I was outside a museum, in the suburbs of a large capital city. The museum had closed; there were very few shops or cafes nearby, and there was a park on the edge of the museum site. I had a sensation which, as someone with Crohn’s disease, I’m very familiar with — that is, the sudden and urgent need to go to the toilet, not after waiting a bit of time till I arrived in a convenient place, but right now. I looked with anxiety around the small park. I realised that my panic was entirely unwarranted: I could see one public toilet very close by and another only a short walk away. I used the clean, spacious facilities provided in an elegantly designed building, and nothing bad happened at all. Everything was fine; my needs were provided for.
The only reason why this event, in December 2024, sticks in my head, is that momentarily, I had forgotten where I was. In my head, though thousands of miles away, I was acting as if I were in Britain, or pretty much anywhere in Europe or North America. In those parts of the world, the majority of people who might face a similar problem — the elderly, those with young children, those menstruating, those with bowel diseases like mine, that is, more than half the population — are routinely ignored. But I wasn’t. I was in Taipei, and there was, I realised with great relief, absolutely nothing to worry about.
Public toilets are under attack in many places, but probably the worst affected country of all is Britain. Since austerity began in 2010, around 1,000 public toilets have closed, a quarter of the total. New public toilets opening in a new development is extraordinarily rare. And not only is it now unusual to find working public toilets in a street or a park, it is increasingly rare to find them in exactly the sort of public buildings where you’d most expect them. I’ve been told that there are ‘no toilets’ in public libraries; I’ve also been told this in railway and tube stations. Large transport projects like Crossrail in London or the under-construction South Wales Metro have been planned without toilets on trains, even though journeys can last for an hour or more. When criticised for this, both Transport for London and Transport for Wales promised toilets at the individual stations, but this has been honoured in the breach — the new toilets at Farringdon Station, on Crossrail, which I once used regularly, have been locked for months.
What this means in practice is that a lot of people — especially the elderly — feel themselves to be locked out of urban space. They withdraw into their homes, which necessarily makes them become more withdrawn and paranoid, and frightened of the world around them. It would be hard to think of a policy more guaranteed to make people uncomfortable and distrustful, and more reliant on an inflammatory and cruel media, whether social or ‘legacy’, for their picture of the world.
7-Eleven Toilet Heaven
The fact that there is somewhere in the present day that not only has toilets, but has beautiful toilets, newly designed by the finest of the world’s architects, and that this place is Japan, has been discovered in the West largely through Wim Wenders’s Perfect Days, a wonderful but rather misleading film. For those who haven’t seen it, Perfect Days is about a toilet cleaner in Tokyo who, and this fact is apparently inexplicable to American reviewers on both the political right and left — finds his work highly fulfilling. The film came into being via a quite circuitous route. It was originally commissioned as a documentary, by a charity called The Tokyo Toilet, which is in turn funded partly by the clothing retailer Uniqlo and partly by the Nippon Foundation, a charity we’ll return to presently.
The Tokyo Toilet project funds the designing, and employs the cleaners, of a series of toilets in parks, squares, and streets in Shibuya, an inner-city borough of the Japanese capital (one with a great deal of attractions and tourists). The veteran German director Wim Wenders decided to make a fictional film based on the story of the toilets, creating an imaginary cleaner who is so utterly devoted to public service that he methodically, cheerfully, and silently cleans these stunningly beautiful loos with the same attention and pleasure that someone might otherwise channel into creating a painting. It’s all very easily mocked, and it has been: as a romanticisation of what is expected by the Western viewer to be in reality miserable, repetitive, and frankly disgusting work — and as a romanticisation of Japan.
But one thing anyone who has been to Japan notices — and notices very quickly, if they have Crohn’s disease — is that public toilets are everywhere. Every, and I mean every, metro and rail station in the country’s cities has a toilet, often two, one before the ticket barriers and one after. A couple of years ago, Transport for London created a map of the toilets on its network, which was a well-meaning attempt. But what it revealed is that only a quarter of stations have loos (which still places it ahead of New York, whose subway had over 1,500 toilets in the 1940s but now has only around sixty). In Tokyo or Osaka or Kyoto or even the tiny Okinawan capital of Naha you don’t have to check a map. You just know there will be a loo.
This provision is also, somewhat astonishingly, the norm in the country’s famous convenience store chains like 7-Eleven, Lawson, and Family Mart, which mostly have customer toilets signposted and open in case you’re caught short when buying your groceries. And then there are the self-contained, specially designed toilets — which, again, you will find absolutely everywhere. The average square will have at least one, and the average park will have several; moreover, they’re usually imaginatively designed, in a range of styles suiting the area. I’ve used a (not at all brutish) Brutalist toilet in Yokohama, a traditionalist wooden toilet in Kyoto, a domed toilet, a high-tech toilet, a kawaii anime toilet, a mock Tudor toilet. Often, these go an enjoyable if rather unnecessary step beyond, by including electronic toilets that have heated seats, a variety of ‘upwards’ washes, or recordings of running water in case you don’t want people to hear your business.
Scatology of the Super-Rich
The dark secret of the Tokyo Toilet project, and of Perfect Days, is not that it isn’t an accurate representation of the toilets in question and the work that goes into cleaning them — far from it. Rather, it’s where the money is coming from. The Nippon Foundation, which put up most of the cash, was founded by the shipping magnate Ryoichi Saskawa, a war criminal and far-right politician who once described himself with some honesty as ‘the world’s richest fascist’. His ‘charitable’ activities included, along with the usual building of schools and other good works, financial backing for the genocidal 1965 coup in Indonesia and for sterilisation programmes in 1990s Peru. The Nippon Foundation refers to its efforts in toilet provision as an attempt to make Japan into a ‘Toilet Superpower’.
