It's funny to me that both this woman and Kondo describe their methods as "The Japanese art of tidying." It's funny because if these methods were so characteristically or inherently Japanese, why would so many Japanese people themselves need so much help & training in the methods as to spawn a whole industry?

It's like calling Golang "The California programming language" or calling Newton's laws "The English art of explaining inertia." Is there really anything particularly Japanese about these women's methods or is it just Orientalist branding?

(You do see this sometimes around Brooklyn, or you used to, when Brooklyn's cultural cache was especially high.)