Get personal with your poo, like a samurai

0:28Hey, this is Christy from Lululemon. When you finally find your thing, you want the whole world to know about that thing. So you use a thing called Canva to make it an even bigger and better thing. Whether you want to create flyers for that thing, make presentations for that thing, or design merch for that thing, you can do anything. So people can see your thing, feel your thing, love your thing. The next thing you know, it's a thing. Canva, the thing that makes anything a thing. Where is Daredevil? I'm right here. Don't miss the return of Marvel Television's Daredevil Born Again. So what's next?

1:11We're going to take this city back. In an all-new season, now streaming only on Disney+. They're hunting us. It's time we started hunting them. I can work with them. This should be tons of fun. Marvel Television's Daredevil, Born Again, streaming only on Disney+. Let's get personal with what goes into our toilets, like the residents of Edo, Japan. Coming up in this episode of Life Lessons from History is my chat with Dr Chris Harding from Edinburgh University. He's an expert in Japanese history and he reckons that we should look back at how the Japanese in the Edo period dealt with their waste to get some inspiration for how we could live today.

1:52Welcome to Life Lessons from History with me, Dave Musgrove. The concept is simple. I find a great historian and I ask them to propose a life lesson from history. Some learning from the past that will help us today to live better, happier, healthier or more productive lives.

2:14Let's get to the chat with Chris. The first question I asked him was just to explain what we mean by Edo Japan. So this was Japan from really the early 1600s through to the middle of the 1800s. It's an extraordinary period of peace in Japan run by Tokugawa shogunates who are based in Edo which is now Tokyo. That's their kind of nerve center. And for a while Edo I think they have huge challenges with waste because around 1700 and for a while after that Edo was I think the biggest city in the world, even ahead of Paris. So how you bring in what you need, how you get rid of what you don't need, was a huge issue for them.

2:54So we've got a very big sort of urban centre going on. And obviously, as you said, that creates problems in terms of how you get rid of stuff. So when we're talking about waste, what are we talking about? Are we talking about human waste sewage, or are we talking about general waste from consumption? So I think it's both of those things. And it's also how you get rid of dirty water, not human waste, but water that's been used already and that you don't want to use again. So I think those three things were all a bit of a challenge for Edo. One of the problems I think the city had, a couple of problems actually, one was the sheer rate at which it grew after 1600.

3:31So because the new Tokugawa shogunate was based there and it was trying to control the whole country, it would often require feudal lords from elsewhere in Japan to have some of their family living in Edo all year and they would go back and forward between Edo and other parts of Japan. So this city is packed with really important people and it's packed with all the craftspeople, the artisans who are catering to their needs basically. So that rapidity with which it grows, they have to I think innovate quite fast in how they get the essentials into the city. I suppose that's the first of two challenges they faced.

4:09The other one is that Edo is based right near the sea and it's on reclaimed land. So if you want to get fresh water into the city, you can't simply dig wells because if you dig a well, you're just going to end up with seawater and that's not going to be much use for people. So the challenge of bringing fresh water in, getting rid of used water, getting rid of human feces and urine, and also getting rid of your rubbish, all those things the Tokugaj Shogunate has to think about. Yeah, and by what you're saying, they had to think about it very quickly. They had to come up with some sort of fast solutions.

4:44So what did they do in terms of trying to manage the water flow? One of their biggest innovations was in the middle of the 17th century. They created this huge aqueduct, the Tamagawa Aqueduct, which took water from the Tama River all the way into what's now Tokyo. They used these uncut water channels first, and then as the water comes closer into Edo and starts branching out, you have these underground water pipes, mostly made of wood, sometimes made of masonry, which get the water all the way to, if you're lucky enough to have a big samurai home, it'll take it straight into your home. Or if you're one of Edo's more ordinary townspeople, it'll take it into these row houses where multiple families would live.

5:27You'd have a shared well fed by these wooden waterways where you could draw water from. So I think it's amazing that they did that, and And these services were provided not just to the elite of Edo, but to everybody. You know, you had to pay for it. You had to pay your water rates because they're wooden channels. They have to be renewed quite frequently. And you've got water watchmen checking the quality regularly. So there's a brilliant system. You did have to pay for it. But the sense of equality that everyone gets access, ideally, to fresh water, I think is quite important. There was also a sense that you cannot waste this water.

