Feces Dispersal

This painting is a super blunt image of a woman relieving herself. Painted in the early 1600s, it gets at a very different perspective (compared to modern USA) about human effluences in Medieval and Early Modern Japan. Instead of pushing our human elimination as far away as possible, urban dwellers strove to use it.

Historian Susan B Hanley speculated that, due to Japan’s relatively nutrient-deprived soil, communities became aware of a need for good fertilizer. And so, laws were passed in the 17th century that regulated poop dispersal, so that urban dwellers were required to surrender their feces to collectors who took it, treated it, and used it for crop growth in the country side. Poop was so valued that landlords from cities like Osaka and Edo (now Tokyo) claimed their tenants’ feces.

Measures like this led to Medieval and Early Modern Japanese towns being far cleaner than their European counterparts, because there were no disease-ridden cesspools.

The picture here illustrates how the Japanese culture of urinating and defecating was more public and less taboo. Poop was even discussed in medical diagnostics. In _The Twenty-Four Filial Exemplars_ by Guō Jūjìng (late 14th/early 15th c.), a man is directed to figure out the health of his father by tasting some of his poo: “If you want to know your father’s chances of prognosis and recovering, you must test his stool. If it is sweet-tasting, then the malady is serious and chronic. If it tastes bitter, then the problem is acute and short-term. . . “.

The practice of recycling treated human excrement is being revisited today as a way of handling environmental challenges like soil nutrient depletion and CO2 emissions, and Medieval and Early Modern Japan can demonstrate proof of feasibility.