and glass, two boxes jammed with half-drunk bottles of scotch and sake, and a stack of new boxes still flat and tied together. On the near wall is a poster of Bob Marley smoking a joint and another advertising the Rolling Stones’ Voodoo Lounge tour.
In the middle of the room a woman sits on a stool, right leg crossed over her left. She’s in her midfifties, wears skinny jeans and a short black coat, and her hair falls past her shoulders. She is the widow, and there are dark circles below her eyes. As a condition of my presence, she asked that I not use her name.
Han settles back into what she was doing before she fetched me from the subway station: packing the widow’s glassware in newsprint. “I pack things we can resell at the recycling markets,” she explains. “The crew packs the furniture.”
I lean in closer to look at two cloudy beer glasses that she’s wrapping carefully. “You can sell these?”
“It’s very difficult to sell in Japan. They prefer things that have only been used a year, including electronics. So we export, if they want it.” She works through the widow’s kitchen as if she’s collecting meal trays in a packed wide-body jet well into its descent for landing, dumping what must be dumped so that she can move on to the next item. “Our first choice is the Philippines. But recently Africans are buying more things. But not everything. Sometimes we leave things in front of the office, just so people will take it.”
“I want the things to go to people who will use them,” the widow pipes up. She’s fidgeting with a finger-size toy bicycle that she pulled from the disorder. It strikes me that the desire to see one’s things take on a second life is as much a matter of vanity as it is a concern for the planet or dismay at waste. It’s as if she’s saying that her stuff is worthy.
One of the crew walks over with a box of vinyl records, and the widow kneels down and flips through them. I see Elton John’s Don’t Shoot Me, I’m Only the Piano Player and The Best of Cream. In Japan, collectors of old vinyl are passionate, and the objects of their desire are highly sought. Old beer pints may not have much value, but these records surely do.
Han’s eyes flash in the direction of the records but she doesn’t say a thing.
The widow smiles. “My husband used to make tapes and bring them to bars for them to play. I remember neighbors yelling, ‘Turn it down!’ when he made them. We used to have parties here all the time.”
Han seals a box of glasses with tape and, without looking up, asks, “Can I take the records?”
“Take them.”
It’s a good score. Despite the emphasis on resale and reuse, most of her cleanout revenues come from the fees that the clients pay her, which range from $2,200 to $3,200 for a one-day job (multiday jobs scale up in price). But that revenue shrinks as she pays salaries and steep disposal fees that sometimes reach $1,000.
Han isn’t struggling, though. The Tail Project, like most Japanese cleanout companies, is busy. On average she does ten to twelve jobs per month. “I could do more,” she acknowledges. “But I like to do a good job on the ones I’ve accepted.” The day before, she cleaned out a home in Fukushima Prefecture, 180 miles to the north, and after this job she’s bound for Yokohama, 20 miles away, to meet another client. “When I started out, it wasn’t so easy to find business.” She opens a junk drawer. Unopened boxes of staples go in the resale carton, while pens get tossed into the nearby garbage bag. She picks up a small brown cylinder. It’s a personal seal that’s used like a signature in Japan. She turns to the widow. “Do you want this?”
Jeongja Han of Tail Project during a Tokyo-area cleanout.
During the course of the morning, the widow has swung from quietly contemplative to chatty, even humorous. But with that question, she settles into what appears to be her ground state: exhausted. “No, thank you,” she says with a shake of the head.
It lands in the trash bag.
Jeongja Han’s decluttering methods are practical, not spiritual. Everything has a place or—better yet—a market. It’s a way of thinking with relatively shallow roots in contemporary Japan. In the 1910s, Japan’s modernizing bureaucrats and industrialists embraced the “scientific management” theories of Frederick Winslow Taylor, an American mechanical engineer who became one of the world’s first management consultants.1 Taylorism, as his approach has come to be known, sought to measure and maximize the efficiency of the workplace and to reduce waste, whether of time or materials.
Toyota adapted the Taylorite idea to create its famous “lean production” system that’s become synonymous with Japan’s manufacturing prowess. But Taylorism isn’t just about factories. In a Taylor’d office, executives should be seated close to the door because they leave the office most often, and shared items should be placed in designated areas so time isn’t wasted looking for them.2
Some of Taylor’s Japanese acolytes decided that such advice is also applicable to the home, and in the late 1940s advice literature emerged that focused on reducing waste and improving the efficiency of home life. For example, in 1949, Omoto Moichiro published The Scientification of Home Life, a guide that sought to create the optimal division of labor in the home, with the housewife as manager. Taylorite advice such as “things should have a designated place in the home, and containers such as boxes or cans should be clearly labeled with a description of their contents,”3 would become decluttering gospel in the 2010s.
