So this is the story all about how poop in the Edo Period made people in Japan rich and
cleaned up the cities.
Yeah we’re gonna talk about poop economies, poop collecting, and poop fights.
In the Edo Period, Japan had huge cities, bigger than European cities at the time.
Edo itself, what we now call Tokyo, may have been the largest in the world.
It was either Edo or Beijing in China that held the honor.
By 1700, London had 575,000 people.
Edo had a million.
European cities were notoriously dirty.
Sometimes it’s overblown but people did do things like
pile trash right outside their doors.
Horses were walking around town like the world was their oyster,
and the street was their toilet.
You would think that Japanese cities, being bigger, were even dirtier.
But no, foreign visitors were always amazed by how clean the cities were.
Not only were there laws to keep the streets clean, having poop in the streets was not
a problem they had.
Poop was too valuable to just casually toss away like they were Christmas gifts from grandma.
No, you didn’t throw away poop, you sold it.
Cities are like your body.
You feed it food and water, and it makes poop.
The better the food, the better the poops.
Luckily I have something that’ll help you with that first part.
Hey. Hey, disappointment.
Hey Dad what's up?
Hey Bokksu just sent me this box for us to try out.
Try some for me.
Oh later, I’m busy researching poop.
No just try it really quick.
Here, just open your mouth. Open your mouth.
Just try it really quick. Don’t be a little girl. Linfamy: Stop--c'mon seriously?
Stop. Ah--it’s so good--it's so good T_T
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Alright, about poop, or the more polite way of saying it: night soil,
or the even more polite way of saying it: bum gifts.
Unlike their European friends, the Japanese did not see poop as icky waste that you paid
someone to get rid of.
No, in Japan, someone paid you to get rid of that icky waste for you.
Because poop made amazing fertilizer.
There’s even a Shinto god called kawaya no kami (厠の神), or toilet god.
It’s a helpful kami, you can pray to it for a good harvest.
Instead of just throwing it out, people saved their poop to use as fertilizer
or to sell to people who need it.
Europeans did use night soil as fertilizer to an extent,
but they didn’t jump all in the steamy pile like the Japanese did.
There were several reasons why human droppings were way more valuable in Japan.
Japan had a lot of people.
The population in the Edo Period exploded as much as this YouTube channel didn’t.
That exploding population needed more and more food.
Poop was a readily available fertilizer that grew with the population.
Kind of hard to have a shortage.
The gods didn’t grant Japan much land that was good for farming, so they worked with
the limited amount of space they had.
Also there wasn’t much animal waste to use for fertilizer because the Japanese didn’t
have a meat eating culture.
They didn’t raise a lot of farm animals like in the West.
And so poop went into fertilizing farmland instead of fertilizing the road.
In Europe, they dumped their dumps in these nasty cesspools that dotted the cities or
let human waste flow down gutters in the streets.
Japanese cities didn’t have this.
They had laws to keep the streets clean and clear of human waste, animal remains,
dead bodies, the usual things that end up on the streets.
So Japanese cities were actually cleaner and smelled nicer in comparison.
Osaka had a golden poop economy.
Even before the Edo Period, the major city of Osaka used bum gifts from its citizens
to supercharge the surrounding farmland.
Osaka later became a major poop exporter.
They collected human waste and put it on ships.
The ships rowed up and down the nearby rivers and unloaded on farmers.
The poop export business grew so big that people living near the ports
complained about the smell.
Other ships also carried food to the same ports, you know.
Local governments debated what to do but decided that poo ships were so important that they
just had to live with it.
There was an old proverb: “The superior farmer values crap as he values gold.”
For many farmers, losing their source of poop would have ruined them.
The government even ordered peasants to store their crap, giving out instructions on how
to do so correctly like how you must keep it from getting wet in the rainy seasons.
Not all poop was the same, the status of the pooper also mattered.
Poop from the rich cost more than poop from the poor.
