Three shirts, four pairs of trousers: meet Japan's 'hard-core' minimalists

Reuters in The Guardian

Fumio Sasaki gave away the majority of his possessions and now lives with just the bare essentials.

 

The bathroom cupboard of minimalist Fumio Sasaki. Photograph: Thomas Peter/Reuters




Fumio Sasaki’s one-room Tokyo apartment is so stark friends liken it to an interrogation room. He owns three shirts, four pairs of trousers, four pairs of socks and a meagre scattering of various other items.

Money isn’t the issue. The 36-year-old editor has made a conscious lifestyle choice, joining a growing number of Japanese deciding that less is more.

Influenced by the spare aesthetic of Japan’s traditional Zen Buddhism, minimalists buck the norm in a fervently consumerist society by dramatically paring back their possessions.

Sasaki, once a passionate collector of books, CDs and DVDs, became tired of keeping up with trends two years ago.

“I kept thinking about what I did not own, what was missing,” he says.

He spent the next year selling possessions or giving them to friends.

“Spending less time on cleaning or shopping means I have more time to spend with friends, go out, or travel on my days off. I have become a lot more active,” he says.

Minimalist Naoki Numahata talks to his two-and-a-half-year-old daughter, Ei, in their living-room in Tokyo. Photograph: Thomas Peter/Reuters

Others welcome the chance to own only things they truly like – a philosophy also applied by Mari Kondo, a consultant whose “KonMari” organisational methods have swept the United States.

“It’s not that I had more things than the average person, but that didn’t mean that I valued or liked everything I owned,” says Katsuya Toyoda, an online publication editor who has only one table and one futon in his 22 sqm apartment.

“I became a minimalist so I could let things I truly liked surface in my life.“

Inspiration for Japan’s minimalists came from the US, where early adherents included Steve Jobs.

Definitions vary, because the goal is not just decluttering but re-evaluating what posessions mean, to gain something else – in Sasaki’s case, time to travel.

 Utensils lie in a kitchen drawer in the home of minimalist Saeko Kushibiki in Fujisawa, south of Tokyo. Photograph: Thomas Peter/Reuters

Sasaki and others believe there are thousands of hard-core minimalists, with possibly thousands more interested.

Some say minimalism is actually not foreign but a natural outgrowth of Zen Buddhism and its stripped-down world view.

“In the west, making a space complete means placing something there,” says Naoki Numahata, 41, a freelance writer.

“But with tea ceremonies, or Zen, things are left incomplete on purpose to let the person’s imagination make that space complete.”

Minimalists also argue that having fewer possessions is eminently practical in Japan, which is regularly shaken by earthquakes.

 Minimalist Saeko Kushibiki stores away her futon mattress in her apartment in Fujisawa. Photograph: Thomas Peter/Reuters

In 2011, a 9.0 magnitude quake and tsunami killed nearly 20,000 people and led to many re-evaluating possessions, Sasaki said.

“Thirty to 50% of earthquake injuries occur through falling objects,” he said, gesturing around his empty apartment.

“But in this room, you don’t have that concern.”

The progressive argument for leaving the EU is not being heard

Larry Elliot in The Guardian


It is now nearly nine years since the problems of three hedge funds heralded the arrival of global financial and economic chaos. Britain’s EU referendum this week is the latest manifestation of that crisis.

That is not the way the debate in the UK has been framed. For one side, the decision is all about taking back control, especially over immigration. For the other, it is about the potential consequences for the economy in general and individuals in particular.

This narrow focus reflects the fact that the referendum has been a contest between two wings of the Conservative party, neither of which has any great love for the EU. Few of the bigger themes have been drawn out by this blue-on-blue affair.

There is, however, an obvious reason why immigration has proved an effective weapon for the leave side. Life is tougher for millions of Britons on modest incomes than it was a decade ago.

