Full transcript of “11 Japanese Organisation Rules Americans Break - That Make Your House Messy”. Click a timestamp to open the video at that moment. Need another video? Use the YouTube transcript generator.
0:00 There are 11 Japanese organization rules that Americans break every single day, and together they are the reason your house looks messy and full of clutter, no matter how many hours you spend organizing the place. Most Americans are breaking at least four of these rules without realizing they even exist. Japan built a whole system around organizing the house so mess never gets a chance to build up in the first place. Japanese homes are less than half the size of American ones, with fewer closets and no basement, garage, or attic, [music] and there is still room for everything. The first rule is one that you'll break tonight without thinking, [music] and it is why you own clothes you have not seen in a year. Number six is about the messy drawer in your kitchen you are afraid to touch. And number eight is why you spend 15 minutes a day looking for
0:46 things you already own. The first Japanese organization rule Americans break is about the way your clothes sit in the drawer. In a Japanese home, clothes are folded into small rectangles and stood up on their edges, so [music] every item in the drawer is visible from above the second you open it. In an American house, it goes the other way, where clothes get stacked flat on top of each other, six or seven deep, and you only ever see the shirt on top of the pile. That means the shirt at the bottom of that stack is the one you have owned for two years and worn twice, because you have never once lifted the six shirts above it to get to it. A drawer of six stacked shirts is a drawer where you own one shirt and store five. Standing them up fits more into the same drawer, not less, [music] because a folded rectangle takes up less vertical space than a rumpled flat pile
1:33 ever did. This is the same principle Marie Kondo teaches on the Netflix show from 2019, and it is worth knowing that KonMari is the export version of a much older Japanese practice called Dan Shari, which means refuse, dispose, and separate. The Japanese reasoning is that a stack is a decision you have to unmake every time you want the thing at the bottom, and no drawer should require a decision to open. So, do one drawer tonight. Fold everything into rectangles and stand them up on their edges. It takes about 4 minutes. A similar pile exists in your kitchen made of things that weigh 8 lb each. The second Japanese organization rule Americans break is about the cabinet you dread opening. In a Japanese kitchen, every flat object in the cupboard stands upright in its own slot. So, baking sheets, cutting boards, [music] cooling
2:20 racks, and pot lids all get pulled out one at a time without touching anything else. >> [music] >> In an American cabinet, all of those things lie flat on top of each other in a leaning pile. And you know the sound the whole pile makes when you go in for the one on the bottom. The fix for this is one of the strangest crossovers in the whole house, which is that you use a file holder. An office object, the kind you buy for magazines or Manila folders, is the thing that finally organizes the baking sheet cupboard. Every item gets its own vertical slot. Nothing is ever lifted to reach something else, and the whole pile stops existing. Two file holders run under $10. And once they are in the cupboard you dread the most, the cupboard stops being the cupboard you dread. A pile is horizontal storage, and horizontal
3:06 storage cannot be read. That is the entire mechanism in one sentence, and it applies to more than just cabinets. The Japanese reasoning is that if you cannot see everything in a space in the first second you open it, that space is not organized, no matter how neat it looks from the front. So, get two file holders and put them in the cabinet you dread opening. That cabinet is full because of what is on your counter, and the counter is the surface your guests actually see. [music] The third Japanese organization rule Americans break is about your kitchen counter. In a Japanese kitchen, the counter is empty because [music] tools and bottles hang off rails or magnetized to the wall, so the flat surface stays clear for cooking. In an American kitchen, the counter [music] holds the knife block, the coffee maker, the paper towel holder, the fruit bowl
3:52 with one banana in it, the mail, the spice rack, and the stand mixer you use twice a year. And [music] every single one of them has been sitting in the same spot for months. The counter is the first thing anyone sees when they walk into your kitchen. A guest forms their whole opinion of the house in about 4 seconds standing right there, and every object on that counter is talking to them before you get a chance to. Every couple in America has the same recurring fight about the same flat surface. The real subject of the fight is that nothing on that counter has anywhere else to go. Every object sitting on the counter has a footprint, >> [music] >> and around that footprint is a ring of dead space you cannot cook in, cannot chop in, and cannot set anything else down on. That is why you actually cook on a 9-in square in the middle of the
