2023 | 15 min read
‘Tis a fine morning when the stool – smooth, soft, and tapered, in a fine coating of mucous – falls cleanly out of my ass. This, the opening sentence of a short story by the Canadian author Patrik Sampler, is as fine a description as I’ve seen of the link between a perfect bowel movement and a perfect day. Knowing Sampler as well as I do, I suspect that he picked up this idea in Japan.
The poop emoji has become a global signifier of disdain. But in the poop emoji’s cultural homeland of Japan, it’s a symbol of good cheer. It can also represent good fortune, as the child-friendly word for “poop” is a homonym of “luck”. Children are taught early that to poop is good, that crappiness is happiness, that shit is without shame. The unfussy attitude to all things toilet-related in Japan is experienced first as something surprising, then as something humorous, and finally as something wise.
In my first year in Tokyo, I worked as a contract teacher of English at something called a women’s university – a casual job that helped me find my feet in the city. At one time, this university had been a finishing school for the daughters of wealthy families. Now, having pursued a bold campus expansion, it welcomed young women from every social class. I quickly learned that one thing troubled young women of every background, and that thing was constipation.
“Mr David, I’m constipated,” became the catch-all excuse for missing class or doing badly on a test. The students would share updates on which foods to avoid as they were bound to cause constipation. Apples were the worst. Some of the students had been to Catholic schools, so they likely knew the story of how Eve had eaten this forbidden fruit and unwittingly caused the Fall of Man. But it was even worse than that: during the Fall, Eve suffered from terrible constipation. I perfected the art of making a sympathetic face, but I didn’t really know what to say.
To lighten the mood, I’m happy to reveal that the Japanese word for stool, ben, also means convenience. The word for constipation, benpi, means concealed convenience, which some people find to be the least convenient of all the conveniences. The toilet, or benjo, is a convenient place, just like the English public convenience. A convenience store could now be seen for what it really was: a public toilet with a large gift shop attached. Finally, the character ben can also mean correspondence or tidings. What is a stool, after all, if not a correspondence with the body? “Good (or bad) tidings for you,” is the stool’s morning refrain.
Also during those early years, a nurse would loudly interrogate me across a hospital waiting room about the colour of my stool , while other patients absorbed the news and nodded thoughtfully. I was beginning to understand that a healthy Japanese lifestyle treats bodily functions as a matter of public interest. Your individual health is bound up with the health of others, your loved ones especially. Their stools should be your intimate concern. When your partner emerged after a short absence with a spring in their step, you could rejoice in the knowledge that it was one of those “two-poop days”. You could be reticent about many things, but defecation wasn’t one of them. Got something awkward to say? Say it with toilet paper.
Toilets could be approached with an easy transparency, so few Tokyoites seemed to mind when Shibuya Ward unveiled a set of clear-glass public conveniences. Architect Shigeru Ban designed the toilets using a dynamic, switchable glass that dims when the door is locked. The transparent state allows users to check for cleanliness and be completely assured that the toilet is not in use. To inconvenience someone else’s convenience is the worst form of shame. Ban’s designs are installed in and around Yoyogi Park – but they’re currently out of order due to a, quote, problem with the glass.
Ban’s transparent designs are part of a wider scheme called The Tokyo Toilet, in which 16 architects and creators were invited to reimagine public conveniences in Shibuya. Japanese public toilets are clean, but they can also be primitive. That’s why – or is it because? – most people prefer to use the more convenient facilities inside commercial buildings. If you can tell a lot about a nation by the state of its public toilets, what this told you about Japan was that commercial interests had taken over much of the public realm.
Now Shibuya was setting a new trend: the public toilet as public art. But what appears no more than a cute project aimed at upgrading part of the ward’s infrastructure is actually more than it seems. The Tokyo Toilet is an well-funded publicity campaign involving a fast-fashion heir, a progressive ward assembly, a private philanthropic organisation, a German arthouse filmmaker, and – checks script – Japan’s leading manufacturer of ceramic sanitary ware. Their aim? To catapult the Japanese toilet into the global consciousness.
Forty years ago, Tadashi Yanai inherited a small chain of menswear stores from his father. Over the next few decades, he transformed the business into Fast Retailing, better known as Uniqlo, becoming Japan’s richest man in the process. Yanai’s second-born son Koji Yanai, as the third generation in this dynasty, was left wondering how to go about making his own splash in the world. It’s not known exactly when and where he came up with the idea for The Tokyo Toilet, but Koji Yanai had found his calling: he would be the man to bring the Japanese toilet to worldwide acclaim.
