Reporting TO the UN Headquarters on a brisk November morning to run a 5k is a blissful experience for precisely one reason: the opportunity to freshen up in Bryant Park’s well-attended bathrooms. In America’s major cities, including New York, an easy to access, continuously cleaned toilet is a veritable commodity that makes Birkins and Kellys look downright pedestrian. The best thing Equinox and New York’s three Soho Houses have to offer isn’t their communities—it’s their commodes. The Big Apple is by no means the only city impacted by a dearth of convenient public bathrooms, though it’s among the most vocal. San Francisco, which has become infamous for its $1.7 million single toilet proposal, is a close second.
In this light, it should come as little surprise that the Tokyo Toilet Project, which brought the city’s denizens well-maintained toilets by the likes of Shigeru Ban, Tadao Ando, and Kengo Kuma, is the muse behind Wim Wenders’ latest film, Perfect Days. “It’s especially otherworldly to someone from New York,” film critic Bilge Ebiri writes, “where we treat bathrooms as unmentionable pits of stained despair that must never be made accessible to the public and certainly never kept clean.” Perfect Days, by contrast, stars Koji Yakusho as Hirayama, a quiet custodian who dabbles in film photography, reads William Faulkner and Patricia Highsmith, and spends his days tending to Tokyo’s public toilets.
