In the late 20th century, Japan was known for its minimalism: its Zen arts, its tidy and ordered cities, its refined foods and fashions. But Tsuzuki peeled away this façade to reveal a more complicated side to his nation. And Tokyo was the perfect setting for this exfoliation. Like the interiors he photographed, it remains visually overwhelming – even cluttered. Outside, enormous animated advertisements compete for attention against a jigsaw puzzle of metal, glass, concrete and plastic. In the sprawling residential districts that radiate from the city centre, compact homes are packed in formations as dense as transistors on a semiconductor chip, while confusing geometries of power lines spiderweb the skies above.
In suburbs across the nation, homes filled to the rafters with hoarded junk are common enough to have an ironic idiom: gomi-yashiki (trash-mansions). And in areas where space is limited, cluttered residences and shops will often erupt, disgorging things onto the street in a semi-controlled jumble so ubiquitous that urban planners have a name for it: afuré-dashi (spilling-outs). This is an ecstatic, emergent complexity, born less from planning than from organic growth, from the inevitable chaos of lives being lived.
https://aeon.co/essays/the-life-changing-magic-of-japanese-clutter