Once he had the basic concept in place, Koji Yanai called in some friends. Management of the project was entrusted to the Nippon Foundation, a private philanthropic organisation formerly known as the Sasakawa Foundation, founded by maverick businessman and nationalist Ryoichi Sasakawa, one of the more colourful figures in modern Japanese history. The Nippon Foundation quickly struck a deal with Shibuya ward to play host. Shibuya was, after all, the birthplace of trends and where foreign tourists flocked to see all that was new in Japan.
The Tokyo Toilet, as the project became known, served a multitude of needs. For Shibuya, it would champion the ward’s commitment to accessibility and diversity. For the Nippon Foundation, which is funded by legalised gambling on boat races, it would promote Japanese leadership in water treatment and sanitation, the kind of expertise it wants to export to the world. For another partner, TOTO, it would be a showroom for the latest bathroom equipment. For the 16 architects involved, it was a chance to get creative on a brief.
The grand unveiling was set for 2020, by which time a viral airborne pandemic had turned public toilets into no-go zones and transformed even the humble hand-dryer into an instrument of death. For now, The Tokyo Toilet would be a media event. Its message of cleanliness and accessibility would have to travel through the twisty bends of global toilet culture. And of course the global media was only interested in one thing: transparency. It didn’t matter that Ban’s toilets were only transparent when unoccupied. Just the thought was horrifying enough to be newsworthy outside Japan.
The Tokyo Toilet wasn’t done yet though. Like an advanced bidet, it deployed another arm you didn’t dare dream existed: a Cannes award-winning feature film. German arthouse filmmaker Wim Wenders has a relationship with Japan that goes back to his 1985 documentary Tokyo-Ga, in which he pieced together the life of the legendary director Yasujiro Ozu while also capturing a whimsical portrait of Tokyo in its late-Showa years. Perhaps, wondered Koji Yanai and friends, Wenders could be persuaded to produce a similarly hagiographic treatment of the Japanese throne?
The initial documentary idea that was pitched to Wenders turned into a 2023 feature film called Perfect Days. Based on a screenplay worked up between Wenders and writer Takuma Takasaki, Perfect Days follows a monkish toilet cleaner called Hirayama as he lives out the kind of spartan yet mindful existence often associated with Japanese toilet culture. In the Buddhist tradition, ritual cleaning is one way to let go of the ego, the origin of all suffering. Cleanliness becomes the gateway to serenity, and there’s no better place to start than with the ceramic shrine.
That theme of achieving serenity, of finding your perfect days in the most humble of daily rituals, is echoed in the marketing campaigns of TOTO. Japan’s leading manufacturer of toilets and plumbing supplies was established in 1917 as Toyo Toki, a manufacturer of ceramics in Kitakyushu, an industrial city in western Japan. Toyo Toki had its first flush of success when it made Japan’s first flushing toilet. It later changed its name to TOTO on the way to becoming Japan’s dominant bathroom brand – and a lesson in both the spiritual and practical aspects of exporting Japanese toilet culture to the world.
TOTO’s most celebrated product is the Washlet, which it introduced to the market in 1980. World-renowned as a trusty source of material for travelling cultural commentators in need of cheap laughs, the Washlet is an electronic bidet that doubles as a toilet seat. It includes a retractable warm-water nozzle properly called a “wand” and a seat-warming function known as a “warmlet”. The top-of-the-range Washlet G (for “Gorgeous”) model also comes with a dryer. The Washlet has become an icon of Japanese high-tech toiletry, even though it was actually an American invention.
The predecessor of the Washlet was the world’s first electronic bidet manufactured in the 1960s by the American Bidet Company of New York. Founder Arnold Cohen – whom industry thought-leader bidet.org labels the “Bidet King Extraordinaire” – invented the electronic bidet for people with mobility issues (who couldn’t “reach around”) and a niche market for the product was established in hospitals. Cohen had high hopes of expanding into the consumer market, but he faced resistance. Nobody in America wanted to run Cohen’s ads due to the perceived vulgarity of the product. In 1967, he gave up and agreed to licence the technology to TOTO in Japan.
