Transparent public toilets more than meets the eye
HONG KONG — Public toilets around the globe have a reputation for being dark, dirty and dangerous. Tokyo recently unveiled new restroomsin twopublic parks that aim to address those concerns.
For one thing, they are brightly lit and colorful.
For another, they are transparent.
This way, the logic goes, those who need to go can check out the cleanliness and safety of the stalls without having to walk inside or touch a thing.
Japan has long experimented with toilets, resulting in lids that open and close automatically and seats that warm up. But the new stalls — designed by Shigeru Ban, the Pritzker Prize-winning architect — are made out of an opacity-changing “smart glass” that is already used in offices and other buildings to provide privacywhen needed.
The toilets were installed in Japan’s capital this month, coinciding with a nationwide campaign to phase out the city’s old-fashioned public toilets ahead of the now-delayed Summer Olympics. Set up in front of a cluster of trees in the Shibuya district, the stalls stand out like a Mondrian painting, bearing tinted walls with colors like mango, watermelon, lime, violet and teal.
Whenoccupiedandlocked properly, the tinted glass toilet stalls become frosted and opaque. When the door is unlocked, an electric current realigns the crystals in the glass to allow more light to pass through, creating a transparent effect. The toilets were presented as another futuristic and aesthetically pleasing example
of the country’s technological advancements.
The reviews were mixed. “I’mworried it willbecome transparentdueto amalfunction,” a social media user with the Twitter handle @ yukio wrote in a widely circulated post.
“It will take time togetused to the idea,” Ming Cheng, a London-based architect, wrote onTwitter. But he gave it a “thumbs up.”
SerahCopperwhite, a technologyworker based in a district south of Tokyo, said that while she normally avoided public toilets, she would be more inclined to use thenew ones because they appeared bright and clean. “I trust the science,” Copperwhite, 28, said in a phone interview, addressingconcernsonsocial media about the reliability of the glass technology.
Advocateshave long called for the Japanese national government to make brickand-mortar toilets in public spaces more appealing and accessible to residents and tourists. Some public bathrooms in Tokyo, particularly in train stations, lack hand soap. A kindergarten in southern Japan stopped taking children to a city park last year because they were deterred by the flies in the squat stalls. The school opted instead to use a park with
Western-style flush toilets.
More than 300 restrooms were refurbished from2017 to 2019, according to the Japan Tourism Agency. Before that, 40% of the country’s public restrooms consisted of squat stalls rather than Western- style commodes. The government had sought to phase them out before the Olympics, which have been postponed because of the coronavirus pandemic.
But while some appreciated the new toilets’ advanced technology, some Tokyo residents said they were misplaced in exposed public spaces andwere perhaps better suited elsewhere.
“I am not willing to risk my privacy because someone wants to make a fancy toilet,” Sachiko Ishikawa, a 32-year-old writer and translator, said in a phone interview from Tokyo.
Ishikawa said shewas concerned that human error would make it too easy for bathroom users to inadvertently expose themselves. The transparent structure could also make them more vulnerable to assailants, she said.
“They could be waiting for you if you’re getting out of the bathroom,” she said. “So the argument of protection does not hold for me.”