Fumio Sasaki's one-room apartment in Tokyo is so cold that his friends call it like an interrogation room. He has three shirts, four pairs of pants, four pairs of socks and a small amount of other items.
Money is not a problem. The 36-year-old editor has consciously chosen such a lifestyle, joining a growing number of Japanese who feel the less the better.
Influenced by the aesthetics of traditional Japanese Zen Buddhism, these minimalist lifestyles fought against the highly consumptive consumer norms by dramatically reducing the items they possessed.
Sasaki, who had been a collector of books, CDs and DVDs, began to tire following the trend two years ago.
"I keep thinking about what I do not have, what is missing," he said. He spent a year or so selling his things or giving them to his friends. "Less time for cleaning or shopping makes me have more time to be with friends, to go out, or take a walk on a day off, and I become much more active," he said.
Others welcome the opportunity to have only the things they really like, the philosophy that Mari Kondo also implements, the consultant with the popular "Konari" organizing method in the United States.
"I do not have more stuff than the average person, but that does not mean I appreciate or like all the things I have," says Katsuya Toyoda, editor of online publications with only one table and one mattress in a 22-square-meter apartment.
"I am a minimalist follower so I can let the things I really love to come into my life."
Inspiration for a minimalist lifestyle in Japan came from the US, with early adherents including the late Steve Jobs. The minimalist definition is diverse, since the goal is not only to tidy up but also to reevaluate what it means to get something else, in the case of Sasaki, time to travel.
It is unclear how many of these lifestyles are, but Sasaki and others are convinced there are thousands of hard-line minimalists, and possibly thousands more are interested in it. Some say minimalist lifestyles are not unfamiliar but derived from Zen Buddhism and a simple world view.
"In the West, making a complete room means putting something there," says Naoki Numahata, 41, a freelance writer. "But with a tea ceremony, or Zen, things are deliberately left incomplete to let someone's imagination make the room complete."
The adherents of minimalist lifestyles also argue that having fewer items is a practical thing in Japan, which is routinely rocked by an earthquake. In 2011, an earthquake measuring 9.0 on the Richter Scale and tsunami killed nearly 20,000 people and caused many people to reevaluate their belongings, Sasaki said.
"Thirty to 50 percent of injuries to an earthquake are the result of falling objects," he said, pointing around his apartment. and the very expensive thing that became the center of public attention, especially in japan
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