by Rose George
He could have, if he’d watched enough TV reruns. Unlike their British counterparts, American sewer workers can reflect in the glory of a much-loved sitcom character from the 1950s. Millions of Americans remember—and loved—the character of Ed Norton in The Honeymooners, a sewer worker with an endless supply of wastewater witticisms, most of them involving lying back and floating. Sewer-worker pride is also fed by the Operators’ Challenge, a nationwide annual competition set up by the Water Environment Federation, an industry body. Wastewater workers compete in several events, such as rescuing from a sewer a mannequin in danger; fixing machinery; and answering technical questions in “Wastewater Jeopardy.” (Question: The minimum design velocity in sewers to prevent solids from settling in the collections system. Answer: What is 2 feet per second? Question: The mixture of microorganisms and treated wastewater. Answer: What is “mixed liquor”?)
The competition is taken seriously—there are Operators’ Challenge trophy cabinets in every treatment plant I visit—even if the team names lack gravitas. The Ward’s Island Ninja Turtles compete with the Bowery Bay Bowl Busters and the Tallman Island Turd Surfers. The media treat it with humor, referring to it as the Sludge Olympics, and coverage brings prestige. “It’s genuinely good for improving skills,” says Buckley, who adds that much of the work is achieved “with brute strength and ingenuity.” He tells with pride of his most ingenious hour, when he traced a catastrophic spill of boiler oil in a local creek two miles back up the sewer line, right to the basement of the apartment building that was sending it into the sewer. He got commendations; the offender got a $3 million cleanup bill. He says his investigative technique involved sticking his head down manholes and stopping at the first clean spot of sewer he saw.
This is a skilled job, and it’s sought after, though not for the salaries. The newest team member is Edwin, a tattooed man, whose low rank is obvious because it’s his leg that men grab onto for balance when they’re going down the holes. Edwin earns $15 an hour. The most senior crew member only gets $21. I suspect they’d earn more cleaning toilets. More attractive are stability and benefits, crucial in a country where the only health care on offer has to be paid for. That’s what attracted Buckley, when he got off the plane from London in the 1970s and didn’t want to be “the stereotypical Irish navvy.” The only thing lacking for job satisfaction is a proper New York nickname.
At a manhole in La Guardia Airport, Buckley is showing me another tide gate, shining light into the hole with a mirror and sunlight (“better than any flashlight”) when a Port Authority cop stops by. He asks what we’re doing, and when Buckley replies, “Looking for alligators,” nods with no apparent disbelief before moving in for a peer. I ask the cop why they’re known as New York’s finest, why firefighters are New York’s bravest, and even prison officers at Rikers Island are New York’s boldest, but the men who keep sewage flowing, and keep disease away, have nothing. He shrugs. He doesn’t know or care. Buckley laughs. “We’re New York’s stinkiest.” Sometimes New York’s bravest can’t do without New York’s stinkiest: Douglas Greeley remembers the police asking for his men’s help in retrieving a dead mafioso who had been thrown down a manhole. Another time, the item being retrieved was a broomstick discarded by certain police officers who had used it to sodomize a Haitian immigrant named Abner Louima. “It was very humid, and the police department internal affairs division had spread canvas sheets out on the street. They closed the street and we scooped every catch basin, and we were pulling out all kinds of broomsticks. We had to lay them down on the canvas and then they would categorize them, measure them and do samples. In 95-degree weather.” They found it. Louima was eventually awarded $5.3 million in damages against the city, the largest police brutality settlement in its history. The contribution of sewer workers to the investigation went unnoticed.
They could be New York’s damnedest, working with a system that is heinously expensive to maintain and upgrade, excessively wasteful of water, and easily defeated by less than half an inch of rain. Greeley knows that flooding could be minimized if the rain had somewhere else to go beside a sewer, such as into the earth. But New York—and London—have blocked off all natural drainage by concreting over much of their surface area. Patio gardens also have a lot to answer for. Greeley talks wistfully of Seattle’s Street Edge Alternative (SEA) streets, where asphalt is removed and replaced by wide borders of whatever encourages the natural percolation of water downward (earth, turf, pebbles). Similar plans have been proposed as part of New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s Sustainable City initiative. Even in London, where homeowners have been allowed to pave over the equivalent of twenty-two Hyde Parks in ten years, the government has announced that covering earth with anything other than porous materials will now require planning permission. I ask Greeley if he has the money for things like SEA streets. “No. That’s the tragedy.”
