This video is best enjoyed while sitting on a toilet.
Ready? Good.
Way back in the early days of Japan, when people were hunter-gatherers, they didn’t need toilets.
The world was their toilet.
They peed and pooped in the woods and used whatever they found around them to wipe their butts,
like leaves, twigs, or adorable woodland creatures.
As people began building small, kind of permanent settlements, they needed places for people
to go do their business.
They couldn’t just have Uncle Steve randomly pulling up his robes and taking a dump in
the middle of the settlement.
What would the neighbors think?
Now it was typical for people back then to throw their trash in garbage piles just outside the community.
These garbage piles made good toilets.
It was good enough for them to let nature take care of the waste because they didn’t
have that many people, and they migrated often.
This is really good news for poop historians, because settlements near the sea often had a lot of shells.
People would eat shellfish and then throw the shells into the piles.
Over centuries, calcium from the shells bonded with the poops, immortalizing them into rock.
Imagine being an archaeologist and digging up a rock in the beautiful shape of a piece of ancient poo.
It’s the pinnacle of your career.
You wouldn’t be able to wipe the proud smile off your face.
After scientific analysis, we can safely say that ancient poop has a similar shape to modern poop.
When agriculture became all the rage in the Japanese archipelago, people began living
in permanent settlements, and the population exploded.
Poop piles were no longer an option. There were just too many people.
So how do you figure out where people in the past went to the toilet without having calcified
remains of their waste to dig up?
Well, one way is to look for evidence of parasites and bugs that like to hang around human waste.
Scientists have found dung beetle remains in moats.
Settlements at this time were often surrounded by moats to fend off attackers.
Looks like people also relieved themselves in these moats.
In 1971, scientists started digging up this site called the Makimuku ruins, dated to the early 200s AD.
In it, they found large ditches.
I couldn’t find a good picture of it, so take a look at this ugly one.
They guessed that it must have been used to provide clean water for religious rituals.
A perfectly valid conclusion, for the untrained eye.
But later, a team found evidence of food and eggs of parasites that lived in human poop.
So what historians first thought was a ritual building may very well have been a toilet.
But not just any toilet.
It looked like a toilet system that could flush.
When you think of the peak of modern technology, what comes to mind?
That’s right, a flushing toilet.
Well, the ancient Japanese already had it in the year 200.
There was a channel that took water into a tank, filtering out leaves and other trash.
There were some stones that could serve as footholds when you’re squatting.
People pooped there, then released water from the tank to flush it away downstream.
This is the earliest flush toilet we’ve found so far in Japan.
And then we found the first cesspit toilet, also known as a hole in the ground.
It was found in Japan’s first capital, Fujiwara-kyō.
In the toilet were these flat sticks called chūgi 籌木, or poop sticks.
They were for wiping.
Many people would call that an unsanitary way to clean yourself down there, but most
of those people only use toilet paper to clean themselves, so they shouldn’t be talking.
The capital also had a large flushing toilet system, but the cool thing about cesspit toilets
was that people could remove the waste and use it for fertilizer.
Fujiwara-kyō was the capital for only 16 years, from 694 to 710.
The reason they moved away from there so quickly is pretty funny, as you will see later.
The next capital was Nara. Nara upped its toilet game.
The main streets had gutters on the side with river water flowing through them.
They built public toilets on the side, separated from the street by a wall.
People did their business, then flushed by opening some door to let water from the street
gutter flow through the public toilet, washing the waste back into the street gutter.
It was an above-ground sewage system.
But like your boyfriend’s toilet when you use it, sometimes the system gets clogged.
Leaves, twigs, or poop could build up in places, making it smell like crap.
And it was the job of prisoners to unclog everything.
This brings us to why the Japanese moved out of the Fujiwara capital only after 16 years.
It’s actually a question that historians have debated and killed each other over.
There are always many different reasons for these things, but one of those reasons could
have been something people don’t usually think about.
The capital had a fatal flaw.
Here’s a map.
A river flows right through it from southwest to northeast, and they used the river’s water as flushing water.
The lower classes lived on the south side, and the north side housed the upper classes
and the imperial palace, where the emperor lived.
Water from the river flowed north, taking waste from the more populous lower classes
to the elites and the palace.
More waste meant more chances of clogging.
We have records of people complaining about how bad the imperial palace smelled.
When the seat of government started to smell, it was probably time to find another seat.
Later capitals did not have this flaw because they did plan for the water flow.
Starting from the Heian Period, toilet technology took a step backwards onto poop.
The upper class copied the fashion from China at the time and switched to using simple
chamber pots, or they were more like boxes.
They were filled with sand or ash, like cat litter.
People did their business in the boxes, and servants would empty them.
Here’s a chamber pot.
The bar in front is where you hang your sleeves, since those can be long and get in the way.
Can’t be too careful with clothing worth 20 years of peasant income.
Here’s a cute square one with a little hole just for pee.
Now in the capital, people outside of the upper class did continue using flush toilets,
but also cesspit toilets.
And it seems like people just pooped on the streets at designated areas.
Areas for pooping on the street.
Maybe the public toilets just weren’t enough.