Poop from the privies of daimyo castles and homes netted a huge price.
And so did poop from high-end brothels, probably because they had rich clients.
Poop from Edo castle itself was the most valuable.
Only a few poop connoisseurs had permission to take crap from Edo castle.
That was shogun crap.
This notion of fecal quality may not have been totally ignorant though.
Samurai and their lords had better diets.
Logically, they would have produced better poo.
Also very logically, poop from children or breastfeeding women was less valuable because
they used more nutrients to grow or to feed babies.
Some farmers fancied themselves poop readers and bragged about their ability to know if
a household was rich or poor by looking at their crap.
They gave some description of how rich poops look differently from poops of the poor,
but I stopped reading.
Over the Edo Period, night soil prices skyrocketed like this YouTube channel didn’t.
At first, night soil was exchanged for vegetables.
Doodoo dealers were like, “Hey, I got some poop, you want some poop?
I’ll give you an ounce for that potato.”
That’s right, the boats arrived at Osaka with fruits and vegetables,
and departed with poopoo.
A harmonious cycle where poop was used to grow food,
and food caused the making of more poop.
It’s like the circle of life, but crappy.
One eloquent Japanese author wrote,
“Rice becomes crap and crap becomes rice in an endless cycle of birth and rebirth.”
But come back to the same poop dealer 100 years later and you had to pay in silver.
That’s right, over time, as the price of other fertilizers grew and as the number of
rice fields around Osaka grew, the price of poop also grew.
No one wanted vegetables for their poop anymore, sellers demanded silver.
The poop index rose so high that the poor farmers couldn’t buy enough fertilizer and
resorted to stealing poop.
Those poo thieves had very disappointed parents.
It was serious business.
These were serious fecal matters.
There were fights, legal fights and actual physical fights,
over who got to gather the goods.
Collection was complicated.
Farmers or collectors went door-to-door, but instead of selling you a vacuum cleaner like
we don’t do nowadays, they asked for your night soil.
Or more like a subscription service where they came by a few times a week or a few times
a month to relieve you of your night soil.
Pee deserves an honorable mention here, some also bought pee, but it was the poop,
the POOP was king.
Poop fetched a higher price.
Most people in the cities lived in tenements.
Naturally, poop from a building belonged to the owner of the building
and the owner could sell that poop.
Pee belonged to the tenants, so the tenants were able to sell their own pee if they could
find a buyer.
In Osaka, the price of the poop of 10 households in one year was worth enough rice to feed
a person for half a year.
For landlords, fecal income was so great that there was a saying:
“The landlord’s child is brought up on dung.”
Landlords even raised the rent if the number of tenants dropped because of the lost poop income,
which sounds very much like landlords.
The government of Osaka established night soil guilds.
What were guilds good for?
They made sure poo was disposed of properly, they set prices,
and they’re great when you need a healer for your party.
Farmers also banded together into associations.
It gave them buying power.
Associations lobbied for sole rights to buy poop from certain areas,
preventing others from operating on their turf.
Protests and even fights broke out between all these groups.
There’s no evidence that they flung poop.
There’s also no evidence that they didn’t.
The major poopoo collectors did not collect the peepee.
Piss was less valuable and was heavier to carry, bet you never thought about that.
But then a smaller industry emerged to collect the pee.
The outcast village of Watanabe won the right to collect pee in Osaka from these urinals
that they put on the street corners for people to pee in.
They were genius, very convenient!
And they were a success.
The Watanabe village soon had a pee monopoly.
I couldn’t find a picture of what these public urinals looked like,
probably not much more than a bucket, maybe covered from public eyes?
Both men and women used these.
Yes, women peed standing up, it was normal.
Night soil collectors were usually outcasts, people at the bottom of society.
However, the filth business was so good that some outcast families became wealthy af,
like the Watanabe.
Other pee collectors tried to disrupt the Watanabe’s income stream.