None of this advice was geared to minimalists and other people who sought to reduce their reliance on stuff. Instead, it was explicitly aimed at helping Japanese manage the growing volumes of stuff—and waste—that they acquired. It’s advice for people who like to shop, and few countries like to shop as much as Japan does (the size of their economy is in part the proof). Fashion turns over quickly; gadgets are adopted, upgraded, and tossed.
But even during Japan’s midcentury boom, there were doubters. In the 1970s, a nascent environmental movement began voicing concerns about Japanese materialism. Those environmental concerns soon merged with social concerns. In 1979, respondents to Japan’s annual national survey on lifestyles indicated for the first time that “affluence of the heart” and yutori—a word that roughly translates as “a search for time and space to enjoy life”—was more important to them than material affluence. As the roaring 1980s wore on, dissatisfaction with materialism deepened.
Eiko Maruko Siniawer, the foremost historian of Japanese waste and wastefulness, writes that seekers of yutori considered “not just whether a purchase was necessary or not but whether … it would bring pleasure and joy to their heart.”4 It’s not a very big leap from acquiring things that bring pleasure to the heart to Marie Kondo’s famous commandment that consumers should keep only those things that spark joy.
In late 2018, I called Professor Siniawer at her office at Williams College, in Massachusetts, and asked what had caused these multiple threads to converge and create the internationally popular Japanese decluttering movement in the late 2000s. Like Rina Hamada, she cited the influence of Japan’s long economic slide. But she was careful to note that despite the economic slide and growing environmental consciousness, Japanese decluttering remains a movement aimed at organizing stuff to achieve immediate, individual happiness. It’s about saving space, not money or the environment:
I think Marie Kondo has been popular in Japan for the same reasons she’s popular in the U.S. and other relatively affluent, mass-consumer societies. Which is that she is addressing the problem of an abundance or excess of stuff, which is a problem only if you’re of a certain class and can afford to have an abundance and excess of stuff. And she doesn’t actually address the consumption side of things. Some people say it’s implied that you should make do with less stuff. But she doesn’t actually address how and why stuff ends up in your home in the first place.
That last problem—one that’s metastasizing around aging, affluent Japan—is typically addressed only during the final declutter, when the consumer is no longer around to feel joy, and the person picking through the stuff might be a hired hand.
Jeongja Han doesn’t have time to mourn for what her clients give up. It’s a lesson she learned personally after her own mother died years earlier. Family members weren’t available to help, and Han recalls thinking that she would have liked to hire a stand-in or two. Instead, she did it herself. “It was so hard,” she recalls, showing a brief flash of vulnerability. “ ‘These are my mother’s things!’ ” she says, quoting her younger self. “But I have to do it.”
A few years later, Active-Techno, a manufacturer of sheet-metal painting equipment in part owned by Toyota, was reeling from the recession that followed the March 2011 Tohoku earthquake. The owner is a friend of Han’s, and he mentioned that he was in search of new business lines and had recently read an article about the cleanout industry. “He said, ‘Maybe I should do this business,’ ” Han recalls. “And I said, ‘No, no, no. I’ll do it.’ ” The Tail Project opened as a division of Active-Techno in 2012.
The barriers to entry are few. Han acquired a secondhand-goods dealer’s license. For jobs that require she also do some cleaning, she acquired safety training similar to what a mortician might receive. Thanks to the thousands of Japanese who die alone every week, that work accounts for around 30 percent of the business.
Han steps away from the kitchen, takes out her iPhone, and scrolls through photos of cleanouts. “See,” she says as she stops on a photo of a bed. The mattress is stained with a dark shadow in the shape of a body. “I don’t remove the body,” she says. “But I had to receive the training to clean what’s left.” She keeps scrolling, through images of hair still stuck to tatami mats, a pile of garbage upon which a body was found, and an entire decomposing body on a bed. She captures the images when she’s visiting a potential client to bid on a job. If she lands it, those images prepare her and the crew for what they’ll encounter.
