"THE TOKYO TOILET," A lecture by Koji Yanai and conversation with Rahul Mehrotra and Seng Kuan

Hi, good evening. I'm Sang Jun, lecturing architecture here at the Graduate School of Design. I'm also on the faculty at the University of Tokyo and serve as chief editor of the Tokyo-based magazine A+U. I want to begin today's presentation with this acknowledgement: the Harvard Graduate School of Design is located on the traditional and ancestral land of the Massachusetts, the original inhabitants of what is now known as Boston and Cambridge. We pay respect to the people of the Massachusetts tribe, past and present, and honor the land itself which remains sacred to the Massachusetts people.

The school also recognizes the work of the Harvard University Native American Program in cultivating the relationships that led to the creation of this acknowledgment. I have the privilege this evening of introducing the main speaker: Koji Yanai, Senior Executive Officer of Fast Retailing Group, the controlling entity of the global fashion behemoth UNIQLO. He oversees sustainability communications for the Fast Retailing Group as well as UNIQLO's global marketing efforts, which includes sports.

Before joining Fast Retailing, Mr. Yanai worked for the Mitsubishi Corporation, providing support to Japanese retailers seeking to expand overseas. This led to a second assignment a few years later to the company's UK subsidiary. I also want to acknowledge that for the past six years in a row, UNIQLO has actually sponsored two students from Japan on four-year scholarships to study here at the Graduate School of Design.

Koji Yanai graduated from the Faculty of International Commerce at Yokohama City University in Japan in 2001 with a bachelor's degree in economics. This evening, rather than speaking to us about the exciting world of fashion and mass consumer culture, Mr. Yanai's talk will focus on architecture and the urban realm, addressing the collection of public toilets built in Tokyo's centrally located Shibuya ward in preparation for the 2020-21 Tokyo Olympics and Paralympics.

Mr. Yanai played a central role from behind the scenes through the Nippon Foundation in commissioning these public toilets. Some of these works engaged world-renowned Pritzker-winning architects, while others relied on allied fields such as graphic design and pop and social media. Before coming to the contemporary flourishing of public toilets in the world of Japanese design and architecture, I just want to briefly make one point to hopefully give some color to the importance of Mr. Yanai's presentation.

It has to do with the idea that these public toilets are, quote, the smallest public architecture—"sai shō kō kōenchiku"—which is a term often heard in Japanese architectural communities. In fact, four decades ago in the 1980s, there was another significant experiment with small public architecture in the form of the ubiquitous "kōban" that you find all over Japan. These are really boxes about eight meters square, staffed by just two officers at any given time, as local outposts of the national police system on the neighborhood level.

In 1982, the Metropolitan Government of Tokyo launched a campaign that would rebuild these police boxes all over Tokyo, working with outside architects. The famous police box in Tokyo's satellite town, designed by Kazuyo Sejima and completed in 1994, was a particularly well-known example of this effort. While there may be similarities in terms of scale and scope between the public toilets of today and the police boxes of the past, there is a profound ideological and social distinction between the two—in the exact same manner as the so-called barrières by the 18th-century French architect Claude Nicolas Ledoux, who designed 62 toll booths along the circumference of Paris for the collection of taxes.

These police boxes in bubble-period Japan were formalist vignettes that in fact served as the faces of the state, as part of a top-down coercive system. With a new generation of public toilets now springing up all over Tokyo, the smallest public architecture signifies a new kind of public. As no doubt we'll hear from Mr. Yanai, these public community amenities represent a crucial development in Japan as it confronts an increasingly diverse, pluralistic civic order where rights of minorities and the disenfranchised become even more present in civic discourse.

Through these public toilets, we're seeing a profound shift in terms of generations, in terms of values in Japanese society. As a foreigner such as myself who has been living on and off in Japan for the last 20 years, these are hugely inspiring and reassuring changes. So on this note, I invite Koji Yanai to the podium.

Tokyo is one of the most comfortable cities to live in the world. However, one area that Tokyo had failed to evolve was the public toilet—dark, unsafe, and unsanitary. This is especially true for those with disabilities, women, and children. Our project sought to redesign the perception of public toilets in Tokyo. 17 public restrooms in Tokyo were redesigned by 16 of Japan's leading artists. This toilet can be operated by using your voice—a toilet that innovated public sanitation through voice commands. A toilet with a circular design that reuses waste wood. A transparent toilet to promote behavioral changes to help reduce crime. The diverse designs and experiences changed public toilets into a symbolic place to maintain together with the community. These iconic toilets became the new face of Tokyo, and the world was watching. Public toilets in Tokyo were reimagined from a place people avoided to a place people wanted to visit.