I also ask him the question I put to everyone I meet who works in or with wastewater. If they had to design the system again from scratch, would they do it differently? Would they, as former president Teddy Roosevelt did, question the original concept of flushing? “Civilized people,” Roosevelt said in 1910, “ought to know how to dispose of sewage in some other way than putting it into the drinking water.” Greeley considers the question with a long pause. “It’s true that waterborne sewerage is very problematic.” But a return to on-site sanitation, whether privies or private treatment plants, is no solution. “People wouldn’t look after them properly. There’d be disease outbreaks.”
Before I leave, after Greeley has loaded me down with lapel pins that are miniature New York Sewer manhole covers, he plays me “The Song of the Sewer,” sung by Art Carney from The Honeymooners. We listen to it, a rare example of a positive spin on sewer work—“Together we stand / Shovel in hand / To keep things rolling along”—and he ponders his chosen career. The great American sanitary engineer George E. Waring may have written about “the branch of the Art of Drainage which removes fecal and other refuse from towns,” but who, these days, thinks of waste disposal as an artistic endeavor? “A city father,” says Greeley, “would never say, welcome to our sewer system, isn’t it special, we’re proud of it. The best I can hope for is indifference.”
_______________________
World Toilet Expo, Bangkok, 2006
(Author)
THE ROBO-TOILET REVOLUTION
THE ACTRESS AND THE GORILLA
______________
The flush toilet is a curious object. It is the default method of excreta disposal in most of the industrialized, technologically advanced world. It was invented either five hundred or two thousand years ago, depending on opinion. Yet in its essential workings, this everyday banal object hasn’t changed much since Sir John Harington, godson of Queen Elizabeth I, thought his godmother might like something that flushed away her excreta, and devised the Ajax, a play on the Elizabethan word jakes, meaning privy.
The greatest improvements to date were made in England in the later years of the eighteenth century and the early years of the next by the trio of Alexander Cumming (who invented a valve mechanism), Joseph Bramah (a Yorkshireman who improved on Cumming’s valve and made the best lavatories to be had for the next century), and Thomas Crapper (another Yorkshireman who did not invent the toilet but improved its parts). In engineering terms, the best invention was the siphonic flush, which pulls the water out of the bowl and into the pipe. For the user, the S-bend was the godsend, because the water that rested in the bend created a seal that prevented odor from emerging from the pipe. At the height of Victorian invention, when toilets were their most ornate and decorated with the prettiest pottery, patents for siphonic flushes, for example, were being requested at the rate of two dozen or so a year.
Nonetheless, the modern toilet would still be recognizable to Joseph Bramah. He could probably fix it. Other contemporary inventions like the telephone have gone through profound changes (it’s difficult to think of Alexander Graham Bell coming to grips wi
th an iPhone). They have been improved through generations of innovation. The toilet, by contrast, remains adequate and nothing more, though readers of Focus magazine once voted it the best invention in history (over fire and the wheel). Compared to other items that are considered necessities—car, telephone, television—the toilet is rarely upgraded voluntarily. Marketers call it a “distress purchase” because it is only replaced when necessary.
One country treats the toilet differently. Here it is modified, improved upon, innovated. It is a design object, a must-have, a desirable product. Enormous sums are spent on improving its smallest parts. Only here is the toilet given the respect accorded other great inventions.
Three scenes:
On my first morning in Tokyo, I go to get my hair cut. I am the first customer in the shop and talk to the receptionist while I wait. I tell him I’m writing a book about toilets.
“Why?”
I say Japan’s toilets are like no other.
“Are they?”
[He thinks]
“Westerners don’t like them.”
[He makes a gesture of spray going upward]
“They don’t understand.”