4:39 counter, no matter how big the counter is, because the dead space around the coffee maker, the knife block, and the paper towel holder has eaten the rest of it. A magnetic knife strip, a wall rail for utensils, and a wall-mounted paper towel holder move all of that off the counter and onto the wall, and you get your counter space back. That is the pattern behind all 11 of these rules. The Japanese are not tidying harder than you are. They are building the room so clutter has nowhere to collect in the first place. I put every one of these rules and the systems that make them work into a book, so if you want the full version, scan [music] the QR code on screen or click the link in the description to get your copy. Now, the next rule is about the space above your counter. The fourth Japanese organization rule Americans break is about the space above your plates. In a
5:26 Japanese cabinet, the shelves are set at the height of what actually goes on them. So, a shelf of plates has about an inch of clearance above the tallest plate and nothing more. In an American cabinet, the shelf sits at a factory standard height that has nothing to do with your plates. And there is 5 or 6 in of empty air between the top plate and the shelf above it. Go and open your plate cabinet right now and take the tape measure to the space between your tallest stack and the shelf above it. The [music] gap will be 5 in, sometimes 6. Now, multiply that by every shelf in your kitchen, then by every cabinet in the house, and work out the cubic feet of empty air you are paying for in a room you already thought was too small. You paid for all of it. The fix is shelf risers, which are metal or plastic platforms that sit on the
6:12 existing shelf and give you a second level halfway up the wasted space. So, your mugs sit on top of your plates instead of leaving 3 in of air above them. Two risers cost less than lunch, they need no tools, and they take about a minute to install. The Japanese reasoning is that a cabinet is measured by what goes in it and not by how tall it was built. >> [music] >> That was one cabinet where the wasted space cost you nothing but volume. There is another cabinet in your house where wasted space is costing you money every [music] single week. The fifth Japanese organization rule Americans break is one I spoke about in my previous freezer video, and I will say it again here, which is that you cannot forget something you can see. In a Japanese freezer, everything [music] is stored upright in bins with labels facing
6:58 forward like files in a filing cabinet. [music] So, opening the door shows you every single thing in there in the first 2 seconds. In an American freezer, bags get thrown flat on top of each other in the exact order they were bought, and the bag on the bottom is welded to the back wall under a year of ice. That is why you have a second bag of the same thing you already own, because you could not see the first one when you were at the store, and it was cheaper to buy again than to spend 40 minutes digging through the freezer looking for it. You own three tape measures and four pairs of scissors for the same reason. Searching for the one you already have costs more time than driving to buy another one, so you buy another one. The fix is three plastic bins for the freezer with everything in the bin standing upright on its edge like a filing cabinet, and every label facing
7:43 the door. When the door opens, every bag in the freezer is readable in a glance and the second bag you buy at the store is going to be the first one you have bought all year. The Japanese logic is that storage is really about visibility and if you cannot see the thing, you do not own it. You are just paying to keep it cold. The freezer is at least obvious about the problem. The same thing is happening in a drawer you open six times a day. The sixth Japanese organization rule Americans break is about the drawer you know I am talking about which is the one from the beginning of the video, the one everyone in the house calls the junk drawer. In a Japanese home, every drawer is divided into compartments. So socks live in one section, chargers in another, batteries in a third and every category has its own place. In an American home,
8:31 most drawers are one open box >> [music] >> and inside that box are socks, chargers, one loose battery, a tape measure, hair tie and a bookmark from a hotel in 2017 [music] and you go through the whole box by feel every time you open it. This is a property of open space and it has nothing to do with your discipline. Any undivided compartment in any house will drift toward junk drawer over time because the drawer offers no place for anything and everything ends up in it. The rule that governs this in Japan comes from the first two letters of the Toyota production system which are seri and seitan meaning sort and set in order. Your junk drawer is failing a standard that runs the most reliable car company on Earth and the fix is 50 cents
