fact, human waste has become a big business, and farmers go to great lengths to secure contracts to collect and transport night soil from the cities to use on their fields. In Europe, this waste is being dumped into rivers, polluting the water supply and leading to outbreaks of cholera, but here the frequent collection and efforts to minimize leakage and loss have positive health benefits for all.
The practice of bathing regularly also has tremendous health benefits. Whereas privately operated public baths have become very common in cities, where the density of the population can support the business on a large scale, bathing is a household affair in villages (unless there is a natural hot spring nearby). Although rapid development in bath facility design is taking place, including improvements in the construction of bathtubs and the design of water heating and drainage systems, few of these advances benefit peasants like Shinichi directly, and it will be over one hundred years before the average farmhouse is equipped with an actual bathroom, tub, and water heater.
At Shinichi’s household, once a week a large tub is dragged either into the doma or outside, filled with water heated on the kamado and over the irori, and everyone, including the neighbors, takes turns washing themselves and soaking. Bathers scrub themselves with small cloth pouches filled with rice bran, which provide the perfect amount of abrasion. Because no soap is used, the waste-water may be safely collected and sent to the pond. Heating this much water is laborious and consumes as much fuel as a day’s worth of meals, and consequently it is difficult to justify bathing more frequently.
There are bathing methods that use less energy, the most common being the steam bath. Often little more than a shuttered cabinet barely large enough for two people and fitted with a small charcoal brazier and a pan of water, the steam bath provides several intense cleansing minutes of pore-opening and sweating. After scrubbing and rinsing with cool water, one feels very clean and refreshed. In summer months, solar energy is used to save fuel. A large jar of water is placed outside directly in the sun, and over the course of the day, it becomes warm enough to be used for the evening bath. Water similarly warmed may also be used to jump-start the heating of water for tea, also saving fuel.
Over time, a variety of bathing arrangements have appeared, from the cook pot-like iron goemon-buro tub to small rooms that have no tubs but are equipped with drains in the floor. But the key component of the bath remains hot water, and the respect and value accorded it reflects an awareness that the benefits come with a significant cost in fuel and therefore in environmental impact. This drive to economize on hot bathwater will prove to be an enduring value (and continue to influence bath design) in later centuries as well.
self-sufficiency as a way of life
Life in the village is marked by self-sufficiency on several different scales. Shinichi’s household, like all the others, is nearly self-sufficient in food, producing enough rice for itself and for government levy and enough vegetables. Each household has at least a few fruit trees, can gather its share of forest foodstuffs, and can fish in the rivers. They press their own oil and ferment miso from soybeans. Unavoidably, temporary surpluses and deficits occur for each family, but more often than not, these can be remedied by the informal exchange that characterizes social interaction: one may receive a bushel of persimmons from a relative and reciprocate with a basket of fish. Unusual food items, perhaps for special occasions such as entertaining visitors, may only be obtainable by purchase, but this is infrequent.
Similarly, each household is self-sufficient in energy. Shinichi’s household uses only the fuel it can gather, which is never more than a fair share of the village’s supply. It has its own water supply in the form of the well. The house and work yards are designed to take advantage of solar energy, and the agricultural process would be unthinkable without it. The house is designed and oriented in conjunction with plantings to maximize natural shade and cooling breezes. Water power is used on a modest scale for pressing oil, grinding grain, and pulverizing minerals, but except for a handful of draft animals in the village, humans power nearly everything.
Shinichi’s family makes most of their tools and implements and produces their own clothes—from spinning and weaving fabric all the way to actually cutting and assembling garments. But here an individual household may begin to rely upon the resources of the village as a whole: it may need to supplement its own cotton with some grown nearby; it may prefer to obtain more expertly woven and dyed fabric; it may need expert metalwork for a particular tool; it needs pottery, tatami mats, and paper for shoji. In all of these areas, while each family may not be truly self-sufficient, the village in general is. In fact, the only essential item likely to be obtainable only from outside the village is salt. Other items are imported, of course, and itinerant peddlers are allowed to sell an increasingly wide variety of items to peasants—seaweed, tea, oil, wooden water dippers, pans, rice pots, paper, fans, rulers. Luxuries and status items are available, like better sake, better cabinetry, finer pottery, ornaments, and accessories, and this attests to the peasants’ increasing standard of living and integration with the wider cash economy. But the essentials are all locally sourced.
There is an incredible amount of recycling going on as well. Agricultural waste—what little there is, since most plants, from root to stalk, are fully utilized in some way—becomes compost and mulch. Similarly, fireplace ash is recycled into the fertilizer mix, as are worn-out woven rush and straw items. Metal (predominantly iron) is successively reworked. A broken cooking pot may be converted into several sickle blades, for instance, and broken blades beaten into straps and hooks.
Wood has a particularly long life cycle: a broken plow frame can become an axe handle, a broken axe handle refitted to a scoop, a broken scoop added to the firewood pile (and its ashes finding their way to the fields again as fertilizer). Clothing can be endlessly reworked, taken apart, remade, with the most intact portions of a worn-out jacket, for example, being carefully salvaged and worked into another as patchwork, which is eventually recycled into carrying pouches, and then as cleaning cloths. Old cleaning cloths can be cut into narrow strips and woven into indoor sandals or small mats, and when these are worn out, they will find their way to the compost heap or end up helping to heat water. In the village, this recycling takes place mostly at the level of households like Shinichi’s, but, in fact, it has been institutionalized and commercialized throughout the country.
Beyond being self-sufficient, most households are able to generate a surplus of some nonagricultural items, which eventually evolve into cottage industries. Though raising food for the nation is their primary purpose and responsibility as mandated by Shogun Ieyasu at the beginning of the era in 1603, in 1649 the government decreed that after their day’s labor is done, peasants should spend their evenings industriously working at crafts that can supplement their income. This is seasonal work as well, much of it ideally suited to occupying the winter months. It also provides a way of efficiently utilizing labor, since all hands are not always required for every agricultural task, and some can be better employed at other industries.
Among the most common cottage industries are straw work, basketry, and textiles. Straw work is incredibly wide in application since the rice straw (wara) from the harvest is the most readily available material for a great number of household necessities and is a prolifically renewable resource From their own leftover straw. Shinichi’s family
