Hi Toilet!
The Tokyo Toilet Project (2020-)
Seventeen renovations of existing toilets
The Tokyo Toilet Project was conceived in the lead-up to the Tokyo 2020 Olympics and Paralympics as an ambitious initiative to redesign and reimagine public toilets across Shibuya Ward. Initiated and funded by Koji Yanai, Senior Executive Officer of Fast Retailing (and son of Uniqlo’s founder), the project was developed in partnership with the Nippon Foundation, Shibuya Ward Government, TOTO Ltd., and Daiwa Lifenext Co., Ltd.
The project brought together sixteen internationally recognized architects and designers, including Tadao Ando, Shigeru Ban, Fumihiko Maki, and Kengo Kuma, to transform existing public toilets in Shibuya parks and community spaces. Each toilet became a unique architectural work, intended not only to improve sanitation and accessibility but also to change cultural perceptions around public toilets in Japan.
The Nippon Foundation played a crucial role in connecting Yanai with Shibuya Ward, which was already planning to renovate seventeen existing facilities. It also oversaw the maintenance and cleaning program as a form of public education for several years before handing responsibility back to the city in 2024. TOTO used the project as a platform to test state-of-the-art sanitation technologies, while Daiwa Lifenext acted as the builder and fabricator, producing these highly customized structures in a process akin to fabricating public artworks.
Beyond infrastructure, the project extended into culture and media. Cleaning staff uniforms were redesigned under the supervision of NIGO (now Creative Director of Kenzo), emphasizing dignity and visibility for workers. Yanai also invited filmmaker Wim Wenders to produce Perfect Days (2023), a feature film centered on a Shibuya toilet cleaner, positioning the project as both social commentary and cultural export. Even details such as toilet paper featuring photographs by Daido Moriyama blurred the boundaries between design, art, and merchandise, turning an everyday object into a collective multiple. Many of these insights—including the designer bios and project descriptions outlined below—are drawn from The Tokyo Toilet catalogue (published by TOTO) and from Koji Yanai’s talk at Harvard GSD, presented alongside Rahul Mehrotra’s account of public sanitation in India.
For our fieldwork, we approached the Tokyo Toilet Project through the lens of play — attempting to visit and experience as many of the toilets as possible, much like the popular vloggers who document and review them. Due to record-breaking heat waves, we managed to see only eight sites, but the embodied process of searching, visiting, and documenting became its own method of research. Importantly, this allowed us to compare what each design claims to be with what it is like in everyday use. In doing so, we observed how the toilets operate simultaneously as everyday infrastructure, civic experiment, cultural production, and tourist attraction. They also raise questions about the entanglements of accessibility, spectacle, corporate sponsorship, and public life in contemporary Tokyo.