Osaka Museum of Housing and Living 9th floor
Exhibition Hall 1: Osaka in the Early Modern Period
Time travel back to Edo Period
12. Ura-Nagaya Back-Alley Tenement
(Communal well and Sō-setchin Communal Toilet)
There were communal well and communal toilet within each ura-nagaya tenement premises.
Idobata-kaigi, which literally means “conference around the well” was held around the communal well among the women of the ura-nagaya tenement where gossip was passed around while doing laundry.
In Osaka, communal toilet was called sō-setchin. Architectural style of communal toilet differed in Osaka and Edo.
In Osaka, communal toilets had tile roofing and full-height doors while those in Edo had lower-quality wooden shingle roofing and doors with only half-height.
Toilets back in those days were vault toilets, and stored human waste was periodically collected by nearby farmers who used it as fertilizer by spreading it on their farming fields.
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