Cramped Chic: Small Is Beautiful to Trendy 20-Somethings

TOKYO —  Stacks of books and magazines blanket one wall. Across the apartment--about three feet away--a mountain of clothes lies on the bed. A TV, two turntables and a computer cover the desk.

Beside the sink, Taiyo Akagi crouches in his tub, which is an oversize bucket he found in the street, and lathers his dyed-blond hair.

“I used to be an office worker, but I quit two years ago,” Akagi says while demonstrating his bath for a visitor. “I couldn’t take wearing a suit and taking the same train to work every day.”

Despite the cramped surroundings, Akagi, 28, and the dozens of twentysomethings living in his rundown apartment building in western Tokyo are not down on their luck.

Instead, they consider themselves the chic practitioners of an ancient Japanese art--the art of living in small places.

The clutter of tiny apartments like Akagi’s better represents Japanese living than the temple-like homes and rock gardens of architectural magazines, says Kyoichi Tsuzuki, a photographer and writer.

“Large houses in most cases are boring because they don’t show any character,” he argues. “But small houses don’t hide anything because you can see, ‘Oh, this guy is wearing these shoes.’ You walk in and see his personality.”

In Tsuzuki’s “Tokyo Style,” a compilation of photographs of homes and rooms around the city, walls are piled high with stereos and stacks of CDs. A pole suspended from the ceiling above a bed functions as a closet. Every space is taken up with knick-knacks, plants, telephones, books.

For centuries, urban Japanese have lived in tight quarters because of lack of money and space. What sets Akagi and his peers apart is that they choose smaller places--and smaller rents--and spend their money elsewhere.

“We are outlaws,” says Akagi, a freelance writer for about 15 entertainment magazines. His 108-square-foot room--about the size of a large walk-in closet--costs 32,000 yen ($300) a month.

One look around the room tells the visitor what his generation’s priorities are: TV, a Sony PlayStation, two word processors, a guitar, an electric keyboard, a laptop computer and hundreds of magazines and comics.

“I don’t want to work just for my rent,” says Akagi, who moved into his room two years ago. He spends much of his time--and money--at music clubs, comic shows and movies gathering material for his articles.

But living in such small quarters can wear on some people, particularly if they have the means to expand. Akagi, who can make as much as $10,000 in a good month, says he’ll probably move to a bigger place in a few years.

For now, though, he’s comfortable having everything he owns at arm’s reach.

“They say Japanese live in rabbit hutches, but we’ve lived in places like that for hundreds of years,” he says. “It’s our culture. We’re used to it.”