塵も積もれば山となる
Even dust, piled up, becomes a mountain.
240 numbered methods. One book for what a house costs you — the bills, the food, the things that break. One for what a house does to you — the damp, the clutter, the small room. Written down plainly, so you can keep them in the kitchen drawer.
家
There is a word we say when something useful is thrown away. もったいない — mottainai. It is not a polite word. It is closer to a small cry of pain.
She said it not over the money, but over the water — still warm at nine in the evening, and about to go down the drain unused.
She was not poor. She had lived through a time when things were scarce, and she never lost the habit of looking at a thing twice before letting it go. That is the whole of what I am going to teach you. Everything else in these books is detail.
You are here because a bill got larger than it should be. Perhaps the electric bill in August. Perhaps a contractor who wanted three thousand dollars for a job that turned out to be four hours of work. Perhaps a spare room that has not been usable in two years.
I cannot fix your country's prices, and I cannot make your house bigger. What I can do is show you what a Japanese household does when the same pressure arrives — because Japan has had that pressure a very long time. Little land, hot wet summers, cold houses, expensive fuel, and a deep dislike of waste.
Out of that came several hundred small practical habits. About two hundred and forty of them work just as well in Ohio or Florida as they do in Kyoto. They are written down in two books, because they answer two different questions.
What a house costs you
The bills, the food, and the things that break. Cooling a house without running the machine all afternoon, heating the person instead of the room, finding what draws current while you sleep, and the repairs worth doing yourself.
110 pages · 120 numbered methods · eleven chapters
$29.95
Sent to your email straight away. Read it on any phone, tablet or computer — or print it.
What a house does to you
The damp, the clutter, the smell you stopped noticing, and the room that never feels big enough. This is the book about living in the house rather than paying for it — and about keeping it a house that still suits you in twenty years.
101 pages · 120 numbered methods · thirteen chapters
$29.95
Sent to your email straight away. Read it on any phone, tablet or computer — or print it.
What a method takes, what it gives back, and — in a red box — exactly where it goes wrong. Those red boxes are the most valuable part of both books. The Home Manual counts in dollars; the House Manual counts in time and space. Five of the two hundred and forty:
緑のカーテン — midori no kāten
After 2011, when Japan lost a large part of its generating capacity overnight, city governments handed out seeds. The idea was a living screen up the sunny side of the building — bitter gourd, morning glory or cucumber on a net. A leaf does two things a reed screen cannot. It blocks the sun, and it releases water vapour. It is the only shade that is actively cold.
Costs / saves$12–$25 for net, hooks and seed. An hour to set up, five minutes a day to water. Shading plus evaporation make a real difference to the wall behind it — and the bitter gourd feeds you.
Where it goes wrongPlant too late and all you have is a net. Four to six vines at the base, in spring, watered daily through the heat.
佃煮 — tsukudani
The kombu you pulled out of the dashi pot is not finished. Simmer it a second time for a weaker broth to cook rice in. Then slice it thin, simmer with soy sauce, a little sugar and vinegar, and you have a salty relish that keeps a fortnight in the refrigerator and turns a bowl of plain rice into a meal. Three uses from one strip of seaweed — the whole philosophy of the chapter in one ingredient.
Costs / savesNothing at all. It is the same strip you already bought, doing two more jobs.
Where it goes wrongNever boil the kelp in the first place. It turns bitter and slimy, and that is the only way to get dashi wrong.
My wife has never once called this economising. It is simply how a kitchen is run. One bag, always in the same place in the freezer door. In go onion skins and ends, carrot peel, celery tops, herb stalks, parmesan rinds, mushroom stems, corn cobs, leek greens, chicken bones. Nothing is bought for that bag, and nothing in it was ever going to be eaten. Once a week it becomes stock, and the stock becomes the base of three meals.
Costs / savesOne freezer bag. The average American household throws away close to a third of the food it buys — this is the quietest leak in the budget, and the easiest to close.
Where it goes wrongLeave out cabbage and broccoli in quantity — they turn it bitter and sulphurous. No potato peel, which clouds it. Nothing mouldy.
水たまり — mizutamari
A traditional Japanese garden should be full of mosquitoes — stone basins, dense shade, wet bamboo, still air in August. And yet you sit in one at dusk and are barely bitten. The reason is not a secret compound. A mosquito needs still water for about a week to complete its cycle. Remove the water and you remove the mosquito, permanently, in a way no spray achieves.
