![]() Superstition holds that tools and other man-made objects can develop souls of their own if kept for too long, and, if not properly disposed of, they can stomp off on an angry rampage. Some of the most amusing examples of kami are the tsukumo-gami, a kind of haunted houseware. The director Hayao Miyazaki paid homage to the idea when the young protagonists of “My Neighbor Totoro” joyfully bound from room to room, exploring a long-shuttered home in the countryside, and then spot sentient soot balls scurrying off into dark corners. ![]() Sekien’s illustration of a yokai goblin whom he dubbed the Ceiling Licker looks like something out of a Disney movie, an anthropomorphized dust mop stretching toward the ceiling with an anteater-like tongue. (In old woodblock prints, households can be seen celebrating a successful cleaning session by tossing one another in the air victoriously.) The annual ritual was given a mascot of sorts, in 1784, by Toriyama Sekien, an ukiyo-e print master and tutor of greats such as Toyoharu Utagawa. This was seen as a chore, but not a particularly dreary one-it was a form of release, even play. During the susu-harai, it was swept away with special dusters and brooms. In a time when wood-stoked fires heated home, hearth, and bath, and candles illuminated rooms after dark, a great deal of dust and grime accumulated on walls and ceilings in the course of a year. By the seventeenth century, large swaths of the population were devoting much of the month of December to the cleaning process, which was popularly framed as an offering to the toshigami, the god of the new year.īefore it was known as ohsoji, the annual cleaning event was called susu-harai: the sweeping of the soot. This spiritually inflected form of housecleaning was widely adopted by Buddhist temples and Shinto shrines starting in the thirteenth century, then slowly spread to the citizenry. Even in this early incarnation, a great cleaning was seen as more than spiffing up one’s environs it was a ritual intended to sweep away a year’s worth of ill fortune and evil spirits in anticipation of a fresh new start. called the Engishiki, a sort of government handbook that logged, among many other laws and bureaucratic duties, instructions for the annual cleaning of the Imperial Palace of Kyoto. The urtext of the art of tidying can be traced back more than a millenium, to a book completed in 927 A.D. But her work is just the most recent manifestation of a long tradition of cleanliness, one that reaches a zenith in the ohsoji, the “great cleaning” that is carried out at the end of December in anticipation of the New Year. Commodore Matthew Perry, whose gunboat diplomacy opened Japan to the West in 1854, marvelled at the organization of the streets in the port city of Shimoda and “the cleanliness and healthfulness of the place.” The British diplomat Sir Rutherford Alcock noted “a great love of order and cleanliness” in his “Narrative of a Three Years Residence in Japan,” from 1863, and, a few years later, the American educator William Elliot Griffis commended “the habit of daily bathing and other methods of cleanliness.” If Kondo’s book sales are an indication, Westerners haven’t lost their fascination with this aspect of Japanese culture. Japan’s fastidiousness in matters of cleaning struck outside observers from the earliest moments of contact. ![]() He wrote them in 1970, more than a decade before Kondo was born. ![]() But they are the words of Shunryu Suzuki, the founder of the San Francisco Zen Center and a nourisher of the American counterculture. ![]() but if they are not necessary, there is no need to keep them.” You would be forgiven for mistaking this advice as a passage from one of Marie Kondo’s best-selling books. “If it is necessary, you may bring everything back in again . . . “You must take everything out of your room and clean it thoroughly,” a guru writes. ![]()
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