Jeongja Han stands beside a truck nearly full with cabinets, coffee tables, chairs, and cardboard boxes of stuff packed between them. Several flights of stairs above her, a cleanout continues. “We maybe should’ve brought a second [truck],” she says, lamenting her misjudgment. “We reuse a lot more now.” The high price of purging personal belongings is one factor driving reuse in Japan. The other is globalized secondhand.
Han gestures at rows of clay planters in front of a building across the street. “We collect those and sell them ten for one hundred yen [a dollar],” she says. A nearby wooden bench, she tells me, can go to Africa. But the majority of the goods she collects are bound for the Philippines. “They have a deep love for Japanese products,” she explains.
Japan’s reputation for quality has long been a key selling point for goods manufactured there. But in a less-remarked-on and perhaps equally important development, goods used in Japan are also coveted. “So even if something is made in China, if it’s used in Japan, people elsewhere will assume it is good,” explains Rina Hamada of the Reuse Business Journal. And nowhere is that more the case than in Southeast Asia, where new Japanese goods have been coveted—and oftentimes unaffordable—for decades.
Later, Han drives down a long boulevard in Yamato City, roughly twenty miles southeast of Tokyo. An iPhone in her lap calls out directions as she gossips about work. Tomorrow she’ll clean out the home of a twenty-six-year-old woman who died by suicide. She was hired by the woman’s parents, and as she drives, she laments that more couldn’t have been done for the daughter. “There are many suicides lately,” she tells me. “We often find prescriptions for antidepressants during the cleanouts.”
She turns left into a parking lot across the street from a Red Lobster. High above is a lighted sign: MURAOKA. Below is a business that appears to occupy a former gas station. Exposed support beams from a roof hang over the space where I expect fuel pumps once stood, and a showroom occupies spaces that might have held a store and cashier station. A forklift drives across the space carrying a pallet that holds a small refrigerator, a high chair, and a Panasonic compact convection oven. It stops at an open forty-foot shipping container full of boxes, appliances, and furniture. In the morning, it’ll ship out to the Philippines.
The owner of this company is a wiry and youthful sixty-seven-year-old named Tetsuaki Muraoka. He walks over and warmly greets Han. She’s one of his best customers, a reliable source of home goods from cleanouts. They walk into the main showroom but pause at a rattan chair priced for 700 yen ($6.21) that Han sold here. Han laughs when I ask how much he paid her for it. “Almost nothing, close to free.”
Muraoka’s shop is filled mostly with old PCs and monitors, some dating back to the late 1980s. (“Factories want them for parts for their old equipment,” he explains.) He’d spent twenty years at this site doing PC repair, thinking the business would always have a future. “Then this came along,” he says, pulling a Samsung Galaxy smartphone in a pink case from his pocket. Over the last decade, demand for PCs—and PC repair—declined precipitously as users migrated to the mobile internet, so Muraoka found himself in search of a new line of business. “I knew somebody shipping used stuff to the Philippines,” he says and shrugs. “I learned from him.”
He traveled to the Philippines and visited wholesale markets where Japanese goods are sold or auctioned. “Buyers showed me the kinds of things they want,” he explains. “And they showed me how to pack stuff tightly into containers.” When he returned, he started buying used stuff from cleanouts, as well as from individuals simply looking to unload stuff. In recent months, he’s even gotten into the business of doing cleanouts himself. Then, once a month, he ships out three to four tons of goods via a broker able to clear a shipping container through the Philippines’ notoriously corrupt ports.
His story isn’t so unusual, especially to Han. When she’s not busy with cleanouts, she holds seminars on how to do cleanouts. “Older people think it’s an easy job to do and a good business,” she explains with a polite smile. In the future, however, it might not be so easy: the Association of Cleanout Professionals is working with the government to create an official certification that would control access to the profession.
As Han and Muraoka chat, the shipping container is sealed up. “The Filipino market won’t last forever,” she tells him. “As the wealth level goes up, they’ll want new things. Then what?” It’s happened before: Thailand was once Japan’s favored destination for its used stuff. But the market has faded with Thailand’s increasing wealth. “Cambodia, probably,” she surmises.
A few days earlier, Rina Hamada mulled the same problem over coffee. “Whenever there’s a gap between wealth and poverty, there will be a secondhand industry,” she says. In her view, Japan’s secondhand industry already knows that the long-term outlook for reuse, especially as an export industry, is poor. Japan is too wasteful; the rest of the world wants the chance to imitate it.
