Tokyo Stealth Wealth: Designer Toilets and Manmade Forests in Perfect Days
There are many reasons to expect the film Perfect Days to say something original and inspired about Japan. The product of German director Wim Wenders and Japanese actor Kōji Yakusho, both stars of the film award circuit since the 1990s, it offers an unforgettable encounter with Tokyo. Moreover, the film’s raison d’etre is the toilet: in particular, TOTO Washlet toilets — all set in exquisite buildings designed by Pritzker Prize winners. Yet while critics marvel at how Yakusho disappears into the role of humble toilet cleaner, what strikes me is how Tokyo feels cloaked in monotony.
Stealth wealth — inconspicuous luxuries enjoyed by the ultra-rich — aptly describes many Tokyo spaces. No country has more living starchitects than Japan (just this month Riken Yamamoto was awarded the 2024 Pritzker laureate). In anticipation of the 2020 Tokyo Olympics and Paralympics, the Nippon Foundation and Uniqlo executive Koji Yanai launched The Tokyo Toilet project in Shibuya Ward. Public restrooms were designed by the likes of Shigeru Ban, Kengo Kuma, and Fumihiko Maki. Then the same private funders approached Wenders to make a film showcasing their work.
Figure 1. Protagonist Hirayama cleans the facilities at Ebisu East Park of The Tokyo Toilet project, designed by Fumihiko Maki. Still from Perfect Days, dir. by Wim Wenders, 2023.
One of the film’s themes is the slippage between the ordinary and extraordinary, most notably in the contrast between Shibuya, the locale of the designer toilets that Yakusho’s character, Hirayama, cleans, and Sumida, where he lives in a tenement apartment. Each day he drives on the expressway from one to the other, then back. The drive registers the physical and metaphorical distance between these two halves of Tokyo. Shibuya Ward sits on Tokyo’s west side, once home to sprawling estates and now fashionable condominiums and office towers. Sumida sits on the modest east side — east of the eponymous Sumida River — home to laborers and merchants and overcrowding since the eighteenth century.
The seventeen toilets that Wenders features hover close to two high-design landmarks: the National Stadium, redesigned by Kengo Kuma in 2020, and Yoyogi National Gymnasium, designed by Kenzo Tange, completed in 1964. Nearly all of them sit in parks. These open spaces nestle like green jewels in a sea of mid– and high-rise buildings, offering respite to middle-class families and office workers. The toilets, equally gem-like, attract little notice, though. No one in the movie appears in awe of the look-at-me designs. They take the free — and thanks to Hirayama, very clean — public conveniences for granted, oblivious to how unusual they are, and to the genius that produced the gargantuan egg-shaped contactless toilet (Kazoo Sato), the lipstick-red trifold wedge toilet (Nao Tamura), and the sinuous but cavernous vessel toilet (Sou Fujimoto).
Figure 2. The facilities at Yoyogi Fukamachi Mini Park of The Tokyo Toilet project, designed by Shigeru Ban, feature smart glass technology that transforms the walls from transparent to opaque with a simple switch. Still from Perfect Days, dir. by Wim Wenders, 2023.
One toilet, resembling three oversize mushrooms shooting out of the asphalt, appears to be a favorite of Hirayama — but not because of its design by Toyo Ito, but for its proximity to Yoyogi Park. Hirayama's lunch routine involves venturing up the stone steps approaching Yoyogi Hachiman Shrine, eating a convenience-store sandwich on a bench, and savoring the canopy of tall trees, with its play of light and shadow. The camera zooms in on his face, filled with wonder, as he peers skyward.
Nature doesn’t happen naturally in a city like Tokyo, and certainly not at this scale. The lush, seventy-hectare forest of Meiji Shrine, adjacent to Yoyogi, is entirely manmade, built in the 1920s through the efforts of citizen volunteers (and their donations) in honor of the recently deceased emperor. It is one of only two major greenspaces in the capital open to the public, along with Shinjuku Imperial Park. On the east side of the river, by contrast, Hirayama has only the towering Tokyo Skytree, a broadcasting tower, as a beacon. At his modest, six-tatami-mat home, in a makeshift side nook, he grows a surrogate forest of potted saplings rescued from Shibuya. They rely on the continuous purple glow of electric grow lights to survive.
“No viewer should forget that this Tokyo is fiction, an auteur’s inspired vision of the city.”
Figure 3. Aerial view of Yoyogi Park and the Meiji Shrine, showing a forest surrounded by dense architecture. Photo by jonny-mt, CC BY-SA 3.0 Deed
Still, Sumida has its charms, at least for a pensive bachelor leading a quiet life. Here Hirayama swaps his janitorial minivan for a bicycle, and the ordinary life of a seemingly simple man runs in extraordinary precision. He cycles to the sento (public bathhouse), where he cleanses himself and unwinds; the ¥100 bookstore; the shop that still develops 35mm film; and the bar run by a golden-voiced mama-san (matron owner). Sunshine is scarce but views of water are abundant. (Although much of Perfect Days is without dialog, the film’s two contemplative conversations take place at the riverbank.)
Figure 4. Hirayama commiserates with a stranger near Sakura Bridge as they stare at the dark waters of Sumida River. Still from Perfect Days, dir. by Wim Wenders, 2023.
The buildings around Hirayama’s neighborhood, in contrast to Shibuya, are mostly utilitarian wood or concrete, and stand cheek-by-jowl in uncoordinated rows. Wenders’ lens avoids additions to the area that might challenge the homey atmosphere, including Philippe Stark’s golden-metal and black-granite Asahi Office Building (as in the beer, not the newspaper), perched on the river’s edge since 1989, and SANAA’s recent Sumida Hokusai Museum. The water identifies Sumida, whereas greenery distinguishes Shibuya.
In the architectural imaginary of Perfect Days Wenders resists the tired tropes of bizarre or grotesque Tokyo of Sofia Coppola’s Lost in Translation and Doris Dörrie’s Cherry Blossoms. At the same time, the Tokyo of the toilet project — and of Hirayama’s tightly framed Sumida — is hardly representative of the ordinary city. It is heavily curated, even sanitized — with a proverbial stiff-bristle scrubber and industrial-strength cleanser. This is not the same Tokyo as in Hirokazu Koreeda’s gut-wrenching Nobody Knows (2004) or Shoplifters (2018): the kind of Tokyo that crushes the young and vulnerable with insufferably dilapidated shelter and anomie. Nor is this the Tokyo of Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s Tokyo Sonata (2008), which also, oddly, features a toilet cleaner, here symbolizing the unspeakable fall of respectability for a salaryman. In that film, parks are not an oasis, but a site for dispensing free meals to the homeless, where the recently unemployed salaryman nurses his shame.
No such grim social reality disturbs picture-perfect Perfect Days. Only one homeless person appears in the parks whose TOTO toilets Hirayama polishes. Played by Tanaka Min (one of two avant-garde dancers cast as ordinary people in the film), he dances among the great trees, exuding a surreal aura, while the familiar blue tarp of an encampment is left blurry in the background. Lovers of art and architecture can easily embrace Perfect Days for its alluring depiction of a glamorous city where top-notch talent builds extraordinary public commodes and the men who clean them, with devotion, live in charming austerity. But no viewer should forget that this Tokyo is fiction, an auteur’s inspired vision of the city.
Citation
Alice Y. Tseng, “Tokyo Stealth Wealth: Designer Toilets and Manmade Forests in Perfect Days,” PLATFORM, Mar. 18, 2024.