Contrast the state of the UK when the accession to the EU of Poland and other former Soviet bloc countries led to strong net migration in 2004. At that time, average earnings were growing by 4-5% a year, the Labour government was investing heavily in schools and hospitals and the eurozone appeared to be over its initial problems.

A second big increase in net migration has occurred since the great recession of 2008 and 2009, but the economic and political environment has changed. Real earnings have been squeezed, the expansion of the public sector has been halted and the eurozone has been in a state of permanent crisis.

The British economy has become increasingly dominated by the fortunes of the financial sector, with the bankers responsible for the worst slump since the 1930s escaping pretty much scot free. London and the rest of the UK have become two countries, which explains why hostility to the EU increases with distance from the capital.

Nor is this phenomenon confined to the UK. It has become commonplace to bracket growing support for leave in poorer parts of Britain with Donald Trump’s emergence as the Republican candidate in this year’s US presidential election, but populist and anti EU sentiment is on the rise across Europe.

The US research company Pew conducted a survey earlier this year to test sentiment towards the EU. In Britain, 48% said they had an unfavourable view of the EU and 44% said they had a favourable view. In France, the anti-EU sentiment was much more pronounced at 61% and 38% in favour, while in Germany there had been an eight-point drop in support for the EU in the past year, leaving those in favour only narrowly ahead at 50% against 48% .
The impact of the great recession in Europe has been exacerbated by monetary union, a policy blunder of catastrophic proportions. The euro has been responsible for the slow growth and high unemployment that has angered the French, and the high debts and that have alarmed the Germans. Stir in the unexpectedly large flows of refugees from the Middle East and North Africa, and you have a toxic mix.

Last summer, when the Greek debt crisis was at its most intense, Europe’s leaders came up with a plan. The “five presidents’ report” laid down a step-by-step approach to a United States of Europe, with banking union followed by a common budget and finally political union. Getting even the least controversial part of this agenda – banking union – past sceptical European electorates has proved impossible. Yet the alternative approach, breaking up the euro and giving countries more control over their own economic destiny, is seen as not just potentially dangerous but also a betrayal of the idea of ever-closer union.

When Britain first sought to join the Common Market in the 1960s it did so for pragmatic, not ideological reasons. There was no great desire to pool sovereignty in pursuit of wider political goals, merely a feeling that Germany, France and the Netherlands were growing faster and had more modern economies. After Britain finally became a member of the European club in 1973, there was admiration for Germany’s control of inflation. In the 1980s, the UK left wing changed sides because it saw Europe as a bulwark against Margaret Thatcher. European solidarity was advocated in the 1990s as the best defence against the forces of global capitalism unleashed by the end of the cold war, which is why many on the left wanted Britain to join the single currency.

Times have changed. Even with a welcome pickup in activity in the past year, Europe’s growth performance since the launch of the euro has been pitiful. Talk of protecting workers’ rights is meaningless unless you have a job, and millions of Europe’s citizens do not. The structural adjustment programmes forced on those countries that have required financial bailouts have involved savage attacks on workers’ rights, including collective bargaining. The EU has not taken the fight to multinational capital. Rather, Brussels has become a honeypot for corporate lobbyists demanding deregulation and the transatlantic trade and investment partnership (TTIP).

One of the great ironies of the UK’s referendum debate is that Europe, with its austerity programmes and its drift towards neoliberalism, has been moving in a direction that rightwing Conservatives would tend to support. Just as in the UK in the 1980s, unemployment has weakened the power of organised labour and the trend is for more competition and for free markets.

There is a modern and progressive argument for leaving the EU, but it has struggled to be heard during this dispiriting campaign. It is that Europe is unable to deliver because it is wedded to backward-looking ideas. Or to adapt the words that David Cameron used on his first outing as Conservative leader to taunt Tony Blair, it was the future once.

There is a leftwing case for staying in too. This accepts that the EU is far from perfect and must change, but says the answer is to work for a kinder, gentler, greener and more equal Europe from within. Exit, by contrast, would be the catalyst for a breakup of the EU that would give rise to aggressive nationalism and leave Britain at the mercy of rightwing Conservatives who would have the wherewithal to cause immense damage before there was a chance to get rid of them at an election.

