Who Owned Your Poop In Edo Era Japan?

In most places, for most of history, few people would eagerly assert their ownership over a bucket of excrement (or poop or doo-doo or whatever your preferred terminology is). Not so in Edo era Japan.

Transcript

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In the spring of seventeen twenty four, a tenant named Jinzaburo appeared before a magistrate in Edo and filed a complaint against his landlord. The landlord, a man named Yasubei, who owned a row of apartments in the Hanjo district, had sold the contents of the building's privy to a fertilizer merchant without Jinzaburo's consent. Jinzaburo argued that the waste was his, he had produced it. It had come from his body, from food he had purchased with his own money. The landlord had no right to it. Yasu Bei argued the opposite. The privy was his structure, built on his land, maintained at his expense. Whatever entered it became part of his property. The contents belonged to him. The magistrate listened to both men carefully. This was not a frivolous case. Cases like this came before Edo's magistrates regularly, because in this city, in this period, the question of who owned a person's bodily waste was a question with a real financial answer, and where there is money there is always someone willing to argue about it. The ruling when it came would turn on a principle that no court in London or Paris or Rome had ever had occasion to establish, because no court in London or Paris or Rome had ever needed to. In those cities, what came out of a person was a nuisance to be removed, an embarrassment to be hidden, a problem to be solved. In Edo it was a commodity, it had a price. It had buyers and sellers and contracts and disputes, and apparently lawyers. We will come back to Jinzaburo and Yasube. First, you need to understand the city. You are Takeda Mosuke, and you are thirty four years old, and you have been working this route through the Nihonbashi district of Edo since your father handed it to you eleven years ago. You know every privy on twelve blocks. You know which ones are the easy collections and which ones will cost you an argument. You know which households eat well and which ones eat badly, and you know why that matters in ways that would surprise most people. It is a bright morning in late spring, the kind where the smell of the canals rises early and the city wakes up smelling like itself. From where you stand in the alley behind a row of Nagaya apartments, you can see the water gate at the end of the street, and beyond it the flat brown surface of the canal, where two of the fertilizer boats are already moving, loaded low in the water and heading south toward the farm villages. By midday there will be six or eight of them. By evening they will come back empty, riding high, carrying cabbages and daikon, and bundles of scallion that will be on sale in the market before sunset. You have watched this exchange happen every day of your working life, and you have never stopped finding it remarkable, though you would not use that word. You would say correct. The city produces something the farms need. The farms produce something the city needs. The boats go out full and come back full. Nothing is wasted. This is the correct way for things to work. The bucket is already full before you arrive. You can smell it from the alley, this is not a complaint. This is information. It tells you that the family inside has been saving for three days, which means the landlord has been saving for three days, which means you are about to have a negotiation. The landlord appears at the rear of the building, wiping his hands on his apron. His name is Chobei, and he owns four nagaya in this block, which means he controls the waste of somewhere between sixty and eighty people depending on the season, and he knows exactly what that is worth. He has known since before you arrived this morning. This is always how it goes with Chobei. Three days, he says. I can see that. Good accumulation. Large households, three families with children. I'll give you the usual. He looks at you the way a fish seller looks at someone who has just offered half price for a seabream. The usual was for two days. This is three days. Three days from families with children is not the usual. Before the negotiation goes further, a word about why this conversation is happening at all. Why is a landlord in Edo selling his tenants waste? Why is anyone buying it? And why does the number of children in the household affect the price? The answer begins with the land itself. Japan is a small island country, and most of it is mountain. The flat agricultural land that exists is limited and intensively farmed, and for centuries it has been farmed without the one input that European and Chinese agriculture depended on most heavily, animal manure. Japan had very few large animals. Cattle were rare and expensive, used for draft work, not kept in numbers sufficient, to produce meaningful quantities of fertilizer. Horses were a military and aristocratic luxury. Sheep and pigs barely existed. The farms that fed Japan's cities had no animal manure to speak of, and the sandy, alluvial soils around Edo were particularly poor, prone to leaching nutrients with every rain, requiring constant replenishment, just to maintain yields, let alone improve them. What Japan had instead of animals was people. By 1750, Edo had become the largest city in the world, larger than London or Paris, or any city in Europe, with somewhere near one million people living in an area of perhaps thirty square miles. One million people eating every day and producing, in the ordinary course of living, the one input that the farm surrounding the city could not grow without. This is what European cities threw into the Thames. This is what medieval Paris shoveled into the