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Kawaii Interior Decoration
25/JUL/2009 on air

How is it like to live in a “character room” with as many as 1000 of Hello Kitty in a small 8Jo (about 13 square meters) room? Here’s the owner of the room, Asako-san, a housewife saying “Hello Kitty is just increased like this while I started collecting, but I don’t think this is enough.” Another woman, an illustrator enjoys as many as 500 dolls in a small 4.5Jo room (6.5 square meters) and she sleeps there. “I’m happy if I can live with my favorite things around.” But how is it like to be looked down by 500 dolls around while she is sleeping? Ichigohime-san (it’s just a nickname, meaning strawberry princess) collects everything with strawberry motif in her 8.5Jo room. Can you believe that she has spent total 20 million yen (USD200,000) into the strawberry room? TV, bowl, dress, and even the scent of the room are all strawberry! The dress was from her mom and cost 280,000 yen (USD2800)! “She has collected enough strawberries, and now I just want her to get dressed with this dress to find someone to live together,” says her mom.

There was a letter from a couple who live in a small 6Jo room together. The concept of their room is second hand clothing of American taste. The items in the room are what the man has collected since he was a teenager. There is not enough space to store things, and so they hang their clothes or even sneakers on the wall. It looks there’s no space for sleeping but the green area is actually where they sleep.

There are as many as 70 interior shops in Meguro, Tokyo which is called “Interior Street” of stores with several different interior tastes such as ethnic, mid-century, Showa retro, etc. A man of good knowledge on Meguro Interior Street is called “Meguro Interior Hakase” (meaning Dr. Meguro Interior). He checked out all the stores on the street and grasps characteristics of each shop.

Acme Furniture opened 15 years ago and it was the first one of the shops on the street. Their furniture is purchased in the west coast of the U.S. and vintage furniture is made in 1950-1970. It’s interesting they offer custom-made furniture such as using some auto-part from airplane.

Fortuna deals with furniture directly imported from the U.S., but limited to small ones targeted for single use.

Claska is a famous nice interior hotel where many foreigners visit. Each room has different concept of interior. Take a room #702, for example, you see a bed decorated with soft toys of second hand use. At a room #707, the concept is “recycle” and “pressed flowers” at #701.

ICS is a first interior school in Japan that was established in 1963. Today, 1/3 of students are from foreign countries.

It was only 3 years ago when IKEA opened in Japan. They needed to study Japanese market very carefully because foreign furniture is sometimes too big for Japanese houses. They started from “home visit” people to ask what kind of problems they have for living. Then they tried to understand the demands of Japanese people and analyzed them.

Then how is Japanese interior brand? Francfranc is increasing its sales drastically. It’s a brand of cute zakka (daily goods such as kitchen tools or cushion or clock) and small furniture. They have strong target image of 25-year-old women living in a city. They have expanded 112 branches in Japan, as well as some in Hong Kong, Taiwan, and Korea. They target China and India in the near future.
It’s important for them to catch the new trends always.

Tokyo Girls Fudosan (meaning real estate) is a small company run by a few young women, but they are getting popular for what they have done. They buy old houses or apartments in Tokyo, renovate them, and promote them for rent. The turned 30-year-old house to a share house with 10 people and this was so popular with as many as 30 people waiting lists. Because the location is at the centre of Aoyama, Tokyo, even the small room with strange shape costs 89,000 yen monthly for rent.

A man opens his studio type of room as a café to his friends, which accompanies with sacrificing himself sleeping in a closet!

These days there is a boutique or apparel shop that deals with zakka to attract more customers who like interior may also be interested in their clothing.

Kirin’s opinion:
I don’t like to live in a mess. To me, full of character or strawberry or used clothes hung around means just a mess. I think that when it comes to living, less is more, and color coordination is also very important to maintain unity of the atmosphere of the room. It makes me sick if I am surrounded by so many different colors and materials at once… This is my honest opinion, but how about you?

