I was recently asked by a Japanese person if we have gomi yashiki (trash houses) in the United States. In Japan, such houses refer to those whose inhabitants hoard things to the point that their stuff is overflowing onto the streets, sometimes impeding traffic.
We do have gomi yashiki in the U.S. I should know — my parents' house used to be stuffed to the brim with junk. Things were not flowing out onto the streets, but that's not because they didn't have enough stuff to "flow." It's that their house was big enough to hide it all.
As each child "left the nest," my parents would fill his or her room with stuff. At 80 years old, my mother and father were still living in a six-bedroom, two-story house with a swimming pool. "How could we ever move to a smaller house?" my mother would say. "Where would we put all this stuff?"
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