TOTO’s Washlet was a major improvement on the American design thanks to a 13-year development process and a huge team effort. Wikipedia notes that two of TOTO’s engineers enlisted the help of 300 colleagues to calculate the average location of the human anus. Testing also helped to establish the optimal angle of attack for the water stream (avoiding the dreaded “backwash”) which to this day remains set at 43 degrees. Finally, Japan’s more relaxed attitudes meant there were no problems advertising the Washlet to consumers. In a series of legendary TV spots, avant-garde singing idol Jun Togawa told the nation that her bottom had feelings too.
TOTO claims to have sold 60 million Washlets since 1980, though it doesn’t say how many of those were sold outside Japan. For the last two decades, its sights have been set on a much bigger prize: your entire toilet. TOTO’s flagship product is an integrated toilet called the Neorest, which combines a Washlet with an automatic flushing toilet in one seamless, spacecraft-like package. An appropriate reaction upon encountering one of these sleek sanitary craft is to crouch down in wonder and say things like: “How many litres does this thing do?” and “Which planet have you come from?”
The latest model in the series is called the Neorest NX. The curvesome form of the NX appears to the eye as naturally bulbous and elegantly tapered as if it were sculpted by a sphincter rather than by a human hand. The whole package summons forth a more benign future, bringing to mind Roland Barthes’ encounter with the new Citroën DS at the 1955 Paris Motor Show, where the famed semiotician marvelled at how “elements are juxtaposed and hold together by sole virtue of their wondrous shape.”
Take the Neorest NX for a test drive and you’ll start to wonder how you ever lived without one. As you approach – be confident but not too cocky – the lid rises. It’s happy to see you. Now have a rest. It’s warm, isn’t it? At the touch of a button, the self-cleaning wand emerges through its own little car wash before doing its thing. TOTO’s patented Wonder Wave technology involves the rapid injection of air bubbles into a stream of warm water to generate a pulsing effect that I’ve heard can be quite pleasurable.
When you’re finally done – but stay as long as you like – you don’t get off the Neorest, you depart. Automatically, the Tornado Flush will fire. Only a light swirl of water is needed as the bowl is coated with a ceramic glaze so flawless that filth has nowhere to cling. You can now make a graceful departure as the built-in deodoriser erases all trace of your presence. In the event you don’t use your Neorest for a full eight hours – as though you wouldn’t! – an antibacterial mist will automatically discharge.
One day, the Neorest may be seen as a basic human right. But for now, TOTO is facing a critical challenge: the number of human assholes. This number, which is considered inseparable from the number of people, has been falling steadily in Japan for over a decade. At home, TOTO has countered the collapsing number of assholes by manufacturing new bathroom dreams, also known as the remodelling market. The strategy in Japan has been to establish close ties with the architectural field. TOTO has an architectural publishing division and an architectural bookstore and gallery in Tokyo’s Nogizaka. But for long-term growth, the company must look to other countries where the number of human assholes remains buoyant.
While a common stereotype of plumbers is of globally mobile labour – e.g. Mario – plumbing is in fact an insular trade. Trusted suppliers, locally enforced standards, rules of thumb and other esoteric “knowhow” amount to a closed shop or innovation bottleneck, making the smallest room in the house the most resistant to change. An outlying Japanese company such as TOTO could never win a battle against the conservative ogre of the global plumbing trade. Instead, it would have to appeal to the wealthiest consumers, the kind of people who believe that they deserve the very best and are willing to instruct a local tradesman to make it just so.
“Pure Luxury” is now TOTO’s marketing proposition outside Japan. It offers an image of a successful yet slightly anxious young couple – we can guess why – who dwell in a remote forest setting. The survivors, perhaps, of a major depopulation event. Their modern luxury home is exactly the kind you would associate with people of good taste, except for one small detail: the glass bathroom. It’s designed to be transparent so that passing woodland creatures and less fortunate survivors can gaze inwards and say to themselves: what IS that beautiful ceramic object?
The key vector for introducing that beautiful ceramic object to the world isn’t advertising, however, but tourism. The huge growth in international travel to Japan has given TOTO endless opportunities to demonstrate its wares, from airport bathrooms to public toilets. In the promising Chinese market, TOTO’s strategy has been to get the Neorest into hotels and give guests a luxury experience they might one day decide to take home. But beyond East Asia, the barriers to entering the lucrative home market are high. The world remains unsure if it really wants to spend ten thousand dollars on a toilet. TOTO is on a mission to change global toilet culture.