Today Japanese Yen hit strongest againt USD for the first time in 14 years. Yesterday’s big news was that 1USD was exchanged at 86 yen for the first time in 14 years, but today it broke the record.

Strong Yen is damage to Japanese economy, as it relies on exporting business. It’s said that we have to strengthen domestic consumption more and try not too much to be dependent on foreign demand.

Then what’s going on among domestic business?
I have to say it’s in the middle of deflation, unfortunately, which we can feel everyday even before we heard the statement from our government some time ago.

We’ve been soaked in deflation for a decade, and I cannot even remember what it was like to be inflation. (I’d say I don’t know inflation, because in the 1980s I was only a kid who didn’t know how adults enjoyed our bubble economy. Our economy has been bad since I started to work and nothing’s changed in a good way. Things are rather getting worse! ) In the past 10 years up until now, our salary is less likely to be raised, bonus is highly cut off, lay-off or bankruptcy is always, almost 0% of interests for the bank savings, and low prices are the only valid reason to attract customers.

*Disclaimer: The photo is quoted from g.u.’s PDF flyer from here.

Especially low prices, I’m afraid this trend is accelerating. Do you know that we can buy a pair of jeans for only 990 yen at g.u. (g.u. is cheaper version of Uniqlo) or for 880 yen at super market such as Aeon or Daiei, and even for 690 yen at Don Quijote today? As far as what I hear, the good thing about that is not “You get what you pay for.” I’ve never tried these things, but people say they are mostly satisfied with the price and what they can get. Thus, they get more than what they paid for.

I miss old days when people said “Everything is expensive in Japan” as now it’s apparently wrong today. When I am inside the deflation economy, my perception or judgment is based on Tokyo pricing. With such observing point, there’s no wonder I felt that eating out in Australia or Europe required too much money when I travelled last summer. But now I know that they are normal, as their economy is growing with healthy inflation. It’s not that they are charging too much, it was our problem. Our economy situation was very weird and something insane.

Everyone is happy about low prices, including me. On the other hand though, I am so worried about what’s going on in our country. I feel sorry for the situation of our economy that allows extraordinarily cheap things like under 1000 yen jeans. How do you see this?

When you have sequence of negative experience, sadness, madness, disappointment, failure, and etc. don’t you think you feel like blaming your fate?

When I was younger, I couldn’t stop comparing my life or myself with my friends’, although I knew that was completely nonsense. It just made me sad whenever I wondered why my family was not happy while my friend’s one was, why I was so bad at math, why I had less good friends, why, why, why…and that only tortured myself more and more…

This bad habit didn’t change even after I started working. Whenever I saw my colleagues’ good designs and cool ideas, I questioned myself “Was I able to come up with such an idea? No, I don’t think so…” and I was upset.

There’s no one who has only good things, and vice versa. That’s too natural to be told. Yes, I know. But I want that to be told from time to time. SInce most of Japanese people do not have religion, which however doesn’t mean that we don’t believe in whatever God, I think I sometimes want to listen to preaches from someone who has deep experience of his life.

Lately I read a book “Seifu no housoku (正負の法則)“. It means principle of positive and negative in this universe. And this book taught me something very interesting.

According to the author, Akihiro Miwa, anyone’s life is even with good things and bad things happening equally. One of the parts I found interesting was that if your life is too many good things so far, you’d better go for charity or something before bad things actually occur to you. If you just enjoy good things, you will have to have very bad things to balance your life, because that’s how life is supposed to be.

In that sense, he says if your life is so-so or OK, that’s considered good enough because you wouldn’t have very bad things to set off. People would envy beautiful, rich, popular and successful people, but they should have negative things to set off such positive things.
I thought that’s one of the reasons why celebrities or rich people make donation often, in order to set off their too many positive things.

My life has become something more relaxed since I stopped comparing.
This book also made me expect good things from so many bad things so far happened in my life.
What do you think? Have you heard of similar story?