

As Kondo told The New York Times in 2016, she was bothered by the idea that there was little consideration that a man might step in to pick up the slack in such a situation, that a woman with A.D.D. It was there that she wrote her thesis, "How to Declutter Your Apartment," and happened upon a book called Women With Attention Deficit Disorder, written by Sari Solden, containing discussion over women who are too distracted to clean their homes. I suggest people develop their home as if it is their own shrine, which is a power spot to its residents."Īt 19, she enrolled at Tokyo Woman's Christian University as a sociology student with an emphasis on gender. You see, in Japan, the living spaces are quite small and the consumerism is quite large, so finding ways to keep your clutter organized is a priority for the citizens of the Asian island, thus making this niche in the self-help industry a lucrative business plan.Īround the same time, Kondo also began working as an attendant maiden at a Shinto shrine, a part-time role that saw her keeping order for the shrine elder, performing tasks ranging from sacred cleansing to performing the sacred Kagura dance, while also selling lucky charms at the kiosk. "I didn't practise Shintoism deeply but it has an influence on my tidying method," she told The Telegraph in 2016. "In Shintoism and in shrines, tidying and cleaning are regarded as mental cultivation and spiritual training. (The library doesn't admit anyone under 18.) "Quite a few books about decluttering are published in a year," Kondo, who as a girl would hide out in her classroom, tidying up the bookshelves, while her classmates were playing in P.E., told The Cut. When she turned 18, she celebrated her birthday with a trip to Japan's national library, lost among the large collection of tidying, decluttering and organizing books that she'd been barred from visiting until that very day. Her parents quickly tired of their daughter and banned her from tidying altogether, she said.

With that mindset, when she would return home from school, before she would even take her coat off, she would begin hunting through the house, trash bag in had, looking for things to throw away. By middle school, she was already "deep in my research" on tidying, she told the crowd, explaining that, at that time, tidying was mostly about throwing things away. When her parents would go out, she would take it upon herself to clean the house, leaving a perfectly bleached and sparkling kitchen for them to return home to, Kondo revealed during a chat at New York City's 92nd Street Y in early January.

"I actually executed all the tidying up." So began to take matters into her own hands, at first helping her mother. "Well, not so much helped, as I was the one who tidied," she told the outlet. Essentially, it's a way of orienting one's home to make it conducive to the greatest flow of positive energy, or qi.) "My mother was applying the method, but to my eye, the house was not tidy enough to have the feng shui effect," she told The Cut in 2015. (Feng shui, a Chinese concept, claims to use energy forces to harmonize individuals with their surrounding environment. As she tells it, she first developed her interest in neatness when she was only five years old, around the time the principles of feng shui began to become trendy in her home of Tokyo. Kondo's origin story as a master organizer is every bit as fantastical as the woman herself. (As for everything that doesn't spark joy? Why, you thank each item for its service and gently dispose of it, of course.) However, benign as she may seem, her dual rises to fame-now, thanks to the Netflix exposure, and in 2011, thanks to the release of her first book, The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up-haven't been without their hiccups, with the spirit of her mission habitually finding itself lost in translation. In her series, Kondo swoops in to one family home per episode like some sort of stuff-obsessed Mary Poppins, teaching her charges-and, by extension, the rest of us slobs watching along at home-how to bring order back into their lives, one uniquely-folded t-shirt at a time.

#Family island tidy up outside the house how to#
And it's that love of mess-or, more accurately, the love of figuring out how to rid one's life of said mess-that has propelled the Japan native from a mere organizational enthusiast to an international best-selling author and star of her own TV show, proselytizing the cluttered masses on her KonMari method and its concerted effort to have our living spaces be full of only things that "spark joy" in our lives. It's the first thing Netflix viewers hear Marie Kondo say in her streaming series, Tidying Up with Marie Kondo.
