Japan: perception vs reality
Most single folks, female or male, live in rooms like….
Embiggen to the full-sized photo, 500 x 704 px.
…Rooms like in the bottom photo are the major reason why urban Japanese avoid asking you to their homes. I have been to a few 20-something girls with rooms like the one on top and I never know where to sit…which can be an advantage since the two of you end up having to sit close together on a single bed.
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March 8th, 2010 at 7:36 pm
It’s not the “single room” the problem, it’s the pack-rat attitude…
If you come to me place and manage to avoid ending up as collateral damage in the never ending armageddon war between my cats. You’d see a 3 1/2 story building, with around 10 rooms per level… nearly all packed… half junk never disposed of, half stuff used everyday but pushed aside by the unmoveable junk. And we also got a 2 story and a half house… with a little more than 60 tatami of surface per level… that is mainly used as a gigantic closet… The worse being… that instead of trying to cure the problem… I make it worse with my own ecosystem and lazyness… I have around 4 tatamis of empty amazon/yamato/else empty shipping box that clog a corridor… last time I got rid of them, they grew back to considerable size in less than 2 month… I really need to find me the phone number of Benri something…
(usual lazy trap, we never know if were going to stay the same place for how long, so, things get temporary… 3 years in the previous appartement, 4 years in the actual building… thats’ quite long for makeshift dwelling…)
March 8th, 2010 at 8:08 pm
As George Carlin says: “That’s all your house is – a pile of stuff with a cover on it.”
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MvgN5gCuLac
March 29th, 2010 at 9:51 am
The perception is just a prequel to gomiyashiki, and the reality is the actual gomiyashiki. And if you’re rich, you can be like the Collyer Bros. or Howard Hughes….I can see the Obsessive Compulsive in Japan become fanatics in surpassing their American counterparts if they really try…
March 29th, 2010 at 10:17 am
Japan’s Obsessive Compulsives have long surpassed their American counterparts in terms of junk-filled houses aka “gomiyashiki” in that the worst-quality-in-the-Developed-World housing of Japan starts out as junk before Japanese move in (and it doesn’t help that the Japanese haven’t invented the “closet” yet).
March 30th, 2010 at 1:42 am
LOL
You can’t have closets when there’s no central heating to begin with….not that those two are connected, but can’t have heating when you’d ruin the kotatsu industry….it’s a large Cthulhuian cycled way of life there….ie a nightmare….