Yet, it is stretching a point to argue that the treatment of Greece has much to do with the theories of Maynard Keynes or that TTIP would sit comfortably with Fritz Schumacher’s “small is beautiful” vision. Europe has been going in an entirely different direction, which is why aggressive nationalism will continue to be a problem even if Britain votes to remain. That’s because Europe’s economic model isn’t working and hasn’t been working for a long time. Bad economics leads to bad politics. Always has, always will.

Brussels isn’t the bad guy. Tory cuts cause Britain’s troubles

Phillip Inman in The Guardian


The current and previous governments are to blame for our economic woes, not Brussels. Photograph: Frederick Florin/AFP/Getty Images

Don’t blame the EU for your troubles, blame Tory austerity. This is the message Labour voters should hear from Jeremy Corbyn. It is a message Ed Miliband could have made more forcefully during his term as Labour leader, when the conversation on the doorstep turned to immigration. Instead, he appeared to choke with embarrassment.

Corbyn has a higher embarrassment threshold. He could look the immigration question in the eye and not blink. Unfortunately, the Islington North MP considers debating immigration off limits.

So, last week, Corbyn tried to persuade voters that the EU is the workers’ friend and a bulwark against a bonfire of employment protections. That’s not an unreasonable position. Yet if immigration is the main source of anger outside the south-east, and if it is driving the Brexit campaign to a possible victory, the subject needs to be tackled head-on. If you think Britain is a great place to live that has been ruined by an alliance with other EU nations, you are mistaken and Labour needs to make that point.

Here are five reasons that the former coalition government and the current Tory administration are to blame, and not Brussels.

Jobs


It is easy to walk around an engineering practice in London, a hospital in Leeds or a leek farm in Lincolnshire and conclude that foreigners are stealing “our” jobs. But, in the main, the roles would be unfilled if they were kept out. The work would probably go abroad.

On one level, the fault lies with consumers and employers, large and small. Consumers would buy a foreign leek before one grown here picked by a Brit who was paid more and treated better. Employers are at fault for not training school leavers, older workers and job switchers because it’s cheaper to hire foreigners. Profits are calculated on this basis. Moreover, without cheaper labour there would, in many cases, be no business.

So foreigners allow employers to expand the number of jobs. That’s what the figures tell us. Compared to this time last year, there are 461,000 more people in work. People from the rest of the EU grabbed a majority of the jobs, but the substitution effect with UK nationals was only at the margins. Overall, the number in work just keeps going up and the UK now has a record employment rate of 74.2%.

Look a little closer and it is clear the government has played a big part by cutting skills and training budgets, laying waste to further education and demanding workers accept precarious employment, whether it be zero-hours contracts or self employment.

Vacancies


Job vacancies are running at a higher level than we have seen at any time this century. A small dip in recent months still leaves the number at 750,000. Most are for services jobs, as one might expect, with the largest number among retailers and wholesalers. Car repair firms reported a 143,000 shortage. The NHS and social work sector accounted for 119,000 of the total.

Finding a mechanic, or hiring a nurse, is as much a problem in Leeds as in London. It’s not just about a lack of skilled jobs being created in the north, but also a mismatch of people to jobs – not a problem invented in Brussels.

Wages

Adjusted for inflation, average wages have collapsed since the 2008 crash. Workers absorbed cuts in overtime and basic hours to keep their jobs.

Since the recovery got into full swing in 2014, wages have nudged ahead of inflation, but not enough to fill the gap. Part of the reason is the lack of investment by employers who rely on cheap workers.

But the UK, like all developed economies, is also suffering from the effects of globalisation, which allows multinationals to invest where subsidies are most generous. Ford has centred much of its European operations in Turkey for that reason. Without investment in skilled jobs there will be no increase in wages, but that is not on the Tory agenda.