Admittedly, the fact that the ideologues of the super-rich should make such a use of their fortunes might seem commendable from a British perspective — would that an Elon Musk or Paul Marshall spent their money in such a socially useful way! Think of a J. K. Rowling who uses her cash to get public toilets built rather than spitefully throwing it into campaigns to prevent transgender people from being able to use them! But the story of the Tokyo Toilet would, if you didn’t already know much about toilets in Japan and the countries that neighbour it, seem to suggest that this is a Potemkin toilets project, a flashy attempt to launder a country’s reputation, with little relation to everyday life for most Japanese people. That way you don’t have to think about the challenge Perfect Days seems to present, with its picture of a world where first-rate public modernist provision for the ordinary person actually takes place in the twenty-first century. If it’s all just a propaganda film, then you can go back to feeling comfortably miserable.
This is why it’s worth stressing not only that Japanese toilet provision goes way beyond commissioning and filming extra-fancy toilets designed by prize-winning architects like Tadao Ando or Shigeru Ban. It is actually ubiquitous and normal, and not at all freakish. And, more importantly, it’s not even something specifically Japanese; rather, it’s something you’ll find throughout East Asia. In Taiwan and China, you’ll find a quality and quantity of toilets that you won’t find anywhere in the West (except, perhaps rather tellingly, in super-rich and highly touristed Switzerland). Taipei, like Tokyo, has toilets in many of its convenience stores, and these actually have a little toilet sign by the entrance so you know if there is or isn’t one. Here, too, there are toilets in every metro station, park, and square — and these are often as imaginatively designed as in Japan, with toilets I’ve seen ranging in style from high modernism to a Qing dynasty temple.
What is more unexpected is how good the provision is in China, a country which has only fully industrialised and urbanised since the 1980s, yet has built in many cities a network of excellent public loos and, of course, provided them in every public transport station in the many newly built metro systems (though, it should be noted, the convenience store toilet remains a Japanese–Taiwanese specialty). Japan isn’t a strange toilet outlier, but one of many countries which seems somehow to have decided collectively that making life easier for ill, elderly, and very young people, or just anyone who has had a few drinks, is worth paying for and staffing.
And none of these countries is significantly richer than Britain — in terms of incomes, China is far poorer. One effect of this, quickly noticed on the streets, is the huge diversity in age of the people using them. Each of these countries has a very low birthrate and not particularly generous pensions — and yet the elderly and young children there are far more likely to be seen just hanging out in the street, using the parks, sitting on the corner or in the square with their friends. That seems to me to be very likely a consequence of the fact they know they will not have to worry about being incontinent.
Preston Model Public Conveniences?
How have these countries managed to do this? The answers to this can perhaps go into two categories — governmental and cultural. While each is obviously a capitalist country with significant inequality, unaffordable housing, and some notorious environmental catastrophes, Taiwan, Japan, and China have long been ‘developmental states’. Their governments have had a major role in planning industrial development and spending big on public infrastructure, frequently intervening directly into the market and ‘picking winners’, while smoothing its operations by building extensive networks of public transport — trams, metros, high-speed rail — and ploughing vast amounts of public money into research and development. Meanwhile, although big businesses do have shareholders and stock markets do exist, they don’t dominate the economy, and long-term planning is still the norm. Short-term profit is largely officially discouraged and publicly frowned upon. So, things that cost a lot of money to staff and maintain do still exist, because the state is still expected to provide them.
That’s the part of the argument that is easy for the Left to make — that we’re dealing with quasi-social democratic countries that, despite their ostensibly Confucian, conservative, or Marxist-Leninist ideological hue, raise and spend public money on good things. But there’s another undeniable fact that has to be grappled with — in these countries the ‘public’, broadly conceived, is also far less nihilistic than we have come to expect. Perfect Days’ representation of a toilet-cleaning job where the worst thing that might happen is a bit of litter being left in the corner is not spectacularly romantic, given Tokyo’s extraordinarily low rates of petty crime and vandalism; and they are not vastly higher either in ‘democratic’ Taiwan or ‘dictatorial’ China.
The assumption that if public toilets like this were built in the UK, they would be rapidly smashed up is not, unfortunately, wholly untrue. One of the trains I use most often is the Thameslink service in London, not uncoincidentally one of the few lines connecting different parts of the capital that always has working toilets on board. Working they may be, but, invariably, they’re caked in layer upon layer of graffiti, and frequently bear signs of being kicked and bashed about. One can argue about what is the chicken and what is the egg in Taiwanese, Japanese, and Chinese toilet provision — do people behave better because their environment has not been treated as a space where everything that cannot extract rent is left to rot, or is it vice versa? But there’s little doubt that the fact that toilets will be looked after is one reason why there are so many of them, and why they are so pleasant and are such attractive parts of the urban scene.
The toilets of East Asia are a reminder that even now, in the 2020s, it is possible to have nice things; to expect them, in fact. What is so striking in the British toilet statistics that I regularly read with a sense of mounting despair is not so much that we have never had such a provision, but that we once did. That’s why so many are being closed — because we once had thousands upon thousands, much as we once had so many council flats, libraries, trams, and health centres, before we decided that running a national economy as a casino was preferable.
It also means that it wouldn’t be staggeringly difficult to reopen thousands of public toilets in Britain, rather than building them anew. We should not expect such a policy from the likes of Keir Starmer or Rachel Reeves — though their permanently clenched faces do suggest that they could probably do with the relief. But maybe some sort of community toilet policy from some enterprising activists or local authorities would be a good start: a sort of Preston Model for public conveniences, where a system of excellently run toilets could become a beacon to the rest of the country. Until then, though, to paraphrase Kafka: there are public toilets, but not for us.