The Metamorphosis of Excess: ‘Rubbish Houses’ and the Imagined Trajectory of Things in Post-Bubble Japan

Abstract

This chapter looks at the ways in which the 'rubbish house' (gomi yashiki) emerged in Japan as a socially recognized phenomenon in the years after the collapse of the bubble economy.Rather than understanding it as a local variation of hoarding, the aim is to locate the gomi yashiki as a phenomenon related to consumption at the intersection of two distinct regimes of value: the bubble years of overconsumption in the 1980s and the years of economic stagnation in the 1990s.The rubbish house can be conceptualized as a place of stagnation, from where things can always return.Uncomfortably straddling the gap between discourses on wastefulness (mottainai) and self-enhancing consumerism, it becomes a manifestation of the ambiguity of value itself.

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