9:16 worth of plastic dividers. An open compartment is a junk drawer that has not finished forming yet. The Japanese reasoning is that every object needs an address and a drawer without dividers is a drawer where no object has one. So put dividers into one drawer a night for [music] a week and by the end of the week, no drawer in the house is a junk drawer. Dividers fix the drawer. But the drawer is only as good as the piece of furniture it lives in. And that is where the biggest mistake in the American house is hiding. The seventh Japanese organization rule Americans break is about the furniture you chose for the room you are sitting in right now. In a Japanese home, storage goes up. So, wardrobes and shelving units are tall and slim. Drawers are shallow, and every category gets its own drawer with one layer of clothing in it. In an
10:03 American home, storage goes wide, which means low dressers, 6-ft consoles, and chests so deep that the bottom half of every drawer is archaeology. Americans buy furniture by the space it takes up on the floor. Japanese homes buy furniture by the cubic space it fills in a room because the ceiling is free, and they know it. That single difference is why your bedroom has a wide dresser you can only reach the top of. In a Japanese bedroom, the same size has a tall, slim tower you can reach every drawer of. The evidence for this is sitting in your garage. You own a purpose-built room designed to hold a $40,000 object, and it is currently holding about $200 worth of holiday decorations, old paint cans, and a treadmill somebody bought in 2021. A
10:49 large share of American two-car garages cannot actually fit a car because the wide storage habit has spilled out of the house and taken over the room built to protect the most expensive object the family owns. The self-storage industry is the same problem one step further. Roughly one in 10 American households is renting a second home for things they do not use, priced monthly forever, because the storage in their first home was built wide and shallow instead of tall and organized. That is a payment you are making every month on the calendar to solve a problem that a slim tower and a shallow drawer would have solved for the cost of one month of the rental. The fix is to replace one wide unit in your house with a tall, slim one. Muji, Nitori, and Iris Ohyama are the three
11:36 Japanese retailers that built every piece of furniture around this principle, and any of them will show you what a shallow drawer for a single category actually looks like. That is the [music] same mistake in the room you spend all day in. It is also happening one room over, and it costs you every single morning. The eighth Japanese organization rule Americans break is about the closet. In a Japanese closet, multi-layer hangers hang five pairs of pants from one hook vertically, so the rail is used from the ceiling down to the floor, and every inch of rail space has something on it. In an American closet, the rail is packed so tight that nothing slides. There is 18 in of empty air above the hangers, >> [music] >> and there is 2 ft of nothing above the shoe pile at the bottom. 15 minutes a day looking for things adds up to 91
12:21 hours a year, which is two full work weeks that you spend every year walking around your own house in a small, private rage at yourself. And most of those minutes are spent standing in front of a closet you cannot see into. A closet is measured in rail length and not in floor space. You already own three levels of rail space in every closet in the house, and you are using one of them. Multi-layer hangers take five pairs of pants and hang them from one hook that used to hold one pair, and shoe racks turn the floor of the closet into another whole level of storage. So, buy two multi-layer hangers tonight, put [music] five pairs of pants on each of them, and see how much of your rail suddenly comes back. Those were eight rules about objects. The last three of these are systems more than rules, and
13:07 they are the reason a Japanese family never has to do a weekend reorganize at all. The ninth Japanese organization rule Americans break is about the containers you already own. In a Japanese pantry, every container is clear. Every container has a label on the front, and every container holds one category of one product with the level of what is inside visible from across the room. In an American pantry, the shelf holds a row of identical opaque tubs, a cereal box with an inch of cereal left in it, and a third bag of rice you bought last Tuesday because you thought you were out. In most American houses, exactly one adult holds the whole map of the pantry in their head, which means they can never be off duty. And everyone else in the family asks them where things are before they can find anything. Clear containers with
13:54 labels on the front mean that anyone in the house, the kid, the visiting relative, the babysitter, can find something and put it back correctly without having to ask. The pantry stops belonging to one person and starts belonging to the house. An opaque container is a decision you postponed, and every one of them in your kitchen is a decision that was supposed to make the kitchen tidier and instead made it invisible. The Japanese logic is that a container is only useful if it tells you what is inside without opening it. And every container that fails that test is doing less work than the bag the food came in did. So, swap out the six things you buy most often into clear containers with labels on the front and see how much of your kitchen suddenly belongs to everyone in the house instead of just you.