Welcome back to CBS This Morning Saturday. We begin this half hour with a new way of experiencing nature's call. Visitors and residents in Tokyo are flipping their lids—yes, I said it—over the city's latest attraction. Lucy Kraft has that story.

Tokyo's hottest new destination isn't a swanky restaurant, nightclub, or museum. Set in local parks, the jewel-like cubes are tinted tangerine, pink, and purple, and shades of blue-green. These aren't just works of art—they're public bathrooms with a feature not standard in most toilet stalls: see-through walls. These are no ordinary plate glass windows, but so-called smart glass used for privacy in hotels and offices. When the door is unlocked, an electric current fogs the windows. When the door is bolted, the electricity is switched off and the windows return to their frosted state. See-through toilets were dreamed up by Pritzker Prize-winning architect Shigeru Ban.

I don't think it's crazy. Visibility is one fix for public toilets, which have a reputation for filth and criminal activity. You need privacy when you are inside, but when you're outside, you like to find out if this is clean and safe, right? So then it should be transparent.

Three times a day, cleaners in designer uniforms ensure the dazzling cubes pass the white glove test. The privately financed Tokyo Toilet Project is unveiling over a dozen artful public bathrooms, but none has raised eyebrows like these. Said project manager Hayato Hanoka, his reaction to the see-through restroom: 'Okay, I was super surprised, to be honest. I had never seen a transparent toilet yet.' After operating for just a few weeks, users say seeing is believing.

You can tell right away whether the stall is occupied or not. I really like that.

I don't mind. Going in, I was nervous, scared even, but it was fine. I recommend it.

Architect Shigeru Ban decided not to copyright his minimalist public lavatory design. He's hoping to spark a transparent toilet wave around the world. For CBS This Morning Saturday, Lucy Kraft, Tokyo.

Thank you very much for that wonderful, amazing presentation. Moriyama Daidō toilet papers—that is going to be quite something. I have to get my hands on a few rolls of these. Speaking of which, let me call—as a way of calling onto the discussions—Rahul Mehrotra. Let me just introduce a little bit of biographical background for Rahul. I should take off my mask.

So joining me in discussion with Koji-san is Rahul Mehrotra, who is the John T. Dunlop Professor of Housing and Urbanization here at the Harvard Graduate School of Design. He's currently chair of the Department of Urban Planning and Design, director of the Master of Architecture program, and co-director of the Master of Landscape Architecture in Urban Design degree program. In addition to these academic appointments at Harvard, Rahul also maintains a prolific design practice through the Boston and Mumbai-based firm RMA Architects.

By way of asking Rahul to offer a series of provocations to this discussion—to the Tokyo experience—maybe I'll just share one other historical episode to provide a temporal link between the Japanese experience and the Indian. So Matt, if I could have that one slide on the screen, please. As all of you know, the Tokyo 2020-2021 Olympics have been in many ways compared to what happened in 1964 with the first Tokyo Summer Olympic Games. Here on the screen is an image I got from the centennial history of the toilet bowl maker—a collaborator with Koji-san on this wonderful project. They actually did this mapping, this tabulation of access to various household amenities in Japan in 1965.

Japan was not always this paragon of modernity and cleanliness as we typically understand it to be. While we often speak of the 1964 Summer Olympics in Tokyo in terms of Tange's Yoyogi Stadiums, or the introduction of the bullet train—the Shinkansen—and the Tōkaidō highway system, or the burgeoning of high-rise structures in the Shinjuku area, in fact there is this vast underlying infrastructure that was also in place. And perhaps this image we now hold dearly of what Japan represents really came into shape in this remarkable transformation of Tokyo and Japan in the late 1950s and early 1960s.

To translate briefly, this diagram talks about the penetration of access to sewage of average Japanese households. The first bar is sewage, which we see at an astoundingly low 13.9 percent. And very interestingly, two or three bars over, at 72.7 percent, is electrical washing machines. I still haven't figured out how it's possible that 73 percent of households had access to electrical washing machines while only 14 had access to sewage. This goes to show some of these dramatic underlying adjustments that a society and economy must undergo to make for these leapfrogging moments in terms of the reach for growth and prosperity.

Again, underscore the fact that Japan, Tokyo in particular, at the end of World War II in 1945 really had a population of only 3.5 million, and this ballooned to 10 million by 1960. That was what prompted, for instance, Tange's monumental plan for Tokyo with this giant megastructure that spans the width of Tokyo Bay. So this was really the context in which all of these changes including the unseen aspects of the city, particularly in terms of modern infrastructure of access to clean water and particularly the access to sanitation and sewage. So on this note, perhaps I can call to the podium Rahu to make a brief presentation on his experiences working in Mumbai.