In a tiny bar in Tokyo’s Golden Gai district, across the alley from Quentin Tarantino’s favorite bar, I’m having a conversation with the owner, a hefty, cheery girl from Hiroshima. She has asked what I’m doing here, and I have answered. “Oh! That’s so interesting!” Within five minutes, the entire bar—it holds seven bar stools and discretion is pointless—is discussing with great vigor the merits of Japan’s two leading toilet brands. TOTO washes better. Yes, but Inax dries better. It’s all a question of positioning. My companion, a genteel young woman who runs an art gallery, is amused. They are taking it totally seriously, she says. They are genuinely trying to help you. It’s nice.
It is very cold in Kyoto. I have come to Japan in December, in between trips to Bangkok and India, where December is hot. I have not brought enough winter clothing and I am feeling the cold. In Kyoto I walk the streets for a while, nipping into shops for warmth. Eventually it gets to be too much. There’s only one option left. Though I have boycotted McDonald’s for years, this is where I go because I know they have heated toilet seats. I know they have TOTO.
Japan makes the most advanced, remarkable toilets in the world. Japanese toilets can, variously, check your blood pressure, play music, wash and dry your anus and “front parts” by means of an in-toilet nozzle that sprays water and warm air, suck smelly ions from the air, switch on a light for you as you stumble into the bathroom at night, put the seat lid down for you (a function known as the “marriage-saver”), and flush away your excreta without requiring anything as old-fashioned as a tank. These devices are known as high-function toilets, but even the lowliest high-function toilet will have as standard an in-built bidet system, a heated seat, and some form of nifty control panel.
Consequently, first-time travelers to Japan have for years told a similar tale. Between being befuddled by used underwear-vending machines and unidentifiable sushi, they will have an encounter that proceeds like this: foreigner goes to bathroom and finds a receptacle with a high-tech control panel containing many buttons with peculiar symbols on them, and a strange nozzle in the bowl. Foreigner doesn’t speak Japanese and doesn’t understand the symbols, or the English translations that are sometimes provided. Does that button release a mechanical tampon grab or a flush? What, please, is a “front bottom”? Foreigner finishes business, looks in vain for a conventional flush handle, and then—also in vain—for which button controls the flush. Foreigner presses a button, gets sprayed with water by the nozzle instead and is soaked.
This is the Washlet experience. The Washlet, originally a brand name for a toilet seat with bidet function, has become for the Japanese a generic word for a high-function toilet (though usually translated as Washeretto). In modern Japan, the Washlet is as unremarkable and loved and taken for granted as the Band-Aid. Since 1980, TOTO, Japan’s biggest and oldest toilet manufacturer, has sold 20 million Washlets to a nation of 160 million people. According to census figures, more Japanese households now have a Washlet than a computer. They are so standard, some Japanese schoolchildren refuse to use anything else.
It is easy for anyone who has not used a Washlet to dismiss it as yet another product of Japanese eccentricity. Robo-toilets. Gadgetry and gimmickry, bells and whistles. Such sniping ignores the fact that the Japanese make toilets that are beautifully engineered, and that the stunning success of the high-function toilet holds lessons for anyone—from public health officials to marketing experts—whose work involves understanding and changing human behavior and decision making. It is instructive because only sixty years ago Japan was a nation of pit latrines. People defecated by squatting. They did not use water to cleanse themselves, but paper or stone or sticks. They did not know what a bidet was, nor did they care. Today, only 3 percent of toilets produced in Japan are squat types. The Japanese sit, use water, and expect a heated seat as a matter of course. In less than a century, the Japanese toilet industry has achieved the equivalent of persuading a country that drove on the left in horse-drawn carriages to move to the right and, by the way, to drive a Ferrari instead. Two things interest me about the Japanese toilet revolution: that it happened, and that it has strikingly failed to spread.
TOTO—the name comes from a contraction of the Japanese words for “Asian porcelain”—ranks among the world’s top three biggest plumbing manufacturers. In 2006, its net sales were $4.2 billion. It has 20,000 employees, two-thirds of Japan’s bathroom market, seven factories in Japan, and a presence in sixteen countries. With the Washlet, TOTO has given the Japanese language a new word, and the Japanese people a new way of going to the toilet. It is a phenomenon.
