What New York can learn from another global city about helping people relieve themselves
Tokyo’s public toilets have attracted a surprising level of global attention in recent years — perhaps best exemplified by the 2024 Academy Award nomination for the Wim Wenders film “Perfect Days,” with its meditative portrayal of a Tokyo public toilet cleaner’s inner life. Despite the film’s depiction of Tokyo restroom maintenance as an almost monastic activity, however, the reality is a more prosaic tale — one that New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani should pay close attention to as he seeks to give New Yorkers and visitors more places to go.
Tokyo has a strong, interlocking system of public and “semi-public” toilet infrastructure that combine together to produce a highly functional urban environment. Tokyo boasts an average of eight public toilets per square kilometer, putting it ahead of European capitals such as Paris. But these fully public toilets are only part of the story; nearly all of the roughly 900 train stations in the Greater Tokyo area have one or more public bathrooms. As discussed below, these ‘semi-public’ bathrooms are central to the average Tokyoite’s daily experience.
These are the lessons from Tokyo for New York’s public bathrooms as I see them — from the perspective of a scholar of Tokyo urbanism devoted to finding ways we can learn from Japan’s megacity to improve urban life here at home.
1) In a transit-dense city, train station bathrooms are the backbone of public bathroom access
Tokyo’s rail transit network is rightly held up as a global exemplar, but few outside of Tokyo realize that about two-thirds of the Tokyo metropolitan area’s railway stations are operated by private railway lines. These shitetsu (私鉄) corporations don’t merely provide transit; they operate multi-story shopping malls above their train stations, develop real estate around their stations into commuter bedroom communities and even operate quality-of-life businesses (such as subsidized affordable childcare services) along their train lines in order to make their neighborhoods more attractive places to live.
In a city where trains and stations are everywhere, the restrooms in these private railway stations — generally located right inside the fare gates — are the most common public restrooms that the average Tokyoite interacts with in their daily lives. They can be thought of as “semi-public” infrastructure — in private hands but accessible to the general public, particularly as railway fares are politically negotiated between the government and the railway operators and thus kept low by global standards. The aggregate effect is powerful: When your city is dense with rail and every station offers clean, plentiful public toilets, you organically end up with a city full of public bathrooms.
In New York, ironically, subway stations and their bathrooms are publicly managed by the state-run Metropolitan Transportation Authority, but the trend for New York City transit bathrooms has moved in the opposite direction: neglected, almost entirely closed off to the public (with those that are open having heavily limited opening hours, 7AM to 7PM with an inexplicable one-hour cleaning break around lunchtime), and/or reserved for staff. An attempt to find an open bathroom in an MTA station frequently requires begging a station attendant for help, and the odds of success are low. The ostensibly ‘public’ bathrooms of the MTA are in actual practice much less open to the public than the ‘semi-public’ bathrooms of Tokyo’s private railway conglomerates.
This dearth of station bathrooms — which even at their full intended capacity now appear in only about 10% of the MTA system’s nearly 500 stations — appears to be the result of two negative trends in New York’s transit infrastructure: budget scarcity from the MTA being funded at the state rather than municipal level, and a separate failure of public services for the unhoused and mentally ill that then reorients transit stations around reactively managing spillover social dysfunction rather than serving the median member of the general public.
San Francisco’s recent experience here is instructive. As the Bay Area’s BART system installed stronger fare gates through its “Next Generation Fare Gate” program, the maintenance costs at the upgraded stations dropped off a cliff — suggesting that only a small portion of the population (fare-evading, to boot) had been causing an unusually high share of damage and wear to station infrastructure. With the MTA moving in a similar direction, New York may be able to begin investing in its train stations as welcoming public infrastructure once again, including via well-maintained public restrooms.
2) Put public toilets where the city already has eyes on the street
Beyond train stations, Tokyo’s ward governments are clear-eyed in their planning around the linkage between public toilets and public safety. Public toilets in parks and public areas are frequently located near the koban police boxes that have been the cornerstone of local policing in Japan since the Edo period, and in other locations with a combination of good public order and predictable foot traffic — a decision aimed at increasing feelings of safety and reducing the likelihood of their use for illicit purposes.