Thank you, Sang Jun. Thank you, Koji, for that wonderful presentation. Matt, could I have my first slide up too? I mean, the three things I got from your inspiring presentation were empathy because you had great empathy and clearly you showed us that video which moved you, and also there was a moment, the Olympics, which acted as a trigger. So the combination of that empathy and that event led to this amazing process. And the notion of access and equitable access—in this case disability, in the case of where I work, poverty—and therefore basic infrastructure. And so I think those become three very interesting guiding moments: empathy, access, and equity, and then an event which triggers this off. And I just thought when Sang and I were discussing this that in the context of the university, first of all, you were very kind in our earlier meeting to generously offer to sponsor a public toilet on Harvard property as a studio with students, which could be quite an interesting process. Michael is now charged to follow up on this. But I also wanted to use the occasion not only for people in the audience but also for you—we started the conversation to share some of the thinking we are doing here at the GSD around these issues and to see how we might create some sort of alignments. And so, this is a map among many others which just shows the global north and south, and this is well timed because tomorrow with the dean we are launching an issue of the Harvard Design Magazine which looks at the global today and these are the sorts of issues we've looked at. Where you have inequity, what you see is the global north where you see the absence of water stress or disease or all the things that are related to public health and sanitation, and in the global south you see a survey of those sorts of issues that are prominent. So when we focus on India, this is a map of open defecation in India—about 600 million people on this planet defecate in the open, of which 300 million are in India, which is a very large population. And so open defecation is a huge issue, and that has a big relationship too, and this is what our research here is showing—to GDP, to the economy. Public health is critical in keeping people productive and healthy, and so that is quite mind-blowing. And by the time you begin to bring those graphics down to a place like Mumbai, it's mind-boggling because in a place like Mumbai, it's about somewhere between 1,400 and 1,600 people per toilet seat. The government's aspiration is to make it 40 people per toilet seat, which means it's what, 10 families you have to have a lottery every morning to see who can use the toilet, right? So even the aspiration is not far enough and we can do much more with it. And so that becomes a version of public toilets—they're people helping themselves, and that becomes the imagination of the government's idea of a public toilet, which is dark, dirty, smelly, scary—everything you said fits perfectly there. So it kind of resonates because I think in terms of economy, Japan versus India, we're in completely different modes. And so this was a prototype that we did for an NGO called SPARC, which was a World Bank-funded prototype where what we tried to do was create a community space on top, separate the men and women, bring flowers around it so that the associations of this would change. But essentially what we learned from this was that when you do community toilets in societies like that as monofunctional infrastructure, the chances of it embedding in those communities is very minimal, and therefore one has to think about it in different ways. And this was a project for the Gates Foundation—this is an international competition which we won but never got built, which was again taking the idea of non-monofunctional infrastructure but embedding it more squarely within the community. And here we came up with the idea of also selling filtered water, soap, sanitation-related things, so it becomes a kind of hub and it becomes a community space for children. It becomes a kind of place which is a community place where the toilet is only one of many things embedded. This is a project I'm showing which is a young architect who had worked for us, Rohan Chahan is his name, where he's done these public toilets in the same way as non-monofunctional infrastructure but for truck drivers on the highway where they can rest, they can get a shave, they can sleep, and this was an amenity that didn't exist for truckers within it. So it becomes again a form of infrastructure and therefore symbolically how you can place infrastructure like that across from the temple on equal importance becomes a cultural and a significant question. But the most important learning that's coming out from our research is sanitation is a broken piece of infrastructure and a broken ecology really because it is a complex ecology of which one would imagine as infrastructure—if you imagine sanitation infrastructure, community toilets is one component, especially in parts of India where basic infrastructure is missing. So what we've been trying to look at is those relationships to inform what finally the toilet could be and how that imaginary of the toilet could be sort of informed. And so this was the work we've done here at the GSD which is sanitation as infrastructure, which was a studio in Mumbai—so it has research but it also has studio projects which I shared with you, and we will share more of this. And there are 12 projects and I'm just showing you one project which looked at the notion of transitional solutions in a settlement within Mumbai and how one can create a network of different forms of sanitation infrastructure to work as an ecology to solve these problems. And now with the help of the South Asia Institute of the GSD, we have developed a catalogue which is called 'Imagining a Sanitation Hub' where we are exploring how it intersects with public health because a public toilet in a slum or a favela is a perfect pathology lab because you can get a read on the community's health just by picking up samples from that, and given COVID and all of that, you can expand it in many ways. And so therefore, how can one even expand this imagination further is what this document has tried to do. And in a place like India where you have almost 20,000 transitioning settlements which are not villages, they're not towns, they don't have the infrastructure, this sort of settlement can become an ideal test. So it's not so much in the cities even, but in these peripheral. So we studied what the landscape of these places is in terms of material, construction techniques, colors, textures, and began to develop what might be prototype hubs where the toilet is only one component of what is essentially a community facility. And therefore this notion of it as a sanitation infrastructure and a sanitation hub, which then begins to bring a multiplicity of kind of domains to intersect. And really, it is, and I think you showed us a case of Tokyo—we talked about this earlier—context really matters because location is from where some of this would grow. And I think what you presented to us reinforced the idea of location, of culture, of particular needs, and the notion of empathy, equity, access—which is access for poor, access for disabled, access for a whole spectrum of society. So I just wanted to put that there as a sharing. So when we discuss it, we have a spectrum of issues we could look at, and really from your experience, ask you what might resonate in terms of learnings even beyond what you've shown us in Tokyo. So thank you again.