14:39 Which brings us to the containers you already own and where they came from. The 10th Japanese organization rule Americans break is about how you bought storage in the first place. In a Japanese home, storage is bought once, meaning one product line, one color, two sizes, and the measurements of every shelf are taken before a single container comes home. In an American home, storage is bought one crisis at a time. Open the closet under your stairs or the one in the garage and [music] look at what is in there. There is a wicker basket from a Target run in 2019, two clear bins from a Container Store trip after a bad week, a cardboard box you never unpacked, three canvas cubes that came free with a shelf, and a Rubbermaid tub from the garage that now
15:24 holds towels in a linen closet. Every one of those was bought on a day you decided to get organized, and that pile is evidence of every separate time you did. The problem with the pile is that nothing in it stacks. The wicker basket has a flared lip. The canvas cubes are 2 in too tall for the shelf, so the shelf above them is half empty. >> [music] >> The plastic bins are the wrong depth, so there is a dead strip of shelf at the back you cannot reach. [music] And the cardboard box is just a cardboard box. 12 containers and you cannot build one straight line with any of them, which is why the closet reads as a mess on the day you just cleaned it. >> [music] >> Someone opened that closet looking for a spare towel at Thanksgiving. They did not mention it in the house. Storage is infrastructure, and infrastructure is bought as a single system one time for
16:12 the whole room at once. So, measure the shelves in the room that most needs help, then buy one product line in one color in two sizes for all of it. A container that is the wrong depth wastes more space than no container at all. The 11th Japanese organization rule Americans break is about the 6 in beside your refrigerator. Go get the tape measure one more time, and go measure the gap between the fridge and the cabinet next to it, or the gap between the washing machine and the wall, or the gap between the stove and the counter. 6 in, sometimes 8. Now, work [music] out what you pay per square foot in rent or mortgage, and multiply it by that strip of floor, and multiply that by every month you have lived in the house. That is the answer to what I asked you at the start. Japan sells furniture designed to fit exactly into that gap. The category
16:59 is called Sukima Kagu, which literally translates as gap furniture, and it comes in five standard widths, the narrowest of which is about 6 in wide. The fact that this is a real furniture category in Japan, sold in five standard widths for space that Americans do not even count as a space is probably the strangest thing in this whole video. The most common piece of gap furniture is a slim rolling cart on wheels, tall and skinny, that holds detergent in the laundry room, oil and spices in the kitchen, or cans and paper goods next to the fridge. It rolls out when you need it and rolls back into the gap when you do not, and the 6 in beside your fridge that you have been paying for since you moved in finally holds something. The space in that gap is space you own and
17:45 space you pay for, and it deserves to hold something. There is one more, and I am not going to number it because it works one level above all the others. It is the reason you needed the other 11 in the first place. The Japanese entryway is called the genkan, and it is the small tiled area right inside the front door where shoes come off, coats come off, bags get set down, and the outside world stops. In an American house, the front door opens straight into the living room or the kitchen, and every item that walks in the door, every key, every piece of mail, every jacket, every school paper, and every Amazon box keeps walking until it finds a flat surface to land on. That flat surface is your counter, or your dining table, or the back of your couch. And everything you
18:32 have ever put down on those surfaces walked in through your front door and never got stopped. The fix is to build a small genkan zone within 3 ft of your front door, which is one hook for coats, one tray for keys and mail, and one basket for bags. Everything that walks in gets dealt with there before it can reach a single surface anywhere [music] else in the house. This is the fastest visible payoff on the entire list because the day you set it up, the drift [music] of paper and jackets across your counters stops overnight. Every one of those rules was one of the four laws from the start. Stand it up, go tall, make it visible, and count the gaps. Your house was never the problem. The geometry was. There is a three-question test you can run on any storage space in your house right now to figure out where to start. The first
19:18 question is, can I see everything in here without moving anything? The second is, does every object in here have one fixed place, or does it end up in a different place every week? The third is, is this space empty because it is empty, or because it is the wrong shape to use? There are two Japanese words that pull this whole video together. The first is taiechi, which means the fixed position that every object in the house is assigned to. So, that when you pick something up, you already know where it is going. Clutter is really unmade decisions, and taiechi is the decision made in advance. The second word is ma, which means empty space treated as something you own on purpose, and not something you failed to fill. The empty shelf you feel a little guilty about is the goal. Every one of these
20:04 rules survived because it made sense the first time somebody did it. The wide dresser was cheaper than the tall one. The wicker basket was on sale that Saturday. The stack of shirts fit the drawer the day you moved in. Americans have never been careless about their homes. They just never went back and checked what those first decisions were doing over 10 years. American homes are built with storage that is wide when it should be tall, deep when it should be shallow, and opaque when it should be clear. And then everyone who lives in one blames themselves for the result. And let me know in the comments which of these 11 rules is the biggest problem in your house right now, and what you will get to first. All right, thanks a lot for watching. [music] Check out my previous video appearing on your screen, and I will see you in the next one.