In many ways, the value of any given public bathroom is downstream from the general maintenance of the public realm around it. If the general public feels safe walking through a city park at night, the impact of a public toilet in that park changes dramatically. The same staffing investment and active management that parks and stations require to be safe and welcoming to ordinary residents, rather than havens for illicit activity, also enables public bathrooms to better serve their intended purpose.
3) Designing public toilets with diverse needs in mind
Presently, the global norm in cities across the developed world is to offer a single ‘multipurpose’ toilet in addition to gendered toilets, designed to encompass everything from disabilities to caregiver needs, and Japan was until recently no exception. Starting in 2021, however, many high-traffic public spaces such as train stations now offer multiple ‘accessible’ bathrooms (referred to as ‘barrier-free’ in Japan’s parlance) differentiated by use in an effort to relieve user congestion. So rather than a single bathroom serving as a catch-all for those with disabilities, mobility issues, caregivers, and diaper changing, diaper changing rooms are explicitly differentiated from ‘barrier-free’ restrooms. The goal is to maximize the odds that a person in need of an accessible bathroom will actually find one available, rather than having everyone who requires privacy competing for a single space.
Japan’s new push puts it at the forefront of the developed world in this regard, and if the MTA works to revitalize its station bathrooms, it should similarly add enough accessible capacity that its “special needs” spaces aren’t a single overburdened stall doing three jobs. Diversity is also a question of time; an MTA station restroom that technically exists but is closed most of the night is effectively a restroom for the same office workers who are already well-served by private bathrooms, not a restroom for shift workers, late-night riders or caregivers navigating a 24/7 city. Part of Tokyo’s success in this regard is that it treats restroom access as part of everyday mobility, not as a special or exceptional service.
That said, Tokyo has its own struggles in this regard. The Tokyo-based journalist Phoebe Amoroso went viral during the 2019 G20 Summit when she pointed out that rubbish bins had been preemptively sealed shut in toilets at one of the city’s main train stations as a matter of security, seemingly with no concern for women needing to dispose of sanitary products. And despite Tokyo’s general reputation for cleanliness, it is only in recent years, particularly with a modernization push in preparation for the ill-starred 2020 Tokyo Olympics, that soap dispensers have been installed in many of the city’s public toilets.
4) Make cleanliness measurable, not notional
Although standards differ across the city, Tokyo’s public and semi-public toilets generally have fixed maintenance regimes that specify not only the frequency of cleaning (typically three times per day) but are now in some cases introducing external audits. These third-party inspections are not yet the norm in Tokyo by any means, but that should not keep them from serving as an example for New York. The audits involve quantitative measures like adenosine triphosphate wipe tests (a common proxy for surface cleanliness), plus periodic measurements of ammonia and environmental conditions.
Third-party audits can make the difference between a municipal promise (“we clean regularly”) and a service standard (“here is the protocol; here is the result we test for; here is who verifies”). Frequency of cleaning matters to an extent for hygiene, but, according to studies on the topic, less than one might think. Actual accountability matters more, as audits create feedback loops.
New York is perfectly capable of this kind of rigor. The city already accomplishes it in other domains, ranging from food safety and water quality to building inspections. The lesson is simply to treat toilets as a public health interface worthy of the same kind of measurement.
As the American city most comparable to Tokyo in terms of the density and reach of its transit network, New York can learn from Tokyo without fetishizing it. Japan’s enviable public toilets are not an outgrowth of national culture, but rather the result of a public policy that takes toilets seriously as public health infrastructure, centered on transit-located toilets and other sites with a high natural degree of public oversight. New York can embrace transit toilets once again, while designing for real users and their diverse needs. And, above all, the MTA can make toilet maintenance a measurable, audited public service rather than a meaningless promise. As our taciturn toilet cleaner in “Perfect Days” would surely agree, a city isn’t made livable by grand gestures. It’s made livable by standards — and by the people and systems that rigorously keep them.
