Wim Wenders' Oscar-nominated film Perfect Days was recently released and follows the daily life of Hirayama, a Tokyo municipal employee in charge of cleaning public toilets. The film highlights the social and cultural differences that exist in the way this space is approached, its visibility and also issues of hygiene and sanitation.
Perfect days partially reflects an experiment developed by the Tokyo Toilet Project launched by the NGO The Nippon Foundation. Its goal was to rehabilitate 17 public toilets in the Shibuya area to turn them into works of art, all of them free and usable by everyone regardless of sex, age or disability.
One of the toilets, designed by architect Shigeru Ban –Concordia Princess of Asturias Award 2022–, is equipped with colored transparent cubicles that become opaque when the door is closed. This device addresses two concerns that users may have about toilets: checking their cleanliness and ensuring that no one is inside.
The project was born because a series of stereotypes (public toilets were considered dark, smelly and scary) limited their use. Even today, many women are reluctant to use the facilities in Japan. Even in a country that is a leader in high-tech toilets, these avoidance strategies express processes of differentiation and exclusion. By aestheticizing the toilets and making them another element of urban decoration, this project shows the unique place they occupy in Japanese culture.
Any action in relation to toilets cannot simply be based on a single geographical unit, but must take into account all the effects they have on society, from their location to their maintenance. Even more so when, in this case, the toilets, sublimated by art, come to reinforce the centrality of Tokyo.
Around the world, public toilets bear witness to the complexity of shared public spaces. In Europe, they are often synonymous with dirt and discomfort, and evoke spaces used for purposes for which they were not designed: drug use, graffiti, sexual encounters or shelter (for those who lack it), for example.
They are multipurpose spaces that reflect gender inequalities. Women need to go to the bathroom more than men (especially during pregnancy and menstruation) and spend more time there, but there are fewer closed toilets than urinals.
Furthermore, the presence of certain population groups (immigrants, drug addicts, homeless people) can provoke abusive reactions from public authorities. In our so-called developed societies, defining who cleans the toilets in the domestic sphere, the workplace and public spaces usually says a lot about relations of domination and the reproduction of gender roles.
The topic of excrement is usually taboo. However, the concern is such that the UN has celebrated “World Toilet Day” since 2013, remembering that a third of the world's population does not have an adequate place to relieve themselves.
This leads to numerous problems: violence, exclusion from social activities (particularly for women and children), health consequences (including the spread of epidemics such as cholera)... The World Toilet Organization, a specialized non-profit organization , promotes this day and numerous projects around the world.
So there are many logistical and technical issues: septic tanks to empty, ways to develop dry toilets or adapt to the phenomenon of open defecation, excrement treatment and recycling systems, or even reuse of excrement for agriculture...
Attitudes toward toilets may reflect social hierarchies. For example, in Haiti, owning a toilet has become a sign of prestige, especially after the 2010 earthquake, when many NGOs helped build them. However, its maintenance is entrusted to the bayakous, the emptyers who carry out their work without any safety or hygiene measures, and who are especially despised by society.
Across rural India, manual waste disposal remains the most degrading practice. Although the ban on this activity was reinforced with a law in 2013, this profession, essentially reserved for the lowest castes, “untouchables” and disadvantaged tribes, continues.
Since 1993, the construction of dry toilets has been prohibited, but they continue to exist and, paradoxically, they are being reactivated – sometimes even by NGOs – for reasons of accessibility in areas not connected to the sewage network.
Dry toilets allow you to separate waste streams, recycle waste resources and significantly save on water consumption. In the West, this ecological and decentralized form of sanitation embodies a certain idea of ecological transition. However, in India, the problematic nature of its management is far from meaning that for the most marginalized populations.
In practice, manual garbage collection continues, with the approval of local authorities, in the clogged sewers of large cities. Women, in particular, continue to use their hands to clean feces and carry it away from their homes. The Indian Railways is the other major employer of women and men working as manual cleaners. In India, defecating along roads is common, especially in cities.
Within the Malian refugee camps in Niger, NGOs installed collective toilets in 2012. They were quickly privatized by Tuareg nobles (Imajaghan), who placed padlocks on the doors to prevent access to less privileged social groups.
However, these toilets are maintained by the Bella (or Iklan), considered, in this highly hierarchical society, slaves or servants with few rights and little remuneration, who live outside the camps and are not authorized to use the toilets. They go to the desert to relieve themselves. Supposedly accessible to everyone, toilets are used to reproduce mechanisms of exclusion and domination.
Toilets can also reveal spatial hierarchies. For example, while large metropolises have largely developed technical sewage networks, the paradigm of toilets connected to a centralized network now seems ill-adapted to the morphology of cities in the Global South.
Too dispersed, fragmented and polycentric, they also house a large floating population that lives in informal settlements and has no “right” to be connected to the sewer network. These cities depend, therefore, on decentralized or temporary infrastructures that are ultimately perpetuated through various maintenance devices. Or, as in the Kibera shantytown (Nairobi), other practices are developed, such as flying toilets – polyethylene bags that are then thrown into the trash.
Toilets may also be avoided for fear of violence or insecurity. Around the world, the lack of toilets in schools or their unsanitary conditions exclude many children from education. This is especially true for girls, who cannot change clothes when they menstruate and stay at home. The need to urinate in public also poses problems for women's bodies, because they cannot do it as easily as men. When they do, they are vulnerable to increased risk of sexual assault.
In private and public spaces, when they are shared but not especially taken into account, as in the context of hospital care, the installation and management of toilets acquire real importance and can even be a wealth differentiator.
Beyond taboos, what is not said and the processes of arterealization, toilets are at the center of our daily practices, but also of public policies. Therefore, they are an object of study that, far from being anecdotal, is at the crossroads of issues related to the body and intimacy, mechanisms of social differentiation and hierarchization, economics and ethical issues.
Whether visible or not, high-tech or rudimentary, whether we talk about them in a more hygienic way or with familiarity, the question of toilets is both universal and still little considered by the human sciences, although lately there has been an incipient interest scholar on the subject. It is a good start to see this small corner of the world as an important witness to the problems of our time.
This article was originally published on The Conversation. Anthony Goreau-Ponceaud is a geographer, professor and researcher at the University of Bordeaux Montaigne. Alice Corbet is an anthropologist at the National Center for Scientific Research (CNRS)
