Excrement in the City
Excrement was a hot commodity in the cities of nineteenth-century Japan. The widespread use of night soil as an organic fertilizer meant that residents of big cities such as Edo (Tokyo) and Osaka could sell their waste rather than dispose of it themselves. Thanks to this trade, early modern Japanese cities enjoy a reputation as remarkably green spaces, in which residents lived in salubrious harmony with nature. Certainly, Japan’s poopless cities were more hygienic than their fetid counterparts in the West, though the environmental and public health benefits of the night soil trade were entirely fortuitous.
This paper will explore changes in the relationship between urban residents and their excrement in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Although night soil remained an important fertilizer, poop’s place in the urban landscape changed a great deal. In the decades after the Meiji Restoration of 1868, city officials worried that night soil haulers might offend the sensibilities of Western visitors to the city. They also worried about cholera, a disease new to Japan. By 1920, the rapid growth of Tokyo had completely disrupted the market for night soil and other organic refuse. There was too much excrement for the farms in the city’s hinterland to absorb; moreover, the expansion of urban space resulted in the loss of much agricultural land.
My goal in the paper is to put poop in the city. In addition to looking at the ways officials sought to manage the ever-increasing volume of excrement, I will explore people’s changing attitudes toward and relationship to their poop. I will devote particular attention to how changes in the night soil economy affected the urban environment of Tokyo.