6:05Yes, it comes in and it flows freely, but ideally you would try to use water at least three times before it becomes wastewater. So you might clean your rice with it first, then you might bathe with it, and then after that you might use it to water your plants before finally it gets sent away in these, again, in these channels all the way out to moats and to rivers far away. So it's quite an efficient system for bringing it in, using it well, and then getting rid of it. Okay, so that's really interesting. That plays into our sustainability conversations today, doesn't it? Like being really careful with water usage, not only trying to mitigate excessive usage, but also trying to do some of the things you've just described.

6:48Those are things that people try and do today. Sometimes, some people, some people who are particularly sustainability minded, I suppose. So that sounds like that came from the fact that this was a scarce resource and quite difficult to get their hands on. So did that drive the mentality there, do you think? Is that why people were so careful about how it was used? I think so. I think something else that is really characteristic of the Edo period is the control that the shogunate, so the ruling shoguns, have over the rest of the population, you know, in Edo and also around Japan. the way they led the country was according to these Confucian or Neo-Confucian ideals, which basically meant that the people in charge, the people at the top, have the right and the authority to decide the minutiae of people's lives.

7:37So not just making basic laws, but talking about what different people from different classes could wear, talking about what they could eat, getting involved really in their everyday habits, their social habits. There was this flurry of edicts coming from the top down towards people living in Edo about exactly how you should run your life. And I think there's a sense amongst ordinary people, because this is a very hierarchical society and people are to an extent bought into these values, that we are going to accept the right of the authorities to tell us how to manage our water, how to use it, how to get rid of human feces and urine.

8:16With societies that don't have that social dynamic, I think it's quite hard actually to get people on board with the kind of recycling that we're thinking about. So that's quite an uncomfortable mentality for us in the West, isn't it? We don't tend to think about having that sort of top-down level control over what we do. What should we take from that? How should we sort of respond to that challenge, do you think? Yeah, I don't think we'd sort of accept a prime minister telling us in such detail how to live, would we? But there's something else that the Japanese did in the Edo period that I think we could learn from, and maybe we sort of do already to an extent, which is they had actually quite a formal system where little groups of households would keep an eye on one another's behavior.

8:57So there was, you know, we would say snitches get stitches, but actually in the Edo period, people were prepared to cooperate on all sorts of things, but including actually looking out for other people's behaviors. That system, I think more broadly worked because people would feel a sense of responsibility to one another and also a sense of embarrassment or shame if you're not doing the right thing. You know, say these shared toilets, for example, and shared bathing, actually, for many of the townspeople in Edo, if you're not using those facilities as you should, people would know. They would know it's you or it's your family.

9:32And for the sake of pride in your family and for the sake of avoidance of social ostracism, you would do what's required of you and be seen to do it. I'm just thinking, even in a place like the UK, I remember back when we were trying to get people to do less drinking and driving or less smoking in public places. It was as much the sense of doing the wrong thing in front of others, of that culture shifting, you know, about what's really acceptable and what you might feel a bit sheepish or embarrassed about doing. I think that's quite effective. And I think that's something that Edo Japan did really well than we can probably learn from.

10:09Yeah, no, that is very interesting. So like a certain social stigma attached to a sense of community and neighbourliness. That's interesting, actually. It's one of the things that I've come across when I've been doing these life lessons conversations with historians. A lot of people say that they point back to moments in time when we seem to have had more of a sense of a community, more responsibility for what we're doing, and I guess less individualism, which again is uncomfortable because we want to be individual. We want to feel like we've got agency and autonomy to do what we want to do, isn't it?

10:39So we're going to continue to sort of butt up against that a bit, I suspect. I think so. And I think even in Japan, actually, now they are a democracy, individual right. There's a sense of the dignity of each person. And as you say, that need for autonomy. In my experience, Japan at its best now manages to marry all that and maintain all that with a sense also of looking out for people around you, looking at what's going, looking at how people are, what they might need, the impact of your behavior on others. And I think it's maybe me becoming a certain age, but when I go to Japan and then come back to the UK, people playing with their phones or having their music or their video on out loud, rather than having headphones or something, it just, it seems quite wrong.