For now, Han isn’t worried. The fees she gets for cleanouts make for a very good business, and business is booming, even if the underlying reasons are sometimes best forgotten. “I don’t want to say I get used to it,” she says. “But I get used to it.”
Shigeru Kobayashi is sixty-four years old with a spiky salt-and-pepper pompadour and a barreling gait. He is dressed in shades of gray: light-gray sport coat (over a white shirt), off-white slacks, and nearly black sneakers. At the moment, he’s dashing through one of the secondhand-goods storage yards that Hamaya Corporation, the company he founded in 1991, operates in Higashimatsuyama, a small city thirty-five miles northwest of Tokyo.
A small office is on the left, and an empty flatbed truck is paused on a scale in front of it. Further on, forklifts zip in and out of acres of warehouses on three sides, carrying pallets of PCs, refrigerators, and boomboxes, as well as a hulking cardboard box overflowing with electric pianos. Kobayashi points to a well-built man in a sweaty T-shirt standing inside a shipping container filled with knitting machines. He’s holding a clipboard and looks as if he’s checking the inventory.
“He’s from Karachi,” says Yuki Ohkuma, a young executive translating for Kobayashi. “One of our regular customers.” She calls out to the man from Karachi and identifies me as a reporter.
He lights up. “Hamaya is excellent! I’ve been coming here eighteen years!” The container will ship out later in the day. But that’s just a start. Hamaya operates fifteen additional locations around Japan, and in 2017 all those locations combined to export around 2,700 shipping containers of secondhand Japanese stuff to forty countries around the world. The company’s website, brochures, and investor materials include photos of turbaned Afghani traders exchanging boomboxes imported from Hamaya, Cambodian families with furniture imported from Hamaya, and Madagascan children holding thermoses imported from Hamaya. The pics don’t exaggerate: Hamaya is by far the biggest exporter of used hard goods (textiles are the soft goods) in Asia, and possibly the world.
Kobayashi dashes into a cavernous warehouse filled with refrigerators and washing machines stacked three high in metal cages and wrapped in cellophane. “Those are for Vietnam,” he says. Then he points to several pallets of rice cookers, also wrapped in cellophane. “Vietnam, too.” A little farther into the warehouse we pause by a ten-foot-high stack of metal pallets that hold knitting machines. “Nigeria, but mostly they go to Pakistan now, because the market is strong.” Next to it is a cellophaned stack of vacuum cleaners. “Pakistan.” And below it, small desk fans. “Not sure. Yuki?”
She takes out her phone to look up the answer, but there’s no time. Kobayashi wants to show me more. An aisle is formed on the left by stacks of flat-screen computer monitors that remind me of crop rows on a breezeless day. “For China,” he says. “They remove the screens and use them in other devices.” Large, waist-high bags are in a corner below additional stacks of refrigerators. Kobayashi opens one and gestures for me to look: rusty hand tools including screwdrivers, hammers, and wrenches the size of toddlers. “Vietnam,” he announces, then sticks his hands into the bag and pulls out a screwdriver. “Quality is too good. These should be sold in Japan as vintage.”
Yuki nods and taps a note into her phone.
Kobayashi is ahead of us again, moving into a brighter warehouse filled with well-built sofas, tables, and chairs (no flat-pack Ikea here). “The furniture goes to the Philippines, Vietnam, Malaysia.” Toward the edge of the warehouse are cardboard boxes filled with dozens of guitars. “Acoustic guitars go to Mali. Electric to Nigeria.” He points at a pallet of car radios. “Nigeria.” Then he walks over to pallets of boomboxes. “These go to Mali, but the market is softening.” Stacks of stereo speakers are cellophaned and awaiting shipment. “Vietnam,” he says. “But they’re a little dusty and need to be cleaned off.” He taps a contact on his phone and begins a conversation.
“We used to get ten thousand yen for a pair of speakers,” Yuki adds. “Now it’s only six thousand.”
“What happened?”
“The price of new things from China has dropped,” she says. “Sometimes the new is cheaper than the used.” Nearby are laundry baskets and plastic milk cartons filled with fishing reels. Yuki follows my eyes. “In Malaysia we have a big buyer for fishing equipment. He’ll order a thousand reels and buy the rods elsewhere.”