Some cleanouts are “happy,” Han says—occasions where the family gathers to tell stories about the deceased. And then there are the sad ones. “The family comes just for the things of value. Leave everything else behind.” She pauses. “What about the United States?”
At this, the widow suddenly interjects that she’d been to Los Angeles with her husband, and while there she’d seen garage sales. “Americans hold them so they can have room to buy more stuff,” she tells me and looks away to smile to herself and, perhaps, to the memory of the husband with whom she once might have shared this observation. “I think it’s funny.”
It’s late afternoon and traffic is starting to choke Yokohama’s wide thoroughfares. Takaharu Kominato, a public relations officer at Bookoff Corporation, Japan’s second-biggest retailer of secondhand goods, is driving his BMW. Over the course of a quarter mile, we pass Tackleberry, a used-fishing-gear retailer with outlets across Japan, and Golf Effort, a used-golf-clubs retailer with outlets around the Tokyo and Yokohama areas. “Do they get much of their used stuff from … shukatsu?” As I say the word, it feels awkward, a pose.
Kominato smiles politely. “Much is from young people. They want to get rid of stuff and have room for new. Stores like these make it easy.” It’s a business that Bookoff pioneered in the 1990s, back when “secondhand” was synonymous with “down-market” in Japan. Today, Bookoff has more than seven hundred outlets across Japan buying and selling everything from books to camping equipment. The company’s stock is listed on the Nikkei—along with the offerings of more than a dozen secondhand competitors.
Kominato turns into a parking lot set between two massive warehouses identified with Bookoff’s playful orange logo. He gets out of the car and pats the wrinkles out of his dark suit and tieless gray shirt, wipes off the tight oval lenses of his black-rimmed glasses. He’s thin and bony, but there’s a warmth to him. In part, I think it’s because there’s a magical quality to the operations of secondhand businesses. Visiting their backstage areas is a bit like lifting the curtain on an audition. In this case, the performance is about how little our stuff matters once we’ve let it go.
We stride into a well-lit storage space that’s divided by hundreds of red and blue carts holding roughly forty beat-up banker’s boxes each. According to Kominato, the individual boxes contain at least twenty used books, DVDs, and CDs that their owners are selling to Bookoff Online, Bookoff’s rapidly expanding e-commerce unit. Rather than go through the trouble of taking them to a used bookshop, they take advantage of a process Bookoff has designed to simplify the process of unloading stuff: simply pack a box, print a shipping label, and call for a pickup. Kominato says that Bookoff receives around 3,000 boxes per day containing around 150,000 items, the vast majority of which are books. This is no cleanout; it’s a black hole that sucks in volumes the moment a book owner loosens her grip.
We walk up a set of stairs to the second floor. As we emerge on the landing, I step back to let a worker push past with a cart the size of a hot tub filled waist-high with hundreds of books. “Those are being recycled,” Kominato says. Bookoff is Japan’s largest used-book buyer and seller. But not every used book has a buyer and, as a result, Bookoff is likely Japan’s largest book recycler, too. According to Kominato, the company sends thirty-five thousand tons of books to paper recyclers every year. That’s three and a half times the weight of the Eiffel Tower, measured out in individual, unwanted volumes: romances, histories, dictionaries, classics, cookbooks.
It’s a heartbreaking number—especially if you’re an author. And it’s a merciless cull that happens all day long in the long, thin second floor of this Bookoff Online warehouse. Running down the middle of the space are carts piled with books. And on each side are perhaps thirty workstations where workers spend their hours opening customers’ boxes and evaluating what’s inside.
Kominato introduces me to Mrs. Naya, a cheerful graying woman who’s worked here for a decade. There’s not much to her workstation. To her left is a hot tub cage full of recycler-bound books and, behind it, six unopened cardboard boxes sent by customers. In front of her is a computer screen, a bar code reader, and a printer. To her right are blue and red bins roughly the size of backpacks. That’s where the books judged to be worth something will be placed.
The process is straightforward. Mrs. Naya slices open a box and grabs a book. If there’s a blemish—a turned corner, a torn page, a sun-bleached cover—the book is immediately dumped in the recycling bin. Kominato concedes that this is a tough standard. “It’s actually tougher than the quality standard used in our physical bookstores,” he says. “The problem is that online customers don’t get to inspect a used book before buying it. So it must be good as new. We don’t want any returns because of condition.”
