How to Plan a Japanese-Style Kitchen

@Narelle DeBoos your kitchen looks great. I especially love the handles that you chose - they are very beautiful! Thank you for sharing.

@ persimmonmswift..thanks for that contribution explaining the other side of that culture that seems to promote an unnusual tendency to hoard just about everything, but that to me seemed contradictory with the austerity and almost deprivation suggested by these kitchen designs.
I hosted a Japanese backpacker couple for a month or so...Every nook and cranny, wherever there was a knob or a shelf, including the picture rail/shelf around the walls in general and in their room, Including under the bed, was crammed with almost a doomsday array of bulk foodstuffs and bibs and bobs...I could not believe it since I thought that the 'emptiness' philosophy applied also to their domestic living...Apparently not! It was staring me in the face, turning my home into a storage depot, and the hedges in the front garden into a laundry drying area! Silly me! Of couese the austerity is necessarily spiritual !...
The living mode is something else. .So - not incorrect to suspect that these kitchen designs express a release from what you describe as "the broil of everyday life..and what I described in much more clumsy terms as places where all the "dissecring" is suddenly hidden along with the excruciating stress of the everyday. .
One of these Japanese-inspired kitchens seems to draw the onlooker into...the austerity of the temple in one's own home! To a place of respite where there appears to be no clutter whatsoever...almost no sign of any activity at all, especially kitchen kind. I get the whole picture now...a dream kitchen...or it could be any other room, since, in my home, even under the bed became a pantry for food and kitchen utensil storage of an almost doomsday frenetic. But, the ceiling of my small kirchen got covered with hooks from which, unabashedly, hung all sorts of things used everyday... as you describe above, even one of those plastic "chandeliers" with plastic pegs for dishrags!
So that's a real Japanese kitchen where nobody is invited to visit and all the other places are the "serenity" areas..where all the "stuff" is hidden in any nook and cranny available to give a sense of calm! Interesting concept.
Weeeell, this may not be the most correct explanation...but at least now I know that all the everyday accumulations are made to disappear to where one would least expect ( and where likely to attract mice and other creepy crawlies) for the sake of convincing oneself and others that one is absolutely governed by the philosophies of the culture of restraint and minimalism.
.Where better to demonstrate this than in an enormous modern, sleek and shiny empty kitchen space...(that would ususlly be up to the ceiling with all the stuff.)...but with all the stuff either hidden in the cupboards or under the bed?!
Allow me these rather graphic musings founded in absolute fact and reality....I've found it quite difficult to accept this idea despite I've been in the middle of it, but now I know why the Japanese-inspired kitchen idea does not convince me. I would, nevertheless, find it extremely informative to experience life, everyday busy life, in such a kitchen in full swing. Would there perhaps need to be another little cluttered kitchen somewhere else in the house where all the domestic flurry happens ? Again...all interesting considerations and insights. Thanks, persimmonswift for this intriguing mental excursion! Again, in case anyone thinks I'm 'bashing' somebody...these are all concepts suggested by my own experienced realities and insights based on realities experienced by another. Its been quite a unique trip on Houzz this time. around!

How to style a Japanese kitchen, one row of cabinets, two burner gas stove that’s not much more than a camp stove and that doesn’t come with the apartment, no oven or perhaps a toaster oven, a whizz Bang rice cooker, forget about a dishwasher, lots of clutter because there’s no room for a pantry. And the washing machine might be in there too, or it could be just outside your back foot and on the street. That’s pretty typical unless you are very wealthy. Japanese kitchens tend to be pretty utilitarian places. The food that comes out of them, however, is often sublime.