11:23And it wouldn't happen in Japan, because I think there is still that sense of you're causing an annoyance to others, which we've maybe slightly lost or are slightly losing here. But that's something else we can perhaps learn from Japan, because it isn't the very controlled society that it was in the period that we're talking about here, the Edo period. Yes, some people will still say it's rather a conformist place and that there can be social pressures that people in Japan, plenty of people in Japan still feel uncomfortable with. But I like to think they're getting the balance generally right and that we could yeah we could maybe learn a thing or two okay well can we can we talk a little bit more about toilets for a second i know that's a slightly uh why not unusual but so we talked about how they got the water in and how they were careful about how they used it and you mentioned earlier they had shared toilets sometimes what what sort of toilet arrangements did they have and what did they do to get rid of the waste that they produced their bodily waste So they had a really good system actually from early on.

12:23And it is a form of sort of circular living, a kind of recycling. So both human feces and human urine would be collected. And again, this comes down from the top. You would collect it in a cesspool in your house if you had your own toilet or if you're in these row houses where multiple families are living, you'd have at least one shared cesspool covered tightly with a lid. And then as soon as possible, you would have people coming in, taking it away in buckets, in ox carts, sometimes on boats that would travel along canals. And it would be out into the countryside to be used by farmers. And the farmers would pay you for this, right?

13:03They would give you rice or vegetables or there'd be some other kind of bartering arrangement because it was so valuable. So human waste wouldn't stay very long in the city. there was this constant traffic out of Edo by all these different routes into the fields and then when you get out into the farmland around Edo there would be these huge pits in the ground next to the fields and you would put feces in the urine into there and again cover it up tightly sometimes mixing some rice straw in with it and what I think you're doing there is you're giving it a chance to decompose let it settle there isn't the scientific awareness in Japan in this period that obviously we have now.

13:41But nevertheless, there was an awareness that you have to let this stuff sit and change and become stable before you can then spread it onto the fields. One sign of how much this meant to the farmers actually was that now and again, they would petition the shogunate to make the system work better so that they could get more of this stuff for their fields. And at least one occasion we know in the city of Osaka, a little bit smaller than Edo, but quite a substantial place, fights used to break out between different groups of farmers because they wanted access to the fertilizer or the night soil from samurai households.

14:14Because samurai ate better, and so they reasoned the quality of the fertilizer would be higher. And so there was even a sort of a sense of where the best fertilizer would be coming from. So, you know, you get a sense of a really highly developed system, I think, here. That's fascinating. Did they separate the liquid from the solids, do you know? Or did they kind of collect it all in one job, Lord? So for the most part, it was all together. But there was an attempt, this never happened in reality, but there was an attempt to persuade the authorities in Edo to actually install, I'm not sure what you would call them, but let's say receptacles for urine in the street so that passers-by who were caught short could use those.

14:56And then that would be an extra way of collecting them so that even small amounts of urine could be collected and could be taken away. The authorities said no to that, whether it's a matter of cleanliness or decorum, or because they don't like taking advice from other people, and I'm not quite sure. But that just gives you a sense of the extent to which this material was considered so valuable, alongside what I think is there from Japan from centuries and centuries earlier, which is a sense of the value of cleanliness, partly in terms of personal hygiene, I think also partly in terms of Japanese religion, the Shintō religion, which has a great emphasis placed on ritual purity.

15:34So these things seem to have come together, and as I say, they long predate the period that we're talking about. Okay so the stuff was deemed to be valuable and rightly so because obviously a good fertilizer and so people were coming through the city what on a daily basis collecting this stuff up and like some sort of receptacle carting out of the city to these sort of designated points from where the farmers could presumably come and get what they wanted is that kind of roughly how the system worked? Yeah absolutely so your first the first stage of the journey would be collecting it all into a bucket and I suppose it's important actually is part of that first step to realize that unlike some other cultures around the world, there wasn't really a taboo in Japan about handling human waste.