Thank you very much. I think the questions I have for the two of you, perhaps before we open up to the audience, firstly has to do with this idea of patronage. In both cases, of course, and I'd love to hear more from Rahu about the mechanisms he is envisioning in terms of how to implement beyond the normal capacities of government, of bureaucracy, in bringing these facilities to the local level. But for Koji-san, I also have a question about patronage—the economic and bureaucratic efficacies between India and Japan are vastly different. And as I was just reading about the toilets program, this article came up about naming rights of these toilets, which is something Harvard is acutely aware of. But it is actually something that is just starting to appear in Japan. Up until fairly recently, while major corporations are often acting behind the scenes as you have done through something like an NGO like the Nippon Foundation to provide essentially the front for this largely private philanthropic endeavor, what is your take on this seeming adjustment in expectations and protocols in private initiatives causing public change in Japan?

If I could just ask a fairly gentle follow-up to that—would it be fair to say that in general, Japanese corporations tend to be a little bit more shy about going forward in these social projects than what we find typically in Europe or the United States?

Yeah, you know, in the case of India, of course it's much more complex because the problem is much bigger, but there are different forms of patronage. To your question, the government has a massive mission—I mean, our prime minister, the prime minister in India, his ambition is in what the next 15 years or 10 years to have a toilet in every house. So what they're doing is they're big factories and they prefabricate toilets and they deliver them outside village homes. But how do you do it in a favela or a slum? The density is too high, so therefore one has to think about community toilets as a transition. So that's one form of patronage. The other is the NGO sector and corporations. There's a wonderful foundation called the Sulabh Sacharia which has been in operation for decades and they build public toilets in cities; they charge people a very minimal amount and that keeps the maintenance going. But you know, what is consistent in all these forms of patronage in India is there's no design, and that's what was very inspiring about this presentation—the role design can play in recognizing the particularities of location. Of course, that's a given. And so there are many forms of patronage; they just haven't aligned. And I think the critical thing thinking about sanitation in India is again I'm emphasizing context matters. So how you intervene in a slum community where people don't own the land, the government has imaginations how to redevelop it, how you make investments in terms of material life cycles—so is it a transitionary solution or an absolute one? becomes a critical question. In smaller towns, which is the example I showed, these are peripheral towns with populations of, you know, 20,000, 30,000 people, agricultural—it's a different approach because then the nature of that hub is quite different. And so I think it's a complex landscape, but I think what I'm beginning to learn is location matters, identifying the patronage, and then aligning those aspirations is completely different. And design can play a massive role, which is, I think, underutilized in the context of India.

I mean, this idea of alignment seems to be so crucial. I mean, there seems to be no shortage of resources out there, but in this case, I mean, I think what we heard from Koji-san today is this amazing case of this perfect alignment of will, of desire, of a social need, but also, you know, someone who worked incredibly hard over the course of the last five years, three years to bring this to realization. If I can ask the two of you to talk a little bit about making this alignment work and what it takes to bring the resources and the needs to match each other, and the kind of infrastructure, social infrastructure that is actually necessary in the cases of India and in Japan to make this alignment come together.