Books that survive the physical evaluation are then slid beneath the bar code scanner and subjected to the judgment of Bookoff’s vast and constantly updating database and purchasing algorithms. Bookoff won’t reveal everything that goes into those, much less the people who control them. But Kominato says that the decision to buy a book and what to pay are based on a range of factors, including what’s sold in the past, what the company’s pricing staff expects to sell in the future (if a title is being made into a movie, the company might hold on to a book that’s not selling now), and what’s already jamming up the shelves.
Most don’t make it. According to Kominato, roughly 60 percent of the books that people send to Bookoff have no value. “Most are manga, which is disposable,” he says, referring to the uniquely Japanese comic books and graphic novels that are printed by the millions. “On the other hand, there are books that are super popular but we don’t want them taking too much space on the shelf.” He drops the comic book. “So they get recycled, too.”
Each scan of a book produces a beep and—on the screen—directions as to whether it should be sent to the recycling bin or one of the blue or red bins for purchase. While speaking to me, Mrs. Naya scans and distributes books to bins as if she’s dealing cards. Beep. “I always see all kinds of interesting things here.” Beep. “Especially in the recycling bins.” Beep. “But we’re not allowed to take anything, which breaks my heart.” Beep. “So that just encourages me to go out and buy new things.” Beep.
“I do the same,” Kominato says as he reaches into the recycling bin for a book that catches his eye. It’s a thirty-year-old hardback novel, and he pages through it carefully. The condition is perfect, and the edition is rare. If it were at a traditional used bookstore, it’d command a premium price. But Bookoff is about volume, and there’s a problem: not only does it lack a bar code, but it lacks an ISBN—the unique ten- or thirteen-digit identifying number assigned to individual books and editions. “So there’s no way to price it in Bookoff’s system,” Kominato says. With a grimace, he gently places it on the top of the books filling the recycling cage and steps away.
It’s a cold-blooded but necessary assessment. In the five minutes it might take to look up the price of one book without an ISBN, Mrs. Naya can scan and sort twenty books that have bar codes. If Bookoff received only a few books per day, that might not matter, while the spark of joy felt by Kominato might have. But Bookoff receives tens of thousands. If it’s going to remain in business as the place where people can easily get rid of their excess, guilt-free, there’s no time for joy.
Meanwhile, a cart full of blue and red bins like those at Mrs. Naya’s workstation gets shuttled to an elevator, where they’ll be sent upstairs for storage. Each contains one customer’s inventory and an invoice detailing the value. A copy of that invoice is emailed to the customer, who needs only to accept it to receive payment. Kominato says 80 percent do. The remaining 20 percent agree to pay the costs of shipping their books home. Few will find a better appraisal than the one Bookoff offers, especially when the shipping costs are added into the total. And that appraisal typically amounts to pennies per volume. “But it’s not really about the money for our customers,” he says. “Whether they accept the offer or not.”
For Bookoff, it’s about the money. Once a seller agrees to a price, the books are sent to one of two destinations. A small percentage move upstairs, where they’re packed for shipment to Bookoff stores around Japan in need of books to sell. Title, author, and subject don’t matter. What the stores want are books—books of any kind—and this Yokohama warehouse has them.
But most move next door to a four-story structure that Kominato claims is the largest used-goods warehouse in Japan—and possibly the world. “I keep meaning to call the Guinness Book,” he says. It contains five million items, mostly books, stored on shelves on dimly lit corridors just wide enough for an attendant with a cart and a handheld navigator to move between. This is no library. There’s no cataloging by title, author, or subject. Instead, Toyota designed a system that catalogs by shelf number only. If there’s room on a shelf, a book goes there. When somebody orders that book, the navigator sends the attendant to pull it for shipment, a nameless commodity bound for a buyer.
A small two-story home sits on the edge of a hillside on a winding road in Kamakura, a coastal tourist town roughly thirty-five miles south of Tokyo. It’s behind a stone fence and a metal gate, and metal sunshades protect the inside from bleaching light and prying eyes. There aren’t too many of the latter. During the late morning, at least, this neighborhood seems to belong to only a handful of elderly people on park benches. Jeongja Han will be here soon. She’s spent the last two days cleaning out this house. This morning, though, she’s away making a bid on another job.
