My grandmother's kitchen in Kyoto had a window that faced a small enclosed garden. The garden had three elements: a single maple, a rounded stone, and raked gravel. That was it. Nothing else. It was, objectively speaking, an underused space - you could have fitted a herb garden, a bench, several more plants. My grandmother would have found this suggestion very funny.
The Japanese aesthetic concept of ma is usually translated as negative space, but that translation does it a disservice. Space in English is what's left when you've filled in the important parts. Ma is the important part. It is the pause between notes, the silence at the end of a sentence, the empty area in a room that allows the things in the room to be seen. It is not absence. It is presence of a different kind.
How ma works in domestic space
I grew up with this without having a name for it. Our house in Kyoto was not minimalist in the aesthetic sense that the word has acquired in Western design contexts - there was nothing stark or cold about it. But there was space to breathe between things. The tokonoma alcove in the living room held one hanging scroll and one ceramic vase. Not two scrolls, not a shelf of objects. One thing, chosen seasonally, given the space to be seen.
When I moved to Vancouver at sixteen, I was overwhelmed by the amount of things in Canadian homes. I don't mean this as a criticism - it was cultural difference, not deficiency. But I remember standing in my first Canadian friend's living room and being unable to look at anything because there was too much to look at. The room had no ma. Every surface was occupied, every wall had something on it. Everything was equally present, which meant nothing was particularly present.
The Western minimalism problem
I want to be careful here, because what has happened to minimalism in Western design culture is genuinely complicated. The aesthetic version of minimalism - white walls, empty surfaces, very expensive plain objects - has become a luxury product. The house that looks minimal is often the house that has the most money: the built-in storage that hides everything, the bespoke furniture with no visible joins, the art that costs as much as a car.
This is not what I mean by ma, and it is not what my grandmother practiced. She was not buying emptiness. She was not curating absence. She was simply not buying things she didn't need, and the space that created was a side effect, not a goal. The difference matters because the goal shapes the practice. If you are trying to achieve an aesthetic, you will make different decisions than if you are trying to live well with what you have.
What I kept
When I set up my apartment in Vancouver, I tried to think about what my grandmother would consider essential. Not to imitate her life - I am not her, and Vancouver is not Kyoto - but to use the same starting question. What do I actually need? What do I use regularly, with pleasure? What earns its space?
I got rid of about half of what I owned. Some of it went to people who wanted it; some of it went to a charity shop; some of it, honestly, went into a bin bag because it had been sitting in a box since 2019 and I had no idea what it was. The space that was left was not empty. It was ready.