A lot of people agree that tidying is connected to how we live, and even though, outside of Japan, houses might be bigger, people have more things than they need.
Sentiment: POSITIVE
It is extremely interesting to live in a private house and to see the externalities, at least, of domestic life in a Japanese middle-class home.
Life has a way of setting things in order and leaving them be. Very tidy, is life.
Good design for the home should be universal. A house should be like old shoes, comfortable, like a good friend... The Japanese aesthetic is important to me. Very organic. They have a sense of the weight of the thing: very balanced.
Compared with U.S. cities, Japanese cities bend over backward to help foreigners. The countryside is another matter.
People cannot change their tidying habits without first changing their way of thinking.
When you look at Japanese traditional architecture, you have to look at Japanese culture and its relationship with nature. You can actually live in a harmonious, close contact with nature - this very unique to Japan.
One of the great tragedies is that there is so much less open land available in Japan today. Many Japanese come to New Zealand because of its beauty.
Basically, people in other countries don't want to have to work quite as flat-out as they do in Japan.
I like messy. What fun is tidy?
In Japan, there is less a culture of preserving old buildings than in Europe.