gutters. This is what London, in the same period, as Mosuke's morning route, was generating in quantities sufficient to contaminate the wells that fed the city, producing cholera and typhus outbreaks that killed tens of thousands, and that everyone in the city had come to regard with a mixture of resignation and horror as simply the recurring price of urban life. Edo had none of this. Edo had Mosuke. The Shimogo trade, the night soil trade, was one of the most thoroughly organized commercial systems in the city. Collectors like Mosuke bought the waste from landlords, transported it by cart and boat to the farming villages outside the city, and sold it to farmers who depended on it as completely as they depended on rain and sun. The price varied by source. Waste from households that ate well commanded a premium, because a good diet produces waste that is richer in the nutrients the soil needs. This is why the number of children matters to Chobe's price. Children eat more relative to their size than adults, particularly when they eat the fish and rice that Nihonbashi households near the market can afford. Three families with children who live near the fish market are producing something measurably different from three families of adults who eat mostly millet and pickles. The farmers know this, the collectors know this, the landlords know this. The price reflects it. The price of the night soil produced by ten households over a year is roughly half a Rio of gold. One Rio will buy enough grain to feed a person for a year. This is not a minor trade. Landlords in Edo, who own large Nagaya complexes, earn thirty to forty Rio a year from their tenants' waste alone, almost doubling a carpenter's annual income without lifting a tool. There are records of landlords and tenants going before the magistrates to argue over who owns the contents of the privy, which is where Jinzaburo and Yasube started this story, and where we will return to them shortly. When a tenant moved out without settling accounts, the right to the privy contents could be part of what was disputed. This was settled law in Edo by the early 18th century. It had to be. Because the money involved was real enough to fight about. Back to the alley and to Jobay. Two buckets extra, Masuke said. Three buckets extra. And I say for you every time. No holding back for the others. The others are two more collectors who work this district, younger men who Mosuke does not like and who are attempting to undercut him on price with the less careful landlords. Chobei knows about this. Chobei knows about everything that happens within four blocks of his Nagaya. Two buckets extra, Mosuke says again, and I come first on Tuesdays. He considers this. Coming first on Tuesdays matters because Tuesday is the day after the bathhouse runs its full loads, which means the households have all been home the night before, and the accumulation is at its peak. Chobe wants the Tuesday premium. He has been wanting it for two years. Done, he says. You shake hands, which in Edo means you bow slightly, and he bows slightly less, and neither of you smiles, because this is a business transaction, and it has been conducted correctly. Now the work. The Kook are wooden buckets made of cedar or cypress, built narrow and tall like sake barrels, tightly cooperated with bands of twisted bamboo. The wood has to be strong because the contents are heavy and the journey is long, and it has to be close grained because even a small leak will make the cart unusable for the rest of the day, and you will hear about it from the farmers when you arrive smelling worse than you already do. You carry two at a time on a pole laid across your shoulders, one bucket hanging from each end on short rope loops. This load, two co oak, is called one ka. Your cart holds eight ko oak, four ka, and takes two trips to fill on a good day. The privi in a Nihonbashi Nagaya is a small wooden structure at the back of the courtyard, shared by all the household in the building. It sits over a stone lined pit with a hinged wooden lid that drops to close the opening. The pit is emptied from a panel in the side of the structure, low to the ground, which you open with a wooden key that every collector carries on a cord around his wrist. The panel swings out. You dip a long handled wooden ladle called a Hishaku into the pit, and transfer the contents to the Kook in long, smooth arcs that you have practiced until they are completely controlled, almost completely controlled. You learned on your second day of work that the one thing you cannot afford to do in this trade is hurry. The smell is not what you notice anymore. This is the truth about any trade that involves strong smells. After six months, the smell becomes simply the smell of work. What you notice now is the quality. You can tell from the color and the consistency whether a household has been eating fish or vegetables, whether someone has been sick, whether the family has been visited by relatives who eat differently than they do. A farmer buying shimogo for his rice patties wants to know these things, and you have made it your business to be able to tell him. This is the knowledge that separates a good shimogo merchant from someone who just carries buckets. The collection takes most of the morning. Cho Bay's for Nagaya, then the soba shop on the corner where the accumulation is thin, but the owner always has leftover noodles he will trade for a discount. Then two more landlords on the next block, one easy and one who tries every time to renegotiate a contract you have held for seven years without incident. You fill the cart twice. The second run you take directly to the loading dock at the south end of the canal district, where the Kobukuni, the fertilizer boats, are tied up waiting. The boats are wide and flat bottom, built for capacity rather