Why We Need to Look at Our Toilets

What makes a country great? Is it having more guns than anyone else, more gold, more brains or producing things that the whole world wants? I would argue that the true sign of a country’s greatness is the state of its public toilets.

When in 2007 I moved with my husband and one-and-a-half-year old son to Tokyo, I was seven-and-a-half-months pregnant with our second child and my well-being depended entirely on being within reach at all times of a toilet. Had I been in any other capital in the world, this would have meant that I would not have been able to go out at all as not even New York or London or Paris has decent public toilets. But Tokyo, I soon discovered, was different. I remember very clearly how on my second day in the city as I trudged up the hill to my son’s creche, my huge stomach before me, the urge to go to the toilet came upon me suddenly. Since I knew no Japanese, I shrank from having to go into a restaurant or café and demand a toilet and so I began casting around reluctantly for a public toilet. I found one a bare 15 metres up the road beside a tiny playground, well signposted in English and Japanese and wheeled my son in his stroller and myself into its tile covered interior. 

A toilet in Tokyo. Photo: 鋸香具師 - Own work, (CC BY-SA 4.0)/Wikipedia.

In those days I was especially sensitive to smells, and strong smells, especially unpleasant ones, made me want to throw up immediately. But the toilet was not only spotless but smelt delicately of lavender and roses. I parked my son in his stroller by the sink and rushed into the cabin. And that was where I fell in love with Japan and Japanese toilets. I cannot remember any more whether I tried any of the numerous buttons that operated things as diverse and front and back showers, air dryers and music. Perhaps the toilet seat was a fairly basic one. But it was clean and heated and as the morning was chilly, I definitely appreciated the warm comfort of that heated toilet seat. The weight of being pregnant and alone in a new city was somehow taken off my shoulders and I felt safe, cared for. More importantly, I felt seen, included.

There and then, I began to love Tokyo – not because it was beautiful, for it wasn’t, but because the city cared for its citizens, even the ones who couldn’t pay for a coffee in a café so that they could use a toilet. 

Toilets are very political things. Every ruler of a country, be they democratically elected, a king, or a dictator, must at some point, contend with sanitation and all that.

One possible reason why the Aam Aadmi Party did not fare so well in the recent Delhi elections could be because while they thought a lot about education and infrastructure, they neglected the drainage systems and last monsoon the sewers overflowed in several places. Interestingly, the newly elected Bharatiya Janata Party chief minister Rekha Gupta’s first public appearance was at the Sunehri Pul sewer which she announced would be cleaned in preparation for the monsoons.

A child stands in front of a public toilet near the Bhoomiheen camp in New Delhi. Photo: Pavan Korada/The Wire.

In the Harappan civilisation, excavations have shown that their cities all had public baths and proper covered sewage drains. But modern India was far more interested in sending rockets into space and building nuclear bombs than worrying about sanitation. Public toilets were a disaster. Bus stations, railway stations and airport toilets were stinking and filthy till COVID-19. Though there has been some progress in that area, in many parts of Delhi, there are open drains running alongside the road even today.

I have long been a toilet militant, judging all institutions, all countries, by the state of their public toilets.

I am not alone in this. Mahatma Gandhi and innumerable gurus even today make toilet cleaning a part of the duties of those who live in the ashram. It wasn’t only because Gandhiji wanted to fight untouchability that he did this. It was because he understood that cleaning public spaces was an essential part of community building, of thinking about others’ well-being in a practical and immediate way.  In my school in Himachal, we were made to clean the school grounds but not the toilets – which were filthy. Had we been made to do those as well; I suspect the toilets would have been kept a lot cleaner. But perhaps the population of the school would have shrunk as shocked parents pulled their darling children out. For how could they pay so much money for their children to be cleaning other people’s toilets? 

Because of the caste system, we in India believe that cleaning a place, especially a public place, is someone else’s job, not ours.

Cleaners are invisible people who come and perform their jobs invisibly. But what this does is it cuts us off from a very fundamental piece of knowledge, one that is essential to life – that all actions have consequences and it is our responsibility to take those consequences into consideration when we act. As any cook knows, you cook food you create dirt. You put that food in your body and create more dirt. You breathe in oxygen, you breathe out carbon dioxide. Your body itself will one day be no more than pollution that must be disposed of. These are the facts of life. To cut oneself off from this simple truth is like seeing only one side of a coin. So how can you know that it is in fact money?

More than their toilets, it the Japanese attitude to cleaning up that I admire. For the Japanese understand the connection between cleaning and the mind. They know that to clean the space around them is to clean their mind. My daughter was born in Japan and went to a Japanese creche when she was just short of 20 months. She had been there barely 10 minutes when the teacher thrust a clean duster into her little hand and showed her how to clean the room. When I returned to collect her I watched in amazement as children younger than her cleaned swiftly and with precision, folded their sheets and handed them to the teacher before leaving. This habit of keeping her surroundings spotless out of consideration for others has never left her and it often gets her into trouble in her school where she fights with others who don’t clean up after themselves. 

The Japanese way of life, their attention to detail, their sense of community, their sensitivity to beauty and to the transience of life comes from the central place given to cleaning up in their society. When you eat with Japanese friends at their home, everyone helps with the clean-up, and no one leaves until it’s all done. I asked a Zen monk in Kyoto what was the single most important single thing one could learn from Zen meditation, and he told me that Zen teaches you how to clean your mind, to throw away what is inessential so that you can see what is essential. I didn’t understand what he meant till one day, someone asked me if I had any ritual or habit before I sat down to write. I was about to say I didn’t then I realised that I did. I always clean – either the kitchen, my cupboards, my living room or the bathroom, before I begin to write.   

Radhika Jha is a novelist. Her recent novels include The Hidden Forest and My Beautiful Shadow, both published by Westlands Press. 

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