| 研究実績の概要 |
Japanese high-tech toilets are an international sensation. My hypothesis was that the key to understanding material culture of Japanese high-tech toilets may be found in propaganda materials from the period of the Allied Occupation of Japan. I conducted mostly document analysis: from literary sources, newspaper articles to official documents.
I was able to disseminate findings of my research through many presentations at international conferences which improved the visibility of my research in academia as well as represented The University of Tokyo and Japan.
And I published four articles during the fellowship and managed to edit a special issue of a Journal of Japanese studies. Regarding significant results, I improved the theory of a fecal habitus in the article “Cultural Origins of Japan’s Premodern Night Soil Collection System” published in the Worldwide Waste: Journal of Interdisciplinary Studies.
“Understanding Relatively High Social Visibility of Excrement in Japan” published in Silva Iaponicarum is the first article to address the ambiguity of the excretory experience in Japan: on one hand, the country has the most advanced toilets in the world, but on the other, there are many symbolic manifestations of excrement (e.g. commentaries on bowel movement on TV or poop-shaped merchandise). I explain this phenomenon as dichotomy between the notion and practice of defecation: in Japan’s modern fecal habitus, the notion remained the same as in the original one, while the practice adapted the Western one.
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