After the Heian Period, we started seeing large cesspit toilets, evidence of it being
more popular to use poop for farming.
It was this way for ages, until we got to the Edo Period, where human waste became really valuable as fertilizer.
People didn’t flush their waste down the toilet.
Do you flush your money down the toilet? No.
People collected their pee and poop to sell them to farmers.
Ambitious entrepreneurs set up pee stations for the public.
Women often peed standing up.
They were so used to it that they could hit the pee hole every time.
There were large portable toilets, some where you squatted, but also some where you sat.
They still used chamber pots.
Some fancy pee pots were decorated and filled with fragrant leaves to hide the smell and prevent splashing.
Here’s an example of a toilet room that opened down into containers for collection.
It was a whole poop economy.
I have an entire video about it if you wanna learn more.
Before we talk about the more modern Western style toilets, let’s go over some honorable mentions.
People who lived in the mountains used river-houses.
These were outhouses that either flushed waste to a river, or they were built on the edge
of a cliff overlooking a river.
These are toilets from Tōfukuji temple in Kyoto.
The holes are a bit too big if you ask me.
A person can literally fall in and do serious damage to his pride.
Mount Kōya had a state-of-the-fart system where bamboo pipes directed clean river water
into the kitchen for cooking, and also into the bathrooms to flush waste back to the river.
After WaWa1, Japan joined a special club of countries that were allowed to boss around other countries.
Japan started to Westernize to be more like its peers, and this included changing the toilet.
They tossed out wooden toilets and started making them out of ceramic.
One really cool design was a toilet that stored poop so that people could later take it out for collection.
Japanese toilets usually couldn’t flush because Japan still didn’t have a public sewer system.
Like how garbage trucks collect garbage from your home, collectors came by homes and carried
poop away in big barrels.
After WaWa2, during the American occupation, Americans thought this was all really disgusting.
Peer pressure and the desire to look like a modern country forced Japan to slowly build
a public sewage system.
They went crazy with experimentation around this time.
A stream of new toilet designs popped up.
Ever heard of the female urinal?
A woman could kinda straddle the urinal and pee standing up.
There was a urinal for both sexes.
Women liked these because they didn’t have to squat.
Squatting ruined their stockings at the knees.
In the 1960s, Western style flush toilets became really popular, both the sit and squat ones,
but it wasn’t until the 1980s that most toilets in Japan were connected to a sewage system.
And things just kept getting better.
In 1964, an American company called the American Bidet Company had a revolutionary idea.
What if your toilet shot water up your ass?
They made the Wash Air Seat, a toilet that shot water up your ass.
It was the first in the world.
Unfortunately, Americans didn’t really get behind the idea.
Cleaning something, with water? What kind of sorcery is this?
In 1967, a Japanese company called INAX thought it was a neat concept and made a similar one.
It was the first toilet with a water spray in Japan.
And in 1969, another Japanese company named TOTO entered the water spray toilet arena.
Their model was originally made for medical use, like in hospitals.
Unfortunately, it had some problems.
One, the spray often missed the spot, so it was bad at cleaning that area.
Look, they were pioneers. No one knew the correct angle.
And two, the water often burned people’s anii because it was too hot.
That wasn’t a popular feature.
You don’t wanna be sitting down for a nice, relaxing #2 and then suddenly feel your toilet
shoving a lightsaber up your ass.
TOTO was on the case though.
The company collected anal data from 300 employees so that they could hit the right spot every time
and make it feel oh so satisfying.
And then came 1980. It was a great year, we all know this.
Everyone remembers it as the year that TOTO introduced the Washlet to the Japanese public,
an electric butt spray toilet.
It had a rocky start at first.
The idea was too new, people weren’t ready.
The new toilet didn’t take off until they ran a commercial with a pop idol named Togawa Jun,
with the slogan “Your bottom wants to be washed too.”
In it, she asked a very philosophical question: “If your hands get dirty, you wash them,
you don’t wipe them with paper. Why wouldn’t you do it for your bottom?”
That is an excellent question, Miss Togawa.
From then on, Japan had a whole toilet industrial revolution where they kept inventing new features
like heated seats, scented sprays, and a little hand that comes out to wax your sphincter
until it’s bright and shiny.
It was amazing.
Going #2 was like going to Disneyland and then shitting on it.
The company got rid of the scourge of dirty assholes across Japan.
The average person spends 20% of their day on the toilet.
Now don’t look that up, just trust me.
Since we spend so much time on the toilet, doesn’t it make sense for us to make that
time as comfortable as possible?
Today, most Japanese toilets are the electric butt spray type.
The Japanese are so used to it that when they travel to other lesser countries without bidets,
it’s the thing they miss the most.
Luckily, TOTO is a company that treats its customers right.
They sell a portable Washlet for people who just need to have that extra attention on their ass while on vacation.
Once, the West laughed at Japan for its toilet practices, but now it’s Japan who has the last fart.
Hey check out this video about Japan’s poop economy here.
We have 2 new patrons this week, Samantha Marwick and Krisserin Canary.
Thank you so much.
Alright, I love you, and spread the knowledge.