A closer look
In Tokugawa Japan, flushing your waste away would have been considered terrible financial mismanagement. Because the country lacked large livestock to produce manure, human waste—politely termed 'night soil'—became a massively lucrative commodity. Edo landlords actually wrote clauses into rental contracts specifying that the tenant's poop legally belonged to the building owner. Brokers would bid aggressively on high-quality city waste, ferrying it out to rural farmers in a highly regulated, surprisingly pleasant-smelling (due to strict composting rules) economic cycle.