The Neorest NX owes its resemblance to an alien space-egg to a humdrum feature: its tankless design. While the original flushing toilet’s reliance on gravity gave it an incoherent, janky appearance, the Neorest does away with the cistern and injects water from below. This “Tornado Flush”, in which water travels around the bowl, uses just 3.8 litres of water per flush. That may not sound overly impressive – but it would have been unthinkable a few decades ago. For the longest time, the 6-litre flush was a mythical barrier that many in the plumbing industry thought would never be broken.
Even though Japan is not an especially water-scarce nation, TOTO once regarded water conservation as the strategic zone of competition that would enable it to conquer the world. Ahead of the 1992 introduction of a 1.6 gallon (6 litre) standard in the US, TOTO invested heavily in water-saving technology. Water savings of 30% were achieved just by thinking outside the bowl. In Japan, TOTO constructed a six-storey building with transparent plumbing so that its engineers could observe the flow of solid waste with the human eye. The engineers understood that the flush only finishes when the shit hits the sewage system.
TOTO later switched to using computer-aided engineering tools to simulate flow characteristics of fluids and solid bodies. Having long ago smashed the 6-litre barrier, it could easily go below 3 litres. This is enough to cause anxiety in the plumbing industry worldwide. Plumbers and plumbing equipment manufacturers everywhere share grave concerns about the consequences of reducing the volume of water in a flush below a certain level. For now, 3 litres remains a pipe dream. TOTO must wait for the world to catch up.
Behind all this cleanovation, however, there was another more troubling issue that just wouldn’t go away. Typical of many Japanese companies, TOTO took an incremental approach to sustainability: squeezing out more convenience from less waste, while always leaving the fundamental thing untouched. The fundamental thing in this case was the madness of flushing solid human waste into the municipal water supply. When we pressed that button and watched our beautiful creation swirl away, the convenience was meant for us, not for others.
Today, the percentage of households that flush human waste into the water supply is a key metric in evaluating a city’s level of progress. In its own dash to modernity, Japan had adopted the municipal sewer system developed by Joseph Bazalgette in London during the 19th Century. But in Edo and other premodern cities in Japan, human waste had once been a precious commodity. I recall some interesting facts in Susan Hanley’s Everyday Things in Premodern Japan. Sure enough: “The most important difference between waste disposal in Japan and in the West was that in Japan human excreta was not regarded as an economic ‘bad’ – something that one paid to have removed – but rather as a product with a positive economic value.”
She goes on to describe a premodern circular economy in which night soil from the cities was collected for use as a fertiliser by surrounding farm villages. At first, human waste was exchanged for vegetables, until it became so valuable that it could only be purchased with silver. As human waste became a commodity, ownership rights were established that reflected the feudal practices of the day. In Osaka, landlords had rights to the faecal matter produced by occupants of a dwelling, while the urine belonged to the tenants.
Night soil is still collected today from remote pockets of Tokyo yet to be connected to the sewer system. It all goes to a facility in Shinagawa, where it’s diluted with water and released into the sewer system. The other inheritance of the night soil market is that unfussy attitude towards crap. I don’t doubt that the entire city of Tokyo could be converted back to a circular faecal economy if the right incentives were put in place. The price of industrial fertiliser has been on the rise for some time, and would-be entrepreneurs are monitoring the market with interest. Shit could once again become a commodity and not just a conversation-starter.
The Tokyo Toilet had, in this sense, been a huge missed opportunity. The 16 designs were intriguing to behold – but when it came down to business, not one of them dared to challenge the supremacy of Big Flush. Had a circular solution been proposed instead, the world would now be looking on with envy as Japan demonstrated how to turn tourist turds into metaphorical gold, while Wim Wenders would be good-naturedly explaining to journalists at Cannes why he decided to make a film about the Japanese tradition of harvesting stools for economic gain.
As for me, I thought I would never stoop so low as to turn out 3000 words about high-tech toilets. That’s not what I had in mind when I began writing City of Signs. Yet here I am, pants around ankles, exposed to the world for what I really am: a fountain of crude stereotypes about Japan. Never mind, I’ll give it a title so boring that no one will want to read it. Before doing that, I reflect once more on those formative years passed with constipated young women. One thing is clear to me now. By choosing not to reciprocate with news of my own bowel movements, it only shows that it was I who was actually constipated. But now, thanks to Japan, I can confidently talk shit with the best of them.