Relaxing!!!
I discovered this woman’s channel during the pandemic and for quite a while I watched a lot of her content while falling asleep at night. It was soothing to watch her quietly and slowly dust her tiny apartment or gracefully chop vegetables. She makes videos with titles like, “Cold Night Routine of living alone in Japan | Cozy Winter Night with Me” (with 3 million+ views), and never shows her face. She’ll often carefully place one fresh flower in a vase and has a minimalist aesthetic. She loves to cook and makes some beautiful meals, presented on special plates. Or she’ll use a lovely, flowered teacup for a specially selected tea sachet.
It’s definitely a different ethos from hustle culture. This slower-living mode and it’s cultural influence is perhaps somewhat explained by ideas I found in the following article. “4 Japanese Concepts That Inspire Our Daily Lives,” by Renyung ho.
The author mentions an approach to all of life and to material things that recognizes, “the inherent integrity of natural objects and materials.”
There is also the concept of Mono No Aware: The Pathos of Things.
“This concept describes having empathy towards things and their inevitable passing; a keen awareness of impermanence accompanied with a gentle, wistful sadness that their disappearance is the reality of life…
Mono no aware teaches us to seek beauty and awareness in the transient. It allows us to notice the fleeting beauty of time and to realize that nothing is permanent and that we should take life a step at a time, appreciating everything that passes.”
This also sounds a lot like Marie Kondo’s ethos — one of “thanking” objects for their service and touching everything we own to see if it, “sparks joy.”
Our relationship to things does in fact relate to our relationships to ourselves and others…
https://www.youtube.com/@naminokurashi
