Shuno is the Japanese word for storage, and it is an industry. Bookshops have whole sections on it. Television programmes visit cramped flats and rebuild their cupboards. Shops sell boxes that fit exactly inside other boxes that fit exactly inside the standard Japanese closet. If you have ever seen a photograph of a Japanese drawer with every sock standing on end, you have seen shuno.

It is easy to take the wrong lesson from it. The lesson is not that the Japanese have found a way to store more. It is that storage only works after there is less to store.

The trap

Everyone who has tried to get organised knows the trap: buy containers, fill them, feel better for a week, and find a month later that the containers are full and the surfaces are covered again. Storage without reduction does not reduce anything. It hides the problem and makes room for more of it.

Japanese homes fell into this trap in the boom years, when flats were small and shopping was new, and the shuno industry grew up to deal with it. Then, in the 2000s, Hideko Yamashita wrote about danshari, refusing, releasing and detaching, and the order of operations changed. Danshari first. Then shuno.

The order

Refuse first: stop the things coming in. Release second: let go of what is here and not used. Only then, with what remains, decide where it lives. In that order, storage is a short job, because there is not much to store, and it holds, because nothing new is arriving to fill the gaps.

Done the other way round, with storage first, the containers set the limit, and the limit is always reached.

What Japanese storage does well

Once the reduction is done, the Japanese habits are worth borrowing.

Everything has one place. Not a general area; a place. The scissors live in this drawer, on this side. The place is chosen by where the thing is used, not where there happens to be room.

Vertical, not stacked. Things are stood on end so that every one can be seen and taken without moving the others. This is the sock drawer, and it is also the bookshelf, the paper tray, the frying pans on their edges.

Hidden, not displayed. The traditional closet, the oshiire, is deep and has doors. Japanese rooms look empty because most of what the household owns is behind a door, out of sight, and taken out when needed. Open shelving is the opposite philosophy and it is why open-shelved rooms look busy.

Measured. Before a container is bought, the space is measured and the container is bought to fit. A box that is two centimetres too wide for the shelf is a box that lives on the floor.

The weekly reset

The last habit is the one that keeps the rest working. Once a week, usually on the day the rubbish goes out, every surface is cleared and everything on it goes back to its place or goes. It takes ten minutes in a reduced home and an afternoon in an unreduced one, which is the clearest sign of which kind of home it is.

Starting

Not with the shops. With one drawer, emptied onto the bed, reduced to what is used, and put back standing on end. The drawer will look like the photograph. More importantly, it will still look like it in a month, because there was nothing left in it to spill.

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Continue Reading

This article is part of a series exploring Japanese philosophy and intentional living:

• The Oshiire: Why Japanese Rooms Can Be Cleared in Minutes
• Danshari: A Clear-Eyed Guide to the Japanese Three-Step Practice Behind Marie Kondo
• One Drawer, Fully Used: A Kanso Practice for the Things You Keep
• Koromogae: The Japanese Seasonal Wardrobe Change