“What about those?” I ask, nodding at pallets of chainsaws.
“Cambodia,” she says. “If they’re bigger, they go to Nigeria. They like big chainsaws in Nigeria, and we often argue with our customers about size.”
It goes on like this for half an hour. Hamaya is a museum of the stuff the Japanese don’t want, in outrageous volumes. It comes from a multitude of sources: homes, offices, manufacturers, construction sites, leasing companies, and any other corner of the Japanese economy that decides to downsize and/or upgrade. Yuki tells me that just this facility receives around 130 customers per day selling things—everything from municipalities collecting stuff from residences to small-scale traders who pick up items from residences—and reminds me that this isn’t even Hamaya’s biggest plant.
This was not the business that Shigeru Kobayashi planned to establish. In the 1980s, he profited greatly as a scrap-metal trader who brokered broken and unwanted goods to recycling companies that turned them into raw materials. In that business, a computer, a car, or any other object is viewed as a package of commodities. If the value of those commodities exceeds what a person can obtain for the car or the computer, it’s dismantled and sold off as metal. Kobayashi likely would have stayed with it. But in the 1980s the Japanese currency strengthened, and it became impossible for Kobayashi to make a profit selling Japanese metal overseas. So he looked for a new profession and noticed traders making good money by exporting used Japanese water pumps to Taiwan.
Because the Taiwan market was already saturated with used Japanese water pumps, he looked for a developing country whose market wasn’t. “I saw that Vietnam needs electrical appliances, agricultural machines, construction machines, industrial machines,” he says. Quickly, he narrowed his product mix to electrical appliances like refrigerators and washing machines. “In the early days, it was easy to make money because the price of new appliances was so high. Everyone wanted one, so they accepted used.”
“Was it easy to get the appliances?”
“Japanese are very wasteful, and they tend to change their appliances frequently, even if they work well. They want to upgrade.”
In the mid-2010s, Hamaya’s sales reached roughly $1 billion per year, and nobody is more surprised by this than Kobayashi, who expected the business to fail almost from its start. “But here we are in 2018, and we still survive,” he says and laughs. Then that boyish face transitions into a sad smile. “But it’s shrinking rapidly now. We know that for sure.”
“Why?”
“Ten years ago, new boomboxes sold for two hundred thousand or three hundred thousand yen [$200 to $300]. The new price was high. If the price of something brand-new is high, we can sell many used ones. But recently the Chinese appliances have become very cheap. You can get the Chinese items even cheaper than the used ones in Japan. People don’t have to take the used one.”
Like most entrepreneurs I’ve met, Kobayashi admires China’s entrepreneurial spirit and ability to corner markets. He’s also a pragmatist who believes that his used-goods business doesn’t stand a chance against the low-cost goods that have proliferated globally over the last forty years. “In 1991, when I started this business,” he says, “I saw the Chinese making new products by hand. I was in the factories. Five, seven years later they automated it. That’s why I expected in 2000 this business would end. We were wrong, but the drop-off has been very quick suddenly. No country is growing for us. Vietnam is less than ten percent what it was at its peak. Nigeria is twenty percent off its peak. Philippines, twenty percent.”
If Kobayashi is right—and few are in a better position to be so—the democratization of stuff that began with the industrial revolution is quickening. In the nineteenth century, household objects that once held value—like dishes, glassware, and solid-oak furniture—began to lose it. By the early twentieth century, middle-class consumers could afford multiple sets of dishes and changes of clothes. Individuals further down the income ladder were still excluded from the new and fashionable, but thanks to the excess thrown off by wealthier consumers, they could participate via secondhand.
That process accelerated when the Chinese Communist Party decided to rejoin the global economy in the 1970s. Within a few years, millions of farmers had migrated to work in new factory towns. That migration helped lower the cost of manufacturing pretty much everything, and made the regular consumption of new things possible for hundreds of millions of people. It’s not just the poor who benefit, though. In Japan, the price of durable goods—a category that includes appliances and consumer electronics—has declined by 43.1 percent since 2001. Consumer electronics account for much of this decline—and most of those electronics are made in China.
Shigeru Kobayashi examines a Chinese-made boombox bound for Mali at a Hamaya warehouse in Higashimatsuyama, Japan. Japanese-made boomboxes remain in Japan, where they fetch high prices on the vintage collectibles market.