Housing

If the worry is that housing is either poor quality or too costly, for yourself and your children, blame successive governments for failing to support good quality state-sponsored housing.

The taxes from migrant workers could be used to fund it, but the current and previous governments have preferred to reduce the top rate of tax and protect pensioners’ benefits.

There is no evidence in the last 100 years that shows private builders can meet the nation’s needs. This means housing associations have to find funds to build – but ministers are denying them access to finance, and councils can’t offer builders land when they are forced to sell to the highest bidder.

Health service

If the queue at the hospital and GP is a problem, this is the result of austerity measures that cut spending growth from 4% a year in real terms to 1% since 2010. The NHS, coping with an ageing society, was supposed to implement reforms to fill the gap but, to no one’s surprise, this project has so far failed. Worse, in his last budget, George Osborne slashed council spending on health by £800m. That’s cash used for local mental health services and preventative policies, such as tackling obesity. He told local authorities to put up council tax by 2% to fill the gap.

It’s cuts that lead to queues – in a race to the bottom that Osborne, despite his rhetoric, thinks is just fine.

Why failure is the key to flying high

 

If at first you don’t succeed: Leonardo DiCaprio as Howard Hughes in The Aviator. Photograph: Miramax/Everett/Rex/Shutterstock


Matthew Syed in The Guardian




We want our children to succeed, in school and, perhaps even more importantly, in life. But the paradox is that our children can only truly succeed if they first learn how to fail. Consider the finding that world-class figure skaters fall over more often in practice than low-level figure skaters. At first sight this seems contradictory. Why are the really good skaters falling over the most?

The reason is actually quite simple. Top skaters are constantly challenging themselves in practice, attempting jumps that stretch their limitations. This is why they fall over so often, but it is precisely why they learn so fast. Shizuka Arakawa of Japan estimates that she endured some 20,000 falls as she progressed from a beginner to an Olympic champion.

Lower-level skaters have a quite different approach. They are always attempting jumps they can already do very easily, remaining within their comfort zone. This is why they don’t fall over. In a superficial sense, they look successful, because they are always on their feet. The truth, however, is that by never failing, they never progress.
What is true of skating is also true of life. James Dyson worked through 5,126 failed prototypes for his dual cyclone vacuum before coming up with the design that made his fortune. These failures were essential to the pathway of learning. As Dyson put it: “You can’t develop new technology unless you test new ideas and learn when things go wrong. Failure is essential to invention.”

Even in areas of life where failure is potentially catastrophic, it is still vital to respond positively. In aviation, for example, every aircraft is equipped with two almost-indestructible black boxes: one records the electronic information from the on-board computers and the other records sounds in the cockpit. When there is a crash, these boxes are recovered and analysed so that enlightened changes can be enacted. This means that the same mistake never happens again. It is this constant willingness to learn from failure that means aviation has become one of the world’s safest forms of transportation. Last year the accident rate for major airlines was just one crash for every 8.3 million take-offs.

In healthcare, however, things are very different. Clinicians don’t like to admit to failure, partly because they have healthy egos (particularly the senior doctors) and partly because they fear litigation. The consequence is that instead of learning from failure, healthcare often covers up failure. The direct consequence is that the same mistakes are repeated. According to the Journal of Patient Safety, 400,000 people die every year in American hospitals alone due to preventable error. That is like two jumbo jets crashing every day or 9/11 happening every few days. In the UK, too, the numbers are shocking. Until healthcare learns to respond positively to failure, things will not improve.

But let us return to children. One of the seminal mistakes in education in the 1970s was the attempt to equip children with confidence by giving them lots of successes (setting the bar very low). The consequence was that the self-esteem of kids became bound up with success, and they became unable to take risks and crumpled as soon as they hit a proper challenge.

We need to flip this approach. In a complex world, failure is inevitable. It is those individuals and institutions that have the resilience and flexibility to face up to failure, learn the lessons and adapt which ultimately excel.