When is hoarding?: Temporal regimes, material time, and the domestic life of accumulations in Japan

Abstract

This article reconsiders hoarding not as a psychological disorder, but as a phenomenon embedded in the temporality of social life. Drawing on ethnographic research in Japan, it explores local understandings of accumulation and disorder in three contexts: the biographical trajectories of participants, the everyday rhythms of consumption and disposal, and the material temporalities that emerge when objects are taken out of circulation. Rather than describing hoarding disorder as an enduring mental health condition, the article shows how domestic accumulations become salient at moments of biographical transition, specifically marriage and/or cohabitation. The contrasting experiences of women and men reveal how domestic accumulations become problematic when they disrupt culturally normative trajectories of household formation and family life. Interviews with participants also reveal systemic barriers to disposal, such as rigid waste collection schedules that privilege middle-class norms, making accumulation a social, not merely personal, deviance. Finally, accumulated objects acquire significance through their temporal suspension outside ordinary circulation, becoming indeterminate things whose meanings are resolved only through later acts of sorting and disposal. Taken together, these findings suggest an alternative understanding of hoarding that traces a path through the thicket of the social field rather than the internal landscape of the psyche.