Committing to minimalism

TOKYO — Kids and clutter don’t have to go together, says Naoki Numahata, a 42-year-old Japanese father so committed to minimalism that he’d make a monk look extravagant.

When his 4-year-old daughter Ei wants to play, she doesn’t go to a playroom or even a play corner. Instead, she gets a small basket that contains all her most precious possessions — a doll, a Minions tin with some cars, a yo-yo and a spinning top — and plays happily on the stark white floor.

Their 420-square-foot Tokyo apartment is small even by Japanese standards, and is almost empty. There is nothing on the kitchen counter. In the drawers: three sets of chopsticks, two sets of children’s cutlery. The breakfast drawer contains a loaf of bread and a jar of honey.

There is no couch, only a table, a chair and a bench for two. The small bedroom contains a bed that Numahata and his wife share with Ei. His one concession to decadence: a big television that he uses for his work as a web designer.

He has only two pairs of pants, four shirts and four T-shirts, five pairs of underwear and four pairs of socks in the closet. Ei has two special occasion outfits on hangers and two small drawers for her regular clothes. Numahata says his wife is not a minimalist: She has five drawers for all her clothes, winter and summer. This kind of extreme minimalism is not standard practice in Japan, but the concept of making do with less has become much more mainstream in recent years, an antidote to materialism and excess. For the Numahata family and others like them, less really is more.

The most famous proponent of this concept abroad is the Japanese declutterer Marie Kondo, whose “KonMari” method — she tells people to get rid of everything that doesn’t “spark joy” — has swept through the West in recent years.

But minimalism and decluttering became a craze in Japan several years before Kondo arrived on the scene. Indeed, people here know the concept not as the “KonMari” method but as “danshari” — taken from three Japanese characters meaning “refuse,” “dispose” and “separate.”

“Modern society is all about getting more, more, more without taking account of your whole situation,” said Hideko Yamashita, who was promoting the idea of danshari several years before Kondo arrived on the decluttering scene. (She considers Kondo something of an interloper.)

“With danshari, you

SHIHO FUKADA/PHOTOS FOR THE WASHINGTON POST Naoki Numahata, with daughter Ei, believes in keeping his tiny Tokyo apartment free of clutter. He and his wife keep nothing on the kitchen counter.

When 4-year-old Ei wants to play, she gets a basket that contains her most precious possessions, including a doll, a Minions tin with some cars, a yo-yo and a spinning top.