Costs / savesTwenty minutes after rain. Look at saucers under pots, the gutter, a tarpaulin fold, the tray under the outdoor unit, an old tyre, the bird bath.
Where it goes wrongSpraying kills the generation in front of you and leaves the next one's food supply untouched.
立てる収納 — tateru shūnō · from The House of Sensei Manual
Vertical storage is the single most transferable idea in Japanese housekeeping, and it applies to almost everything. T-shirts folded into small rectangles and stood on their edges in a drawer, so you see every one at once instead of excavating a stack. Files on their ends. Baking trays and chopping boards on edge in a rack rather than stacked flat. Pans nested, but with the lids stood separately.
Stacking has one advantage — density — and two costs: you cannot see what is underneath, and to reach anything you must move everything above it. Which is why the bottom of every stack in every house has not been touched in three years.
What it takes / what it gives backNothing, and about twenty minutes per drawer. A few cheap dividers or shoeboxes stop things flopping over. You can then see the entire contents of a drawer at a glance — which is the difference between a drawer you maintain and a drawer you avoid. It holds roughly the same amount in the same space, so it is not a trade against capacity.
Savings are given as ranges, because your house is not my house. Anyone who tells you a screen makes a room "fifteen degrees cooler" is guessing and hoping you don't check. I would rather be dull and right.
Nothing in here needs a contractor. Where a method touches house wiring, gas, the structure of your roof, or the canning of low-acid food, I say so plainly and tell you where to stop. There is no pride in a low bill and a house fire.
Where I have got something wrong before — the twenty years of food storage, the borax for pests — I correct it in front of you rather than quietly. I would rather be a man you can trust than a man with a better headline.
And one thing said openly: the Sensei is the narrator of these manuals and of the videos they come from — a character, in the way the storyteller in an old household book is a character. The methods are not invented. Every one is a real practice with a real Japanese name, or a plain piece of household work any careful person can check.
家 · 整頓
Both manuals. 240 old Japanese methods for the bills, the food, the damp, the clutter and the small room. Two books, written for two different problems.
What a house costs you. 120 methods across eleven chapters, from cooling without the machine to the first ten minutes of a blackout. 110 pages.
What a house does to you. 120 methods across thirteen chapters, from a small room that feels large to a house that still suits you in twenty years. 101 pages.
Both are built the same way. Every method is numbered. Every chapter tells you what it takes, what it gives back, and — in a red box — exactly where it goes wrong. Where a claim is disputed, the book says so. Where a number is unknown, it gives a range instead of pretending.
$44.95 $59.90
211 pages, two PDFs, both sent to your email within a minute of paying.
家
Not one method in these pages will change your life. A reed screen at a west window saves a modest amount. A hot water bottle saves a modest amount. A bag of scraps in the freezer saves a modest amount. Any one of them, on its own, is barely worth the twenty minutes.
Twenty of them, kept up for a year, is a different matter entirely — and the ones that cost nothing at all, the habits rather than the purchases, are the ones that add up fastest.
So I will ask you to do something small. Not all of it. Choose three.
Do those three for thirty days. Then open the book again and choose three more.
— The Sensei
After paying you get an email with a link. Click it and the manual opens — on a phone, a tablet, or a computer. There is nothing to install and no account to make. Both were laid out to be printed, so if you'd rather have them in the kitchen drawer, print them.
If the problem is a bill, start with the Home Manual. If the problem is the house itself — damp, smell, clutter, a room you've stopped using — start with the House Manual. If both sound like your house, the set is cheaper than buying them one at a time.
A little, in the damp chapters — a handful of methods appear in both, because they answer both questions. Everything else is separate. 240 methods, numbered, no padding.
That was the test for every method that made it in. About two hundred and forty of the several hundred Japanese household habits work just as well in Ohio or Florida as in Kyoto — the rest were left out. Where a method needs a particular climate, the book says so.
Four things are where careful people get hurt: house wiring, gas lines, roof structure, and the home canning of low-acid food. Each is dealt with in its own chapter, with the guidance you should follow and the point at which you should call somebody. Nothing in either book asks you to improvise on those.
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Write to me at hello@thejapanesehomemanual.com — a lost email, a link that won't open, a method that didn't work in your house. I read everything, and the second editions will be better for it. If a book isn't what you hoped for, I'll return your money. No forms, no argument.