They tried to overthrow Big Pee by lobbying the city for collection rights,
breaking the urinals, pouring sand into the pee containers, and just stealing the pee.
But it didn’t work, the Watanabe held a steady hand.
The average pisser using the urinals probably didn’t even know
that the Great Wee-Wee War was happening around them.
Japan’s de-facto capital, the city of Edo also had a thriving poop economy.
Peasants used to say,
The people of Edo receive with their mouths and return with their butts.”
Poop was big business.
Almost a quarter of the boats coming in and out of Edo were night soil boats.
The boatmen often bragged about how they could keep their boats clean enough to carry vegetables
back after depositing their crappy cargo.
They also sometimes added water and toilet paper to the poop buckets to increase their
weight and sell them for a higher price, so I wouldn’t take their word for gospel.
Farm villages competed for contracts to collect poop from certain parts of the city.
For example, one daimyo allowed a farmer to collect poop from his residence for the price
of either 1500 large daikons, 2000 mid-sized daikons, or 2 ryo to be paid in a year.
The man really liked daikons.
Young, bright-eyed potential businessmen tried to get permission from the city to allow them
to put pee containers on street corners like in Osaka.
But their plans went down the toilet when the city kept refusing.
Having pee containers everywhere looked bad and smelled bad.
Edo was the seat of the shogun after all.
You wouldn’t want the shogun’s seat to be covered in piss.
Now part of the advantage of collecting human waste was that you separated the waste from
the water supply.
Edo’s water supply was cleaner than that of London and other major European cities
at the time.
Seriously, Edo’s water system was excellent, and they did it without the superior technology
of their European friends.
The reason it was so good was more than just poop collection,
but we’re talking about poop here, so I can’t get distracted.
Edo didn’t have poop clogging up water pipes or contaminating the drinking water.
In London, people used to dump their business in the river Thames,
but they also drank from the same river.
And people were like,
“Oi, why are we getting sick all of a sudden? Guv’nor.”
Edo also didn’t have uncovered cesspools of human waste
all over their cities like in Europe.
Waste from these poop pools also liked to seep into the groundwater
that people drank from.
Ah but this all flipped once we entered the modern age.
The success of the poop economy made Japan fall behind when Europe finally cleaned up
and started adopting modern sewage systems and toilets.
The Japanese didn’t see much need to modernize when night soil was so beneficial and lucrative.
After Western cities created their modern sewage systems in the late 1800s and 1900s,
we saw foreigners describe Japan differently.
Gone were the glowing Yelp reviews of how clean and free of cholera water in Japan was.
Foreigners hated the smelly open public toilets, the pee collection buckets,
the fact that pedestrians just peed on the streets whenever they felt like it,
and the smell that accompanied poop collectors as they walked by.
The government read the reviews and was like,
“What the crap? We need to look civilized to these white devils,”
so they passed laws and recommendations to
try to get rid of the smell and improve their toilets.
But they just couldn’t get rid of the night soil industry.
Western style toilets would have devastated the poop economy.
It wasn’t until big cities like Tokyo got so big
that their supply of poop outpaced demand.
Instead of selling their poop to collectors, city dwellers had to pay collectors
to dispose of their poop.
The bottom line is that Japan finally started moving to modern toilets and modern sewage.
It wasn’t until the rear end of the 1900s, the 1980s, that most of the population moved
to a public sewage system.
And toilets.
I guess they went all out because today Japanese toilets are the best,
better than all the rest.
Who doesn’t want heated seats and a strong jet of water up their bum?
Alright today’s quiz question is:
How many times did I say “poop” in this video?
Just the word poop, not poo or poopy or poopalicious, just exactly poop.
Yeah not all of these are easy.
The first person to answer correctly in the comments gets one of these.
You have to be in the US or Canada though, because pandemic.
Good luck!
Oh, Check out these videos on the right, see ya there.
Okay I love you much, and spread the knowledge.