That's Rahu. Yeah, I mean, I think in at least my experiences in India, it would differ again by location. So let's take the—I'm just going to for simplicity say the big cities, the small towns like I showed you, and the village, right? Or if that even exists. In the big cities, it's the folks who don't have toilets or access to sanitation are the poor who live in slums; they don't have tenure of land. So the alignment—it's actually a political will decision. And you know, unfortunately in a place like India, all the intellectual capital as far as design is concerned is just concentrated in the big cities, so where that ability exists, but the political will has to be very large because it's a question of very expensive land. If you go to the small town, the will exists, communities can be organized, people have tenure on their land, but you got to take design there, so that alignment becomes difficult. That's why the sample we chose for the Harvard project was taking a small town for that reason. And if you go to the village, it's an alignment of cultural practices. So when the government now builds these prefabricated toilets and delivers it to the village, often people use it as a big cupboard—they store their grain and their jewelry in it because it's the most firm concrete structure because everything else is built in mud. So that's a cultural kind of difference. So I think the alignments vary and it's shifting because it's aspirational, economic, and cultural, so it's hard to generalize that response.

Thank you. We have, I think, just about 15 minutes left. I have more questions for the two speakers, but if there are questions from the audience, perhaps this would be a good opportunity to present them.

Well, thank you very much for the two presentations. It's extremely exciting to have this subject matter at the academy. Since you were talking about alignment, I was trying to think whether there would be forms of rapprochement between the two positions. And I was thinking about UNICEF reports that came out last year—it's all about sanitary equity, that's the key subject matter. And their call, I mean, there is also fun in it where they say it's time to make a stink—they say now we need to talk about that subject matter because we have 60 percent of the world's populations that do not have toilets in their homes, and 25 percent of the schools globally do not have toilets at all. So the question: could you imagine something like the Lagos toilets, the Mumbai toilets, the disability, etc.? Since you were thinking about how to move ahead, and since your father said it should be for all, so let's go there. My second question is if you start to move to what you call the minority world, you would have to disengage the toilet from sewage systems, off the grid. Could you imagine toilets that are not connected to the grid? That would be a great challenge for your company.

There are two parts to the question. First, I would just correct your statement slightly, which is to say that again, I think people understand the importance of the toilet and I think people understand the importance in terms of public health very much. It's just unfortunately, and for us it's hard to even imagine that it's so low down in the priority because the first part of the priority actually is livelihoods, just to survive, then it's followed by dwelling, just to be able to touch—I'm not even saying housing, I'm saying dwelling—and then the third would be everything that surrounds it in public health. And that's why one was trying to now see it in a more complex way because if one sees that ecology, you can situate it. So I think that is worth recognizing. And then I think to your point, Mark, yes absolutely. And so in the small town, because it was surrounded by agriculture, one was imagining reed beds and a whole landscape that goes with the build form for exactly doing the performances that are related to purifying water, sewage, etc. Therefore, it can be a different kind of design where it's also the landscape in which a toilet like this is situated which creates a beauty and therefore an attractiveness and a different relationship. But that would again depend on location. So in a city, you just connect it to the system because that's the most viable thing to do, right? Because you don't have the land.

Hey, thank you for your presentation, and we saw very different toilets and we saw different toilet cultures and different assets to toilets. Like we saw the lack of toilets in India, we saw the Tokyo Toilet Project that's setting a good example. And I'm just thinking that for example in my home country in Germany, there are public toilets but either they are also like scary or dirty or you have to pay for them. And then now when I look at the US, I see like a lack of public toilets—like for example in Cambridge, there are almost no public toilets around here. So I'm thinking, what can the US learn from the Tokyo Toilet Project but also from the aspirations of the Indian government to build more toilets?

Sorry, I could not catch your questions exactly. So I'm wondering like what could the US, as like one of the richest countries in the world, learn from the Tokyo Toilet Project with aspirations for better toilets, but also from the aspirations of the Indian government just to provide more toilets?

I think we have time for one more question, perhaps.

Hi, my name is Zoe. So it's really wonderful to meet you, and I was really inspired by the work that the Tokyo Toilet Project did in terms of thinking about collectivity and addressing collectivity within design. One thing that as I've gone through the GSD and given thought about is how do you engage community, how do you use design to meet the needs of a community? And one thing that I found very inspiring about your project was you had multiple partners from architects to your own corporate organization to the total company. So with so many partners involved, what did community engagement look like for everyone involved? I imagine it was different from the architects to Toto to yourself. So if you could elaborate on that, I would greatly appreciate it. Thank you.

Thank you. Maybe, yeah, one last question.

I'll keep it short, but thank you so much for taking the time to speak. I'm actually curious about switching the narrative a little bit, and I was wondering for the designs where they're taking into consideration the maintenance worker and the cleaners—were you know bathroom public bathroom design allowed? A lot of the conversations revolved around the people who's using it, but what about the people who's maintaining it?

Thank you. All right, thank you. On this note, so let's give another round of applause to our speakers, to Koji, Sang, and thank you very much. And look forward to trying them out on the next trip to Japan.