Waste

If you complain about gadgets having too many features, I wonder what you’d have to say about the famous (notorious?) toilets of Japan. I mean, their toilets can play music, have “featured buttons”, and “cleaning sprays that automatically sanitized”. Like any foreigner, Roma Agarwal, author of Built, experimented:

“I did press a few buttons and regretted it pretty quickly – but hey, I felt cleaner afterwards, if a little violated.”

 

The Japanese interest in, er, “solid human waste” was established centuries back, writes Agarwal. No, it wasn’t some kind of weird fetish; it was a necessity. The land wasn’t too fertile, but the population was booming, and so increasing food production was literally a life and death matter. It also meant the soil was being depleted of nutrients at an alarming rate since leaving the land uncultivated for any period wasn’t an option:

“They found the answer in their own sanitation: the burgeoning population created a lot of waste.”

 

The rulers therefore allowed for “solid human waste” (aka night soil) to be traded. Yes, carried in ships from the cities to the farm lands:

“The turd trade was soon big business.”

So much so that night soil was soon more valuable than vegetables!

“By the eighteenth century, people were buying it (night soil) for silver.”

Inevitably, such a valuable commodity needed laws on who owned it: If you were a tenant, your faecal matter belonged to the landlord, though your urine was still yours. All this, in turn, impacted the housing market:

“The more tenants that landlords had, the more waste they could collect, so the cheaper the rent.”

Lawmakers officially recognized guilds and associations to determine “fair price” for sale to farmers. But the price was still often very high, leading to theft and harsh sentences.

 

All this night soil business though had an unexpected benefit:

“Because waste was collected so obsessively and carefully, the water sources people used to collect drinking water were less likely to be contaminated.”

That, along with cultural practices like drinking boiled water in the form of tea as well as cultural taboos on blood, death, and “purification” rituals is why the Japanese suffered far lower mortality rates than the West in the mid-seventeenth to mid-eighteenth century period!

 

You can find a good story, with unexpected twists and turns in almost anything…