Marie Kondō

Early life

Kondo was born on 9 October 1984 in Osaka, Japan. She has an older brother and a younger sister.

Kondo claims her study of neatness began at age 5, when feng shui became trendy in Tokyo, Japan; its Japanese equivalent was called fusui. Her mother "was applying the method, but to [Kondo's] eye, the house was not tidy enough to have the feng shui effect". As a result, Kondo began implementing the "tidying up" process at this age to help her mother's efforts.

Education and early career

Kondo attended the Chūō Ward Hisamatsu Elementary School.

Afterwards, she attended private Quaker school Friends Girls Junior & Senior High School in Mita, Minato, Tokyo.

In junior school, Kondo ran into the classroom to tidy up bookshelves while her classmates were playing in physical education class. Whenever there were nominations for class roles, she did not seek to be the class representative or the pet feeder. Instead, she yearned to be the bookshelf manager to continue tidying up books. She said she experienced a breakthrough in organizing one day: "I was obsessed with what I could throw away. One day, I had a kind of nervous breakdown and fainted. I was unconscious for two hours. When I came to, I heard a mysterious voice, like some god of tidying telling me to look at my things more closely. And I realized my mistake: I was only looking for things to throw out. What I should be doing is finding the things I want to keep. Identifying the things that make you happy: that is the work of tidying."

She founded her organising consulting business when she was 19 and a sociology student at Tokyo Woman's Christian University. In her senior year, she wrote her capstone thesis, titled "Tidying up as seen from the perspective of gender".

She spent five years as an attendant maiden at a Shinto shrine.

Kondo married Kawahara Takumi in 2012. At the time they met, Kawahara was working in sales-support and marketing at a corporation in Osaka. Once Kondo's career was established, he left his job to become her manager and, eventually, CEO of Konmari-Media, LLC.

The couple have two daughters and a son. After getting married, they lived in Tokyo; the couple later moved to San Francisco and then Los Angeles.

After the birth of her third child, Kondo's rigorous attitude towards tidying her home relaxed in order to make room for more personal priorities at this stage of her life.