How Green Was My Night Soil: The Excremental Economy in Edo Japan

Poop is yucky. Poop is useful. Poop is a yucky thing of utility. Thanks to a perfect resource cycle, in which urban excrement fertilized the fields that supplied vegetables to feed the city, Edo—modern-day Tokyo—was arguably the healthiest major city in the world in the 18th and 19th centuries. David L. Howell, professor of Japanese history at Harvard University, will introduce the excremental economy of Edo and think about Japanese relationships with waste.

This is an East Asian Garden Studies lecture.

Utagawa Yoshiiku, Tōkyō nichinichi shinbun, no. 781 (1874).