Let’s think before we flush, with Dr Christopher Harding

There is a campsite at the foot of the South Downs which has tremendous toilets. In a corner of the field, you’ll find a gaggle of handsome timber cubicles, boasting rustic carpentry and impeccable cleanliness. Each cubicle has a raised box inside, with a hole in the middle framed by a comfortable wooden seat. Obviously that’s where you do your business. Then you throw in a handful or two of sawdust from a bucket to the side, and that’s the job done – no flushing involved (obviously you wash your hands, but there are taps outside for that).

It’s a relaxingly rural experience that would encourage anyone to dwell on the merits of water-free composting toilets, for that is what they are. You can even educate yourself on what happens to the waste you and your fellow campers are producing because there is an informative handout explaining how it’s turned into a rich compost rather than being washed away to a sewage treatment works.

It’s the sort of thing that the residents of Edo period Japan would have been at ease with. I spoke to Dr Christopher Harding, a scholar of Japanese history at the University of Edinburgh, and his Life Lesson from History is that we could learn a thing or two from the way that the Japanese historically dealt with their waste.

Peace, prosperity and the problem of poo

The Edo period runs from the early 1600s to the middle of the 19th century, an era of peace overseen by the Tokugawa shogunate based in Edo, now Tokyo. With peace came prosperity, and Edo grew to be the largest city in the world at the start of the 18th century. That urban explosion also meant an explosion of excrement, which had to be attended to.

You might imagine that the Edo solution was to build sewers and flush it away, particularly as the Japanese at the time were big innovators in municipal water management.

“They created this huge aqueduct, the Tamagawa Aqueduct, which took water from the Tama river all the way into what’s now Tokyo,” notes Chris. “They used uncut water channels first, and then as the water comes closer into Edo and starts branching out, you have underground water pipes, mostly made of wood, sometimes made of masonry, which if you’re lucky enough to have a big samurai home, brings water straight into your house. Or if you’re one of Edo’s more ordinary townspeople, it’ll take it into row houses where multiple families would live. You’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 these services were provided not just to the elite of Edo but to everybody.”

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With all the effort to get fresh water into the city, the residents were very mindful of not wasting it. They used it several times over – cleaning rice first, then bathing in it, then watering their plants – before it was channelled away into moats or rivers. What it wasn’t used for was flushing away sewage. The citizens of Edo knew that their poo was a valuable commodity, to be gathered and used, rather than just removed.

People did their business in shared cesspits, and then on a regular basis, collectors would come and empty them and take the waste away in buckets, oxcarts or sometimes on canal-boats. It would be stored in huge pits outside the city, mixed with rice straw, and allowed to decompose, before local farmers took it to manure their fields. Vegetables were returned from the fields to the city in return for the human fertiliser coming the other way.

The citizens of Edo knew that their poo was a valuable commodity, to be gathered and used, rather than just removed

This was valuable stuff, and the waste from the samurai was particularly prized because of the perceived better quality of the poo they produced, given their richer diets. In Osaka, Chris explained, “fights used to break out between different groups of farmers because they wanted access to the fertiliser – or the night soil – from samurai”.

The economics of excrement

According to Leicester University’s Dr Richard Jones, talking to me recently about the history of manure on the HistoryExtra podcast, this was not unique to Japan. “It has been traditional, in Asia in particular, to make more use of human excrement than has been the case in Europe. There are a number of reasons why that should be the case. The great global historian Alfred Crosby argued that Europe came to economic dominance in the medieval period because the continent had a lot of large domestic animals, and they provided power and protein, but above all, they provided manure. So we have animal manure in large quantities in western Europe. By contrast, in Asia, where there is an absence of these large ungulates, capturing human excrement and using that in the fields is an economic imperative.”

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In Edo Japan, the value of human waste as fertiliser was definitely recognised, and according to Chris Harding, there wasn’t a strong sense of disgust or taboo associated with handling it. When European visitors arrived in Japan towards the end of the Edo period, they often remarked that the streets of Japanese cities did not have the unpleasant smells found in cities such as Paris or London. This was attributed to the efficient and systematic collection and removal of waste.

Part of the reason that the streets were clean was that in Edo Japan, there was strong social pressure from the local community to stick to the rules and use shared facilities like toilets in the proper way. Embarrassment would come not from being in close proximity to excrement, but rather from not acting in a socially approved way. Edo citizens knew where their poo was going, and they were happy to have a close relationship with their waste, because everyone knew that it would be removed quickly and then perform a valuable service as fertiliser.

In Edo Japan, there was strong social pressure from the local community to stick to the rules and use shared facilities like toilets in the proper way

The sewage question

In the end, it was western influence in the Meiji period, which followed the Edo, that brought to an end this sustainable circle of human manure farming. Sewers were built that were in part modelled on the infrastructure projects that were being developed in the likes of London and Paris. In Europe, there was much more impetus for the swift removal of sewage from urban centres, through waterborne systems, and much less interest in using human waste as manure.

Incidentally, it wasn’t a foregone conclusion that Britain would adopt waterborne sewage networks. The ‘sewage question’ was much reported on in the newspapers, as commentators considered what could be done to rid Britain’s growing urban cities of the stuff that was causing a great stink and polluting the rivers.

Even though Joseph Bazalgette’s magnificent waterborne sewers were demonstrably cleaning up mid-19th century London, at the same time Reverend Henry Moule of Fordington was advocating use of his patented mechanical earth closet. This was essentially the Victorian equivalent of the composting toilet enjoyed on glamping sites today. Sewage farms were also developed, with raw excrement pumped onto fields, but it was basically the volume of poo that caused the waterborne system to win out over these other ideas because that was the only way to shift the material out of town quickly enough.

• Read more | What did Victorians do with their poo? The battle over the 19th-century excrement explosion

Here in the UK, we’re still tied to that Victorian sewer network, with most of our waste going to chemical treatment plants. As Richard Jones explained, “People might be surprised to know that sewage is still being used in modern day agriculture: it just happens not to be in a liquid form. But the solid materials that are precipitated out at wastewater treatment plants, the so-called sewage sludge, when treated and dried and turned into what is euphemistically now called bio-solid, is still spread in significant tonnages across large areas of agricultural land today”.

Nowadays, as we once more struggle to manage the increasing volumes of waste flowing into our sewers, it’s a moment to reflect on whether we might benefit from a closer relationship to our waste today. Edo Japan offers an interesting comparison to our current situation, and a different way of doing things.

Rather than flushing and forgetting, it’s a good time to think about whether there are more sustainable ways to deal with our waste. Sewage today comes complete with micro-particles and other hidden nasties, so I’m not suggesting we should all have composting toilets fitted in our houses, but maybe we should at least have the conversation about it.

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