The Pritzker Public Toilet

Four laureates of architecture’s highest honor designed public toilets in Tokyo. I went to see them after watching Perfect Days, and discovered that what makes them extraordinary is not the celebrated names behind them, but the care that goes unseen.

An Afternoon in Fukamachi

It was June, and Yoyogi Fukamachi was full.

It is a modest neighborhood garden, officially designated a mini park, yet that afternoon it seemed to hold more than its size allowed. Children darted between the trees, pelting one another with water balloons, while shreds of brightly colored rubber littered the ground. On the benches, parents, grandparents and teenagers shared the shade as strangers, in no hurry to be anywhere else.

There was something cinematic about it, the kind of scene in which the camera lingers on a wide shot precisely because nothing remarkable is happening, and that is exactly where its beauty lies. I remember wanting to hold on to the moment, the way one keeps a photograph to return to later.

Only then did I notice a small volume of orange, pink and violet glass at the edge of the park. It was a public toilet.

Through its walls the interior lay in plain view: the basin, the toilet, the spotless floor. When someone steps inside and locks the door, the glass turns opaque. Eight minutes away on foot, in Haru-no-Ogawa Community Park, the same architect, Shigeru Ban, repeated the gesture in shades of green and blue. I visited both. But it was in Fukamachi, with the park teeming around it, that I began to grasp what the project was truly reaching for.

I had come to Shibuya because of Perfect Days, curious to see whether Wim Wenders’ film had romanticized these toilets. It had not. None of them felt like a public toilet. I stepped into each one out of sheer curiosity, as one might wander into a small pavilion, and never with the slightest hesitation.

What part can a toilet play in the tranquility of a park?

The Paradox of the Clean Toilet

The answer begins with a contradiction.

Japan is renowned as one of the cleanest countries in the world, and its public toilets meet standards of hygiene well above the global average. And yet many Japanese people avoided them, associating them with spaces that were dark, dirty, foul-smelling and unsafe.

The problem was never hygiene. It was perception. In design, the distinction is crucial: how we experience a space depends not only on what it is, but on what people believe it to be before they use it. A perception seldom yields to more scrubbing. It shifts when the object itself begins to say something different.

One Idea, Many Intentions

THE TOKYO TOILET project was launched in 2018 at the initiative of Koji Yanai of Fast Retailing, the parent company of Uniqlo. The Nippon Foundation brought it to life in partnership with Shibuya City.

The project comprises 17 toilets by 16 creators, as Shigeru Ban designed two. The first opened in 2020 and the last in March 2023. Among the authors are four recipients of the Pritzker Prize, architecture’s most prestigious distinction: Tadao Ando, Toyo Ito, Shigeru Ban and Fumihiko Maki. Alongside them worked designers drawn from fashion, product design and communication.

Several intentions converge here. One is social: spaces that anyone can use, regardless of gender, age or disability. Another is ceremonial, bound up with the 2020 Olympic Games and with omotenashi, the Japanese ethos of hospitality that anticipates another’s needs before they are ever voiced. And there is an intention of image: to show the world the care Japan is capable of, even in the humblest of buildings.

The pandemic upended the plan. The Games went ahead in 2021, but without spectators. Seeking another way to bring the project to the world, Yanai turned to Takuma Takasaki, a creative director at Dentsu. Together they wrote to Wenders with a single stipulation: the film had to be about Tokyo’s public toilets and the people who clean them. What was first conceived as a series of short films became, after the director visited the sites in 2022, a full-length feature.

Rarely does an initiative to promote public amenities give rise to so contemplative a work.

When Curiosity Replaces Hesitation

Of all the toilets I visited, what stayed with me most was that I never hesitated at the threshold. What I felt instead was the pull to explore.

That effect is no accident. Almost every project addresses the same problem, our wariness of unfamiliar spaces, but does so with enough subtlety that the problem simply dissolves.

Ban’s toilets translate into physical space a principle Jakob Nielsen formulated for digital interfaces: visibility of system status. Users should always know what is happening, without having to guess. Through the glass, you can tell whether the space is free and clean before you ever reach for the door.

Other creators arrived at the same outcome by different paths. Toyo Ito divided his project into separate volumes, leaving no hidden corners. Kengo Kuma arranged small cedar huts along a stepped path in Nabeshima Shoto Park. Nao Tamura designed three red volumes, each with its own door opening directly onto the street, and argues that inclusion is measured by whether everyone can enter “without fear.”

I recognize this reasoning from my own work. In financial products, we display the amount, the recipient and any fees before the user confirms a transfer.

Whether on a payment screen or in a public toilet, trust is built in the moment before the action.

Behind the Scenes

Not everything succeeds in equal measure. In a project crowded with celebrated names, the author’s signature gesture always risks eclipsing the needs of the people who use the space. Kazoo Sato’s voice-controlled Hi Toilet is a case in point: some visitors report struggling to get it to work.

By contrast, one visitor who found a broken unit noticed a detail that reveals remarkable foresight: when the system fails, the glass stays opaque.

Transparency requires power; privacy is the default state. Engineers call this fail-safe: when a system breaks down, it fails on the side of safety.

Decisions like this rarely make it into photographs. The same holds true for the most important part of the project.

Service design draws a line between the front stage, everything the user sees, and the backstage, everything that happens out of sight so that the experience works. In THE TOKYO TOILET, the architecture is the front stage and the cleaning is the backstage. The toilets are cleaned two to three times a day and periodically inspected by specialist consultants. Since April 2024, they have been permanent public infrastructure under the stewardship of Shibuya City.

A product is defined not by the day it launches, but by every day it continues to work.

Perhaps that is why Wenders, surrounded by the work of Pritzker laureates, chose to point his camera at a man on his knees, polishing glass.

The Scene We Long to Keep

My thoughts return to that afternoon in Fukamachi, to the wide shot I had wanted to keep.

Japan ranks among the most aged societies on earth, and yet that small park held every generation at once: children darting between the trees, grandparents settled in the shade, parents deep in conversation rather than keeping watch. There was a lightness in the air that resists easy explanation.

I understand it better now. A park comes alive like that only when everyone in it feels free to stay. And that freedom almost always begins with the most basic of needs.

THE TOKYO TOILET demonstrates, conclusively, that public design need not be resigned to functional mediocrity. When exceptional talent is called upon to address a society’s most elementary needs, the city gives back beauty, safety and dignity to all who inhabit it. The mediocre and the hostile are not the inevitable fate of our cities. They are a choice.

To design the most vulnerable infrastructure of urban life with the utmost technical rigor and the talent of Pritzker laureates is not merely to build beautiful toilets. It is to redefine who we deem worthy of belonging to the city.

Having walked the arteries of Shibuya, I came to understand what had truly drawn me there. I had not come to see toilets. I had come to find out whether the logic of the lowest bid could be defied in public space. It can.

A city’s design is not proven in the museums it builds for tourists. It is proven in the dignity it refuses to strip from its most invisible places.

The Pritzker Public Toilet was originally published in Bootcamp on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.