Everybody wins, except the secondhand market.
“Our cycle is ten years—that’s how long it takes for something to appear in our stream,” Kobayashi tells me. “Ten years ago we could get ‘Made in Japan’ items that were of good quality. Now it’s all ‘Made in China,’ ‘Made in China,’ ‘Made in China,’ and the consumers aren’t as interested.”
Not as interested, but definitely still interested.
Data collected by Japan’s Reuse Business Journal shows that more than two dozen Japanese secondhand companies have opened at least sixty-three retail or distribution outlets across Southeast Asia in recent years, with the heaviest concentrations in Thailand and the Philippines. Total exports from just those companies total at least $1 billion per year, and hundreds of millions of individual bits of stuff.
Demand is strong, driven by affluence, not poverty. Between 2000 and 2015, roughly 70 percent of global economic growth originated in emerging-market economies and developing countries like Malaysia, Vietnam, and the Philippines, according to the International Monetary Fund. Those fast-growing economies also happen to be some of the world’s biggest markets for secondhand goods. Newly minted consumers, keen to shop, opt for what they can afford. And usually, that’s secondhand.
Across Southeast Asia small secondhand shops are often the dominant form of commerce, especially in rural towns. Those retailers favor Japanese goods and obtain them from importers that wholesale the goods. Much of this trade is conducted on the gray market, with imports mislabeled to evade customs duties or outright prohibitions. But even if the shipments were labeled correctly, the global trading system lacks a single classification for used “hard goods,” making them next to impossible to find in the databases and sources used to track new goods.
Regardless of the data, there’s no question that stuff flows out of Japan aided by long-standing geographic, commercial, and cultural links. For example, Japanese companies have been a fixture in Malaysia for decades, whether as industrial companies that take on contracts to build crucial infrastructure or as retailers in the country’s shopping malls. Likewise, Malaysian students have been traveling to Japan on exchange since the 1980s, often on tight student budgets. Many bring back stories (or post them to Facebook and Instagram) of surviving by shopping at Bookoff and other Japanese secondhand retailers. Collectively, these experiences enhance the already formidable reputation of Japanese goods in Southeast Asia, and lay the groundwork for what might sound absurd in the United State and Europe: a department store stocked only with used Japanese stuff.
Bookoff was late to Southeast Asia. Unlike many of its competitors, it’d perfected the art of pricing Japanese stuff to move in Japan and didn’t feel the need to export it. But as the tide of stuff grew, Bookoff’s executives started looking abroad. “Bookoff is very good at buying,” explains Toru Inoue, the managing director of Bookoff’s international expansion, during an interview in Yokohama. “It has an annual surplus of one hundred and thirty million items in Japan that don’t sell. So we need an exit strategy.” The company scouted Thailand and the Philippines but decided competition from other Japanese secondhand-goods importers was already too strong. Malaysia, often overlooked because of its higher incomes and strict licensing for retailers, beckoned. A big corporation like Bookoff was the perfect means to pry open Malaysia’s market.
Bookoff’s first Malaysian store opened in January 2017 in a cavernous, largely empty mall twenty traffic-choked miles southwest of downtown Kuala Lumpur. On the ground floor are a handful of restaurants and fruit stands catering to the handful of occupied offices in the adjoining towers. Amid the vacant gloom, there is a bright spot: a two-story bank of well-lit windows that extend the length of the third and fourth floor on one side of the mall. JALAN JALAN JAPAN reads the sign that stretches across the glass, butting up against Malaysian and Japanese flags. In Malay, the company name means “Take a stroll in Japan.”
“The mall is a ghost town,” Inoue admitted. “But it’s cheap, and in Malaysia you can promote via social media. Also, Malaysians love Japanese products.”
It’s a preposterous pitch, but it works. On weekends and on sale days, lines stretch out the door. Inoue tells me that the store has sold ten thousand individual products and grossed 2.5 million yen (around $250,000) in a single day. Those are aspirational numbers for established stores in crowded Malaysian shopping malls. But Bookoff expects them, and it is expanding on the basis of those lofty expectations. There are currently three Jalan Jalan stores in the Kuala Lumpur area, and by 2020 there will be two more. “In fact, we have enough surplus to supply ten stores,” Inoue says. “This is just the start.”