It’s a common house in a common neighborhood. The neighborhood and yard are impeccably clean, void of garbage and waste. Three years ago, the house was occupied by a family of three: a woman, now ninety-five, her daughter, and her son-in-law. The son-in-law died three years ago. A few months later, Saya (she prefers that I use only her personal name), his daughter, moved her mother and grandmother to live with her family in Yokohama, twenty miles away. Then late last year, Saya’s mother died, too.
Saya meets me at the door wearing an apron over a checked shirt and jeans. She has a wide smile and thin glasses that give her a bookish look. She works as a part-time English teacher for children, and she’s happy to chat with me. “Come, come,” she says, beckoning me into the house. Despite the sunshades, the room is bright and yellow, and largely intact. There’s a dining table and chairs, a full china cabinet, and a television on a stand. On the table, however, is a familiar sight: dishes wrapped in newspaper, along with a can of Premium Boss iced coffee, available to keep someone—probably Saya—alert. There are also several beautiful pieces of red lacquerware. “They were made by my grandmother,” she tells me. “We will keep them.”
One of Han’s employees, a newly hired woman who is too shy to talk to a journalist, much less share her name, is also there, packing up dishes in the kitchen. Saya introduces her and leads me back into the sitting room. “This was my childhood home,” she tells me with a grimace and a glance up the stairs. “I know I have to put away everything. But I have a job, a husband, and two children. I can’t do it myself.”
She took bids from three cleanout companies and settled on the Tail Project because of Han’s personality, competitive pricing, and interest in seeking out reuse markets. “I didn’t want to throw away everything. Someone can still use these things.” She turns toward the table and several things that spark joy in her, still. “It’s very hard. Once you start, you can’t go back.”
She leads me up a stairway to the second floor, where the roof slants over the rooms. We stop first in her grandmother’s room. Rectangular tatami mats cover the floor. The walls are olive green, and the space is void of objects except for a small Shinto altar perched high in a corner against the ceiling. A length of twisted rope, known as a shimenawa, believed to ward off evil spirits, is hung in front of it. “Ms. Han will contact the local religious authorities to take the shrine,” Saya tells me. “They will burn it. If there are emotions connected to other things, they can be burnt, too.” According to the Association of Cleanout Professionals, the fee for burning an altar is similar to what would be paid for a Buddhist shrine (one-meter diameter) or a futon: around one hundred dollars.
Saya leads me into an adjoining walk-in closet that’s dominated on one side by a wall-length wooden chest of drawers. The rest of the room is filled with boxes and storage bins. “Japanese religion is very interesting. This chest has its own spirit,” she says, “because it’s been used a long time.” A piece of string ties down a drawer-length piece of rice paper that Saya lifts gently to reveal a heavy blue hemp garment and, below it, wool woven into a floral pattern. “These are kimonos made by my grandmother,” she says, lifting one and then another. “She sewed them.” Six kimonos are in this drawer, and at least as many are in each of the three drawers below it. She walks into the bedroom and reaches into a box that I didn’t notice earlier. It contains at least ten more.
“You’re keeping these, right?”
She kneels down and unties the rice paper covering two more kimonos. “A kimono. A mother wears it, a daughter wears it … not so easy to give it up.” One is brown with intricately woven swirling patterns; the other is covered in a green and orange tangle of art deco angles. “But some of these I can’t keep. I don’t have room. But maybe someone can reuse them.” She stands and wipes a tear. “It hurts my heart, but I cannot take everything. Already some are gone and sold.”
We walk from her grandmother’s room into her mother’s—a journey, it turns out, from an older Japan to a modern one. The room is filled with boxes piled high, a full-size bed on which more boxes are piled, a vanity, a dresser, and a chair. Framed family photos are spread on empty surfaces. Saya touches the sleeve of her black-and-white-checked shirt and says, “These clothes are Mother’s clothes, so I wear them.” She turns me toward a closet where plastic storage bins are stacked six high, opens one, and pulls out a hand-knit sweater. “Grandmother made these, too,” she says, and starts to weep again. “I cannot keep everything.”
As we descend the stairs, I tell her about a used-kimono market that runs on the weekends in the bustling Harajuku neighborhood. “The customers are mostly foreign tourists,” I say carefully, figuring that she’d want her grandmother’s work to go to someone who can appreciate it.
She gives me a hard, affirmative nod. “Good. Let the foreigners enjoy them. It’s good someone values them.” Then she turns away, eyes again wet with tears. I’m not sure what to say. But thankfully, the door swings open. Jeongja Han has arrived, ready to get to work.