Diary: Barry Yourgrau, Kyoichi Tsuzuki, Chronicler of mess

An anthropologist and archivist of populist “low” culture—a radically open-hearted and democratic but acutely discerning advocate, preservationist, and impresario of neglected subcultures

An architect’s quarters, from Tokyo Style. A caption notes that he has lived here since his university days

I first came to know Kyoichi Tsuzuki because of Marie Kondo.

My memoir about clutter, hoarding, and collecting, Mess, came out in 2015. A few months prior, The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up had appeared in English and proceeded to engulf the planet, so it seemed, with its will to decluttering and minimalism under the marketing halo of “Japanese style.” I was dubious. I’d become pro-clutter, or rather, de gustibus about clutter, even hoarding.

I started writing an article on the Kondo phenomenon, and a friend in Tokyo told me about Tokyo Style. I got the chunky, pocket-sized 1999 Chronicle Books American edition (titled Tokyo: A Certain Style), and I discovered a marvelous “Japanese style” antithetical to the KonMari cosmology of hyper-tidiness.

I wrote to Kyoichi right away from New York, and we immediately found a kinship. I was delighted to receive his genial but acute scoff at the Kondo strictures. “It’s just similar to all those diet methods,” he pooh-poohed by email. “Nobody I know pays any attention to her.” She was a successor of the long tradition of the “art of discarding” that started around the nineties, he opined. It was the mood that arose after the Japanese bubble economy’s crash. “Until then, we were educated to buy more and more.”

What he wanted to show and celebrate instead with his candid views of a hundred mainly untidy and prodigiously cluttered, tiny Tokyo habitations—“cockpits,” to use his term—was the actual style of living of so many of the megalopolis’ dwellers.