Inside the front doors, Jalan Jalan Japan looks like a slightly run-down Bookoff. Racks of clothes extend all the way to the back of the twenty-four-thousand-square-foot space. But unlike Bookoff’s Japanese stores, they aren’t segregated by color or brand; it’s just one long wash of undifferentiated (mostly) women’s apparel, priced to move. Garments average around 10 ringgit ($2.50) per piece. “If it doesn’t sell, I lower it to three to five ringgit [$0.75 to $1.25],” says Koji Onozawa, the dapper director of the first Jalan Jalan Japan store, as he leads me on a tour. On average, the store sells five hundred garments per day, or fifteen thousand per month. “That’s far more than an average Uniqlo store sells,” he adds.
To our right are cases of low-cost jewelry priced for the equivalent of a few dollars. Farther on are racks of action figures in plastic bags and Tamagotchi—palm-size electronic “pets” that were popular in the 1990s. “Now people buy them here, not Japan,” Onozawa says, shrugging.
Next to the toys are two racks of heavy hemp kimonos not appreciably different from the ones I saw during home cleanouts around Tokyo. “People buy them for home decoration,” Onozawa says with a bewildered shake of the head. “In Japan, nobody would do that. They don’t buy them at all.” Next to the kimonos are two racks of white, lacy wedding dresses.
“People sell their wedding dresses to Bookoff?” I ask.
Onozawa laughs. Prior to taking on the role of running Jalan Jalan Japan, he spent his career at Bookoff in Yokohama, starting as a clerk. “They bring all kinds of things,” he offers diplomatically.
I reach out to examine one of the dresses. It’s not silk, but at 40 ringgit—roughly $10 at the current exchange rate—it’s good enough for someone who can’t spend more. “And they sell?”
“If something doesn’t sell, I lower the price.”
We wander into a housewares section filled with plates, glasses, and lacquerware. “Plates sell very well,” Onozawa says. “A whole set for nine ringgit [$2.25].” I wander over to stacks of red and brown lacquer bowls. Some still have Bookoff price tags on them. One is marked 216 yen ($2); when it arrived in Malaysia, it was marked down to 3 ringgit ($0.75). “If you bought it new at the mall here, it would be one hundred ringgit [$25],” Onozawa reminds me. “It’s a good deal for Malaysians.”
Ultimately, that’s the point. Malaysia’s economy has been more successful than that of most of its Southeast Asian counterparts, but its per capita household income of $4,571 in 2016 is a long way from Japan’s $17,136 from the same year. As a result, many Malaysians buy secondhand if they have any hope of emulating the Japanese lifestyle that’s so admired across Southeast Asia.
Income inequality isn’t the only factor driving the market for Japanese secondhand in Malaysia. “Japanese families are shrinking and the homes are small,” Onozawa notes. “In Malaysia, the families are big and expanding and the homes are big.”
I stop beside racks of toy cars and trains. There are Hot Wheels and there is Thomas the Tank Engine. It’s the same mix as I saw at Bookoff stores in Yokohama and Tokyo, with an important difference: the condition is uniformly worse in Malaysia. In Yokohama, a used Thomas the Tank Engine train is mint, barely a scratch. In Malaysia, it looks used. And as I look around, I see that the same goes for clothing. There aren’t any noticeable tears, holes, or stains. But the makes aren’t quite as good, the fashions not nearly as up-to-date. Japan’s surplus is not Japan’s best. “The products in Japan are in much better condition,” I say to Onozawa.
He nods. “In Japan, we can sell the best things for more than we can get here.”
We walk past racks of stuffed animals piled four high and extending for forty feet. “They sell very well here,” Onozawa says. “We didn’t expect that.” It’s a colorful mix of bears, zebras, monkeys, dolls, and cartoon characters, sold off piece by piece by Japanese parents in Bookoff’s hundreds of outlets. Japan’s population statistics are clear that most of these stuffed toys were owned and enjoyed in households with only one child. In Malaysia, they’ll be passed between families in which women average two kids.
Not all Japan’s excess lands in the trash or travels to developing countries. Some stays at home, and some moves to countries just as rich as Japan. It’s a point that Shigeru Kobayashi makes as he leads me around a warehouse adjacent to the Hamaya office in Higashimatsuyama. A large Michael Jackson silk-screen painting is against a far wall, and a long shelf is packed with hundreds of rolled-up Japanese scroll paintings. Scattered around them are vintage Japanese bicycles. “Most of that is exported to the U.K.,” he says. “Maybe the bicycles stay in Japan.”