than speed, with a single covered hold where the co oak are stacked and sealed with wax cloth covers before the hatches are closed. A good sized boat can carry two hundred co oak in a single load. One boatman, moving at the pace of the canal current, can cover the distance from the city to the nearest farm villages in three or four hours, which is something that would take three men with carts most of a day on the road. The boats are why Edo can sustain this trade at the scale it does. Without them, only the farms within a few hours' walk could participate. With them, the network extends far enough to fertilize the rice patties that feed the city. You have a contract with a boat owner named Kinsaburo who takes your loads twice a week to a farming village called Sashima, two re south along the canal, and then up a narrow tributary that smells of standing water in summer and ice in winter. The farmers at Sashima grow rice and radishes and a particular variety of gourd that sells well in the Nihonbashi market. They have been using Shimogo from the city for three generations. Their yield per acre of paddy is twice what farmers thirty Ri away can manage with wood ash and river silt. They know why. They are not sentimental about it. You have met the head farmer at Sashima twice, once when you took over the route from your father, and once when you renegotiated the delivery price. His name is Hachiro, and he is a careful man who writes down everything in a ledger that he keeps under the floorboard of his house. When you renegotiated, he had already written down what he expected to pay. He showed you the number. You showed him your number. The difference was small enough that you settled it by midday and ate lunch together, which was cold rice and pickled plum, and a cup of tea that tasted a smoke. He told you that his grandfather had kept records going back forty years, and that the shimogo from the Nihonbashi district grew a measurably better radish than the Shimogo from the Kanda district to the north, and that he believed this had to do with the fish market being close to Nihonbashi, which meant the households there ate more fish, which meant the waste was richer in certain things he could not name, but could see in the color of the soil. You did not know whether this was true. You told him you would raise the price regardless. By early afternoon, you are finished with the collections and the deliveries, and you are sitting on the dock eating a piece of cold tofu from a vendor who works the canal front. The water is brown and slow moving, and the smell from the loading area drifts across you in occasional warm waves that you no longer flinch from. Two boatmen are arguing in the boat behind you about the price of rope. Down the canal, the vegetable boats are beginning to arrive from the south, coming in on the afternoon current, low in the water with their loads of cabbage and dicon that came out of fields that you helped make fertile. You do not think about this connection very often. But when you do, it strikes you as the most satisfying thing you know about your trade, that the work is part of a circle, and the circle has no waste in it, and you are the man who keeps the circle turning. You finish the tofu. The vendor is already moving on, working the dock with his tray. The vegetable boats are unloading. The last of the Shimogo boats is heading out sitting low, its single boatman, standing at the stern with a long push pole, moving without hurry through the brown water toward the farms. You pick up your pole. Tomorrow you have the conda route, which is different landlords and different negotiating styles, and a soba shop that owes you two months of reduced rate collections. You will start at dawn. You will bring the pole and the cook and the wooden key on its cord. You will know before the landlord tells you exactly how long the pit has been filling, because you will smell it from the alley. This is not a complaint. As for Jinziburo and Yasube, who appeared before the magistrate in the spring of 1724, the ruling went to Yasube. The privy was on the landlord's property. What entered the landlord's structure became the landlord's asset. Jinzaburo had no claim to what he had produced once it left his body. The magistrate was not unsympathetic to the tenant's position, but the principle was clear. In a city where waste was property, the ownership of the vessel determined the ownership of the contents. There was one exception that the court noted. If a tenant had established an independent commercial arrangement with a collector, selling directly rather than through the landlord, and the landlord had known about it and not objected, the tenant's right could be recognized. In other words, if you had already been selling your own waste and your landlord had never complained, the court might let you keep the income. This was, by any reasonable measure, one of the more unusual legal principles in the history of property law. It was also, in Edo, a perfectly ordinary feature of commercial life. The city had built an entire economy on the premise that nothing produced by a human body need go to waste. It had taken that premise seriously enough to litigate it. Mosuke, collecting his loads in the alley before dawn, was not just a sanitation worker. He was a participant in a system so thoroughly thought through that it had its own jurisprudence. In 1935, the Tokyo municipal government formally took over the Night Soil Collection System and began to manage it as a public utility, the first time in the city's history that the waste of its citizens was considered a problem to be managed rather than an asset to be sold. The transition took years. Some of the private collectors did not go quietly. They had built something, and they knew its value even when the city had decided it did not.