16:15So there was no sense that it would defile you or that it was a sort of a shameful thing to be doing. So yeah, collected in buckets and then constant traffic out of the city on ox carts, getting it out to the fields. And also Japan had this quite well-developed network of canals and you could get a huge amount of this stuff onto canal boats and get it out of the city that way. So this was happening literally every day. You didn't want to let this stuff sit in the cesspools any longer than you had to. It seems by all accounts to be a very efficient way of doing it. It's very interesting that they didn't have a sense of sort of disgust to human excrement because clearly that's something that it feels like we've always had in the West.

16:57Certainly, you know, conversations I've had with toilet historians, of whom there are quite a few, they all make the point that there was a sense of disgust. It was quite often framed around the odours, like the miasma, the smell that people were particularly worried about. Was there a concern about odour and smell in Japan? I think potentially there would have been if, for example, you had people using the streets as toilets or pouring this stuff out of a house and letting it kind of fester. I mean, it's interesting that when the first European visitors come to Japan in the period that we're talking about towards the end of it, one of the things that a lot of them say is that the streets of Edo don't smell anything like Paris or London, for example.

17:37So I think you partly alleviate that problem of odour, which I think would bother people, by putting this stuff in receptacles and having a lid on the top and then having it taken away before it has the chance to kick up too much of a stink. So although there was no taboo against it in Japan, I think at the same time there was a sense that it literally has its place in these cesspools which the authorities required people to have and which were regularly emptied. And that if it's got its place and there's a system and everyone knows about it, then there isn't really much need for embarrassment.

18:10You just get on with it. I think that was very much the culture. So it sounds like they didn't make any efforts to introduce like a waterborne sewerage system, the sort of thing that we started to see develop in 19th century European cities particularly. They weren't employing that sort of system in Eda, Japan, that wasn't the case. That's right. The only system they had that was a little bit like that was for taking away wastewater. So water that had been used two or three times, as we've been saying, but human waste, not just yet. That was the development of a slightly later period. So what do we know about that?

18:42When did they start to introduce waterborne systems? Was that in the Meiji period, as you just talked about? Yes. Yeah, that's right. So Japan goes through in the 1850s, 1860s, this radical upheaval, where at the end of the 1860s, a decision is made to get rid of the shogunate, install a new group of leaders and really open up to the West in all sorts of ways. And that included looking at how big Western cities like London and Paris were planned out, how they work from a structural point of view, including a sewerage point of view. And that's when you start to get gradually bit by bit in cities like Tokyo, as Edo becomes, the rudiments of these systems.

19:19I think one thing to say, though, is that even in that Meiji era, when you do get that development starting to happen from the late 19th century onwards, the mechanics of actually getting water into Tokyo, as it starts to be called, don't really change. So they use the same roots that they've had since really the middle of the 17th century, but they start to replace the wood with metal. So they make these sorts of upgrades, but the basic system really seems to have held on quite well, certainly into the early part of the 20th century in a place like Tokyo. Yeah. So certainly that timeline aligns what was going on in Britain and Europe, the great sewerage schemes of Baseljet in London, for instance, in the mid-19th century.

20:03But that was all framed, as far as I understand it, in terms of a big drive to basically just get the waste away, just move it away. There were some attempts to try and create sewage farms where the material was piped to farms and just delivered onto mangle-wurzel fields. But I think it was the the pure volume of material that was being produced that meant that that wasn't really a feasible long-term solution so it had to just eventually it was just washed away that was the only solution they could come up with and that was all driven by just a need to a desire to get it away for for you know public health reasons as much as anything else once people had worked out there was a problem does that start to become the same issue in japan like just a need to just like we just need to move this away from us or do you still have that sense that there is value in it and there are other things that could be derived from this produce?

20:54Yeah, I think in two ways you do start to get in Japan a sense that we need to get this stuff out, not simply for practical reasons. And I think there are a couple of things going on there. One is a sense that the eyes of the West are now on Japan. After Japan enters this period of rapid opening up and modernisation in the late 19th century, there is always a sense of comparison. can we match up to Britain? Can we match up to France? Can we match up to the United States? And that's really across a broad spectrum of life, not just can we have an economy that's big enough, can we have an army and navy that are strong enough?