Yuki, in a pink cardigan despite the late-May heat, points over to a corner where perhaps a dozen thermoses and ten rice cookers are set aside. “Vintage ‘Made in Japan’ thermoses are very hot in the vintage markets now. So are rice cookers.”
“How do you sell them?”
“We have an e-commerce section for the higher-value items. Mostly they go through Yahoo! Auctions.”
Farther into the warehouse, we pause at carts piled with dozens of vintage “Made in Japan” boomboxes from the 1980s and 1990s. “These are also hot,” Yuki says. “We sell them at a pop-up shop in Shibuya,” she says, referring to the fashionable shopping district at the heart of Tokyo. “People love to come.”
I tell her that I’d seen vintage boomboxes in Tokyo-area vintage shops.
“People are nostalgic. Also, the old boomboxes are very well made.”
Hamaya’s e-commerce department is up the street. It occupies two floors of a long warehouse and employs more than a dozen full-time repair technicians, each of whom specializes in fixing a given range of items, from computers to electric guitars. It has small photo booths for making professional-looking auction listings and a shipping department. It feels like the future of reuse, a path forward to making and remaking. Take what needs to be fixed, fix it, and sell it to those who appreciate it. Kobayashi, however, dismisses my revelation. “Vintage and e-commerce is only a small percentage of our sales. A few percent.”
“What about Malaysia?” I ask. “Bookoff is expanding rapidly there. It seems like that’s an opportunity.”
“We buy Bookoff’s excess stock,” he says as we step into his BMW ActiveHybrid 3. “Then export it. They get so many items, Malaysia alone can’t take it.” He pauses. “And Malaysia has a very close relationship with China.”
It’s true. Low-cost Chinese electronics brands such as Haier, Oppo, and HiSense are nearly ubiquitous in Malaysia. So are Chinese-made clothes. “Are you worried that new Chinese products will eliminate the need for used in developing countries?”
“Yes.” He drives through Higashimastsuyama with the confidence of a man who owns a chunk of the city’s land. As he turns toward a favorite restaurant for lunch, he again tells me that the global market for secondhand Japanese stuff is in terminal decline. So he’s returning to his roots in the scrap-metal business. Over the last few years he’s slowly built up the capacity to recycle metals from the electrical appliances that he once exported abroad for reuse. It’s an expensive business to set up, requiring advanced technology to keep the process safe and clean. Japan’s strict environmental regulators won’t allow it to operate any other way. “Reusing things is always better for the environment,” he says. “But if nobody wants to reuse, what should we do?”
When I ask whether he thinks the Japanese are becoming more environmentally conscious, he laughs and brings up his daughter. “When she was a schoolgirl, her school sent home a questionnaire asking whether we’d prefer they use new or used textbooks. It’s my daughter, so I prefer new. But later I found out most of the parents chose used.” He laughs. “More and more, Japan has the mottainai mindset,” he concludes.
“Is that good for this company?”
He shakes his head. “Mottainai is not good for this company. If people practice mottainai, we don’t get things in good condition, and then we can’t sell to the secondhand market.”
“Wastefulness helps.”
“Yes.”
At night the narrow streets that crisscross Tokyo’s Koenji district are mostly dark but for the lights coming from the discreet, small restaurants that dot the narrow streets and lanes, and the dozens of small secondhand shops for which Koenji is famous. It’s an appropriate place for old and used things; unlike most of Tokyo, which was rebuilt into high-rises after the destruction of World War II, Koenji mostly maintains the low-rise feel of a traditional Japanese town.
But that vintage Japanese feel stops as soon as you step into a secondhand shop. The merchandise is uniformly imported used American apparel. Whistler, a store perched at a three-way intersection, specializes in finely crafted used leather dress shoes from high-end American brands like Allen Edmonds. Inside the store the smell of leather is pervasive. Vintage shoes dating back decades sell for hundreds of dollars per pair, sourced in the United States by an owner passionate about American culture. Perhaps he’s more passionate than the Americans.