I arrange to visit the TOTO Technical Center in Tokyo. It is a low, sleek building, oddly located in a residential street in an ordinary eastern suburb which has a mom-and-pop hardware shop on the main street, no neon, and no visible foreigners. The Technical Center is described as a place “where architects come to get ideas about designs.” It is a show-and-copy emporium, big, spotless, and empty of people or architects. Sample bathroom sets gleam in the distance; a row of toilets automatically lift their lids as I walk past, in a ceramic greeting ceremony. Photographs are forbidden, leading me to wonder what an architect who’s no good at sketching is supposed to do. But the toilet industry in Japan is a highly competitive business, and the top three—TOTO, Inax, and Matsushita—keep their secrets close. My requests to visit TOTO’s product development laboratories were politely refused.
My guide is a young woman called Asuka. She works in TOTO’s investor relations department and has probably been instructed to deal with me because she went to school in the United States for a few years and speaks near-perfect Valley Girl. Perhaps I’ve met too many engineers, but she doesn’t seem like someone who would work in this industry. When she sees a World Toilet Organization sticker on my glasses case, she says “on Gucci!” with genuine distaste. She later confesses that, actually, she’d rather be marketing cosmetics. She says TOTO is a good employer, though I’m disappointed to discover that rumors of certain employee perks are unfounded. They do not get free toilets.
It’s Asuka’s first time presenting a PowerPoint introduction to TOTO, and despite the occasional sorority phrasing—“the Washlet is, like, a must-have”—she conveys the facts and figures well enough. The world’s biggest toilet manufacturer was founded in 1917, when a man called Kazuchika Okura, then working for a ceramics company, thought it might be a good idea to manufacture toilet bowls. It was not the most obvious business plan. As Asuka puts it, “back then, the sanitation environment was terrible here in Japan. We only had wooden toilet bowls.” In truth, they didn’t have toilet bowls at all, because squatting toilets didn’t have any. Nonetheless, according to the official TOTO history—as told in a comic strip that Asuka gives me, this being manga-mad Japan—Mr. Okura expressed his desire, in somewhat stilted Eng
lish, to “research how to mass-produce sanitary-ware, which are large ceramic items.”
Progress in selling large ceramic items was slow at first. Then came the Second World War, which left Japan with a damaged infrastructure and planners determined to build superior housing connected to sewers. This wasn’t a new concept: the Osaka Sewerage Science Museum shows a diorama featuring Lord Hideoshi, a shogun who installed a sewer at Osaka Castle four hundred years ago. With little thought for chronology, Lord Hideoshi is joined in the diorama by a bowler-hatted Scotsman called William Barton—voiced by an American who learned Scottish from Star Trek—who worked in Tokyo University’s engineering department and introduced Japan to waterborne sewerage. Still, by the end of the Second World War, only a tiny proportion of the country was sewered.
American forces stationed in Japan, accustomed to flush toilets at home, pushed for the same to be installed in the nation they were occupying. TOTO’s toilet bowls sold increasingly over the next forty years, and by 1977, more Japanese were sitting than squatting. This cultural change was not without difficulties. The writer Yoko Mure, in a contribution to Toilet Ho!, a collection of essays about Japanese toilet culture (whose title in Japanese apparently expresses the extreme relief of someone who has been desperate for a restroom and finally finds one), wonders “how the people could use a Western-style toilet. The Western style is the same as sitting on a chair. I had a terror that if I got used to it, I might excrete whenever I was sitting on a chair anywhere, even at a lesson or at mealtimes.”
The new ceramic sitting toilet had other disadvantages. Visiting an outhouse during Japan’s freezing winters can never have been pleasant, but at least with a squat pan there was no contact between skin and cold material. The new style changed that. Now, flesh had to sit on icy ceramic for several months of the year, a situation worsened by a national resistance to central heating that persists today. A homegrown solution was devised by sliding socks onto the seat, but this technique only worked on old horseshoe-shaped seats, which were becoming less common.