21:30These things matter to Japan's leaders, but it's also a sense of, are we as civilized as these places? And so they'll do things like creating ballrooms where Japanese men and ladies, gentlemen and ladies can get togged up and dance to sort of European classical music. So in all sorts of ways, there's a kind of keeping up with the neighbours thing going on here. And I think the sense of basic decorum, really, in a city like Edo starts to be thought as really important. So I suppose that's one thing. The other thing is, as part of this opening up, Japan starts to get all these brand new Western medical and scientific ideas coming in.

22:07And they take these really seriously, partly because they see the next few decades in terms of international competition as being not just about a big economy and the latest weapons, but also having a population that's physically strong enough and physically robust enough to stand up to the West. They worry, for example, that Japanese people are a bit shorter than Brits or French or certainly Scandinavians. And they think, well, what can we do about that? How can we improve our diet? How can we improve the provision of midwifery to women so that they can have babies safely and bring up strong children?

22:42And across all these areas of life, they're thinking physically about how you can improve, I suppose, the flesh and blood of Japan. And so keeping the population physically healthy becomes important. And understanding the danger of cities that are rapidly growing but remain unclean also becomes an important part of that. And I think that really motivates Japan to install some of these systems. Fascinating. Right. We need to sort of draw this to a close, Chris. But I just wonder, do you do anything in your daily life that sort of draws on what you've just been talking about? This interest in a circular economy, I guess, and this sort of this interesting approach to sustainability.

23:20Do you, for instance, have a composting toilet, if that's not too close a question to ask? You're very welcome to ask it. We don't have a composting toilet at home. I suppose we do have a kind of influence from Japanese culture. My wife is from Japan and we're bringing our children up to sort of have a foot in both cultures, I suppose. So some of what we've been talking about gets kind of drawn across into our household. I suppose one of the things we do for our benefit and the benefit of the children is before we eat, it's very common in Japan to do this. You put your hands together and you say, itadakimasu, which isn't particularly a religious thing.

23:57It's more, I mean, the words literally mean we're about to receive. And so there's a chance just to pause really briefly and have a sense of gratitude for what you're about to get. Partly it's about, this goes back to Shinto, I think, the life energy of the plants and the animals, but there's also a sense of not wasting it. I suppose another key word which we hear a lot around our household is motainai, which means what a waste. So, you know, if someone isn't clearing their plate or if they're throwing something away that you could maybe use for something else, maybe an old bit of clothing that can be turned into a dish rag or whatever else it might be.

24:34We try to instill that. I'm not sure how successful it is. I've got a teenage son who, rather than say he tied a gimase before he eats, will say sort of mas and then kind of dig in. So it's not always 100%, but we do do our best. And then we have a little dog, a little chihuahua, who is our sort of mini recycling machine, who tries to do what he can to get rid of as many of our leftovers as possible. Maybe the other thing we do, though, I think, is we've got an inherited sense of shame and guilt when we do chuck more away than we should. I'm not sure that that drives our behaviour as much as it perhaps ought to do, but we have a healthy sense of, should we really be throwing this much away?

25:12And, you know, what might the neighbours think? So, I mean, that's a mixture of Japanese and British, I'm sure. Yeah. But does this sense that waste is bad and something to be guilty about, it sounds like that is something which you draw from your understanding of Japanese history and the fact that they were they were very motivated by that they felt that that was a bad thing and they didn't want waste to be seen particularly in what you talked about in terms of water usage but i guess more broadly that's a sentiment that they felt yeah i think it is i think the big image that i have when i think about that period in japan and i think about how i live now is a circle that whether it's the as we're saying of the life force of of an animal the life force of a of a plant or you know in a more practical sense packaging using packaging to get things into the house and then sticking it in the recycling as as much as possible imagining the whole thing as a circle and trying to cooperate with that and trying to promote it um i think that really does carry across from what i understand of japan and what my wife brings with her from japan and and how we live now that was dr chris harding from the university of edinburgh his book short history of japan is out now and you can listen to him talking at more length about the history of Tokyo in an episode of our History's Greatest Cities podcast channel.

26:29Check that out. And let me know if you have a composting toilet. You can message me at lifelessons at historyextra.com and follow me at historyextra.substack.com. Thanks for listening.