Still, most shops in Koenji specialize in less expensive apparel like sweatshirts, hoodies, and T-shirts. Casual button-down shirts are also popular. And things that Americans might take for granted are extolled and marked up. A simple cotton sweatshirt made by sporting-goods brand Champion is tagged as 1980S KNIT and priced at sixty dollars. A heavily worn blue cotton T-shirt that wouldn’t be suitable for hanging at Goodwill sells for more than fifty dollars. As an American, I find it easy to be smug about stuff that people wouldn’t dare sell at a Saturday garage sale. But spend enough time around it in Koenji and something unique emerges: a Japanese identity assembled from bits and pieces of what can’t be bought at home.
Nowhere is that more obvious than at the shop shining brighter than any other in Koenji: daidai. From the street, it’s a blast of yellow light that illuminates the shops beside and across from it. Inside the double doors, the colors intensify into hellacious reds, pinks, oranges, and yellows that the manager, Mio Ojima, tells me are inspired by the technicolor wash of The Wizard of Oz.
But Oz is just a starting point. “The theme of the shop is an overturned toy box,” says Mio, a slight woman dressed in a yellow-and-green floral-print dress with a collar of knit strawberries (her Instagram profile identifies her as a “Retro&Strawberry lover”). “So when we leave and turn off the lights, we imagine it coming alive.”
“Like Toy Story.”
She nods.
Mio’s dress, I note, echoes the Raggedy Ann and Andy dolls that populate much of the store. Strawberries—knit, plastic, porcelain, life-size, much greater than life-size, that bright red strawberry ring on Mio’s right index finger—are everywhere. Daidai is a glorious art installation, but it’s one designed to sell women’s apparel. So hanging on the store’s racks are floral-print dresses and blouses that—if downsized—would work equally well for Raggedy Ann.
“I fly to L.A. to buy clothes,” Mio says with a wry smile. “And the L.A. people come here to buy them back.” She loves the hunt. The Rose Bowl Flea Market in Pasadena is a particular favorite, and she speaks knowledgeably of U.S. thrift brands such as Savers, Buffalo Exchange (“it’s just like Bookoff”), and Goodwill.
But all is not well. “Three or four years ago it was easier to find things,” she says. “Five, six years ago there was more good stuff.” Back then, in that almost immediate but receding past, daidai was a vintage shop selling flea market finds. Since then, daidai has been forced to remake itself. “These days we cut and sew clothes ourselves from things we buy in the U.S.” She pulls a strawberry-print dustcover off the sewing machine she keeps next to the cash register. “At Goodwill I buy bedsheets and curtains and make garments from them.” She walks to a rack and shows off a green summer dress with yellow sunflowers that looks as if it were airmailed from 1977. “One of the reasons that people love us so much is that we reuse things. We find beauty where others don’t.”
Still, Mio has no illusions about the ultimate fate of her creations. “Japanese throw away more clothes than Americans,” she says. “More fast fashion. They don’t donate. They just throw away.” She sighs. “Danshari.” It’s a three-character Japanese word that means, in order of the characters,1 severing a relationship with unnecessary things (dan), purging clutter that overwhelms the home (sha), and achieving a sense of peace by separating the self from things (ri). Cleaning your home of clutter, the idea goes, also cleanses your heart and mind—regardless of where the stuff ends up.
Mio Ojima and a blouse she designed and sewed from secondhand curtains purchased at a U.S. thrift store.
“Danshari is good in some ways,” Mio tells me. “But it has a dark side because people throw things away. Some customers come, and I ask, ‘Where are your clothes?’ They say, ‘We already danshari.’ ” Her eyes widen into a shocked can-you-believe-it expression. “You should have given it back to us!”
“Why do they do that?”
“Lack of storage space,” she says. “Japanese homes are small. And daidai’s clothes are so unique that it’s hard to keep them. Also, Japan is humid and tough on clothes.”
I take a long gaze around the shop. It’s as far from an Old Navy, an H&M, or a Forever 21 as a retail outlet could be. But in an affluent economy where more and newer are the perpetual promise, even art can be replaced.
“I’ve been to American garage sales, and my opinion is that Americans treat their things well,” Mio says. “Better than we do. They donate everything hoping it’s reused. Even their underwear.” She drapes the strawberry-print cover back over her sewing machine.
I glance around the store again. “The U.S. influences your work a lot,” I say.
She shakes her head in disagreement. “I have no influences from the U.S. It’s just where all the stuff is.”