Perfect Days, directed by Wim Wenders, was given a limited North American release in February.
The best film of the past year is a feel-good Japanese drama that dignifies the abject and revels in fugitive joys. I first saw Wim Wenders’s Perfect Days at the 2023 Cannes Film Festival, where lead actor Kōji Yakusho won an award for his performance as Hirayama, a professional cleaner employed by the Tokyo Toilet. A real-life public restroom initiative that has contracted the talents of such design stars as Tadao Ando, Kengo Kuma, and the fashion impresario NIGO® (whose name appears trademarked in all promotional materials for some reason), the Tokyo Toilet made international headlines in 2020 for several gorgeous, opacity-shifting latrines courtesy of Shigeru Ban. Concentrated in the wealthy Shibuya ward, these high-concept loos are simply too nice to vandalize—or even, it would seem in the film, to wreck with a particularly explosive dump—making Hirayama’s job surprisingly pleasant. Tranquility pervades his perfect days like eau de toilette, carrying the viewer into a hallucinatory lull of pared routines (awake at dawn, in bed before nine), outmoded enthusiasms (Hirayama is a tech antiquarian with a sick collection of cassette tapes), and spartan pleasures (the simple life in the heart of the city).
He also takes obvious pride in his labor, MacGyvering tools to reach the crevices of fancy TOTO toilets. (Remarkably commonplace in Japan, the high-tech potties boast a universal remote’s worth of features ranging from multinozzle bidets to soundtracks of white noise. They crop up in pricey Manhattan udon shops and in the basement of Murray Hill’s Dover Street Market, though in the case of the latter, you may have to dress in head-to-toe designer to gain access.) Hirayama finds deep pleasure in the public parks that surround the johns he services; becoming absorbed by the play of shadow and light, he reaches for the old point-and-shoot camera stowed in the breast pocket of his NIGO®-designed janitor’s uniform. Nodding off at night with a good book in hand, he dreams about komorebi—the Japanese term for dappled sunlight filtering through overhead leaves—in beautifully textural black-and-white sequences. Art directed by Donata Wenders (Wim’s wife), the vignettes rank as some of my favorite moments from recent cinema.
That a man can scrub toilets six days a week and not dream about profane porcelain in the slumber between shifts strikes me as the most essential, and improbable, aspect of Perfect Days’ sublimity. It’s rare to spend so much dilated time—just over two weeks—with a single subject in a film, much less have that subject be something as visceral as lavatorial upkeep. Wenders, perhaps tiring of the sappy romances that have mostly preoccupied him for the past two decades, invokes the sentiments of postwar Italy’s neorealist cinema and the rhapsodic attention it devoted to the lives of the poor. That’s a form of storytelling badly needed in our current era, when an invisible underclass of gig-economy laborers grinds around the clock to fulfill online orders for a bourgeoisie hypnotized by plutocrats.
As a longtime service worker, I’ve had my share of close encounters with odious toilets. Menial work wears you down, in both body and soul. One of the hardest parts about it is the way it denies you a chance to simply do something better with your time, whether that thing is pursuing a degree or exploring a creative passion. Hirayama perseveres amicably in part due to a hobby—nature photography that he even manages to keep up with while on the clock. Komorebi becomes something like spiritual salvation, the only escape from a life overflowing with black water and bleach.
Did I find Perfect Days perhaps a little too precious? Sure—the guy listens to Patti Smith on cassette, for Christ’s sake—but that felt like the point. Some embellishment is needed to so generously imagine the deep well of feeling that lurks inside the average Joe. Then, after cursory online searches, I discovered the film’s less-than-hygienic origins. It turns out Wenders was “invited” to make the movie by Tokyo Toilet, whose financial manager, The Nippon Foundation, has a long history of advancing nationalist policies within Japan and perpetuating the idea of an innate ethnic superiority. In addition to Tokyo Toilet, it has sponsored revisionist campaigns questioning the death toll of the 1937 Nanjing Massacre, and in 2002, Peru’s Congress determined that the foundation had partly financed (along with USAID and the United Nations Population Fund) the forced sterilization of hundreds of thousands of poor and Indigenous women during the dictatorial reign of president Alberto Fujimori.
In its 1995 obituary for Nippon’s founder, the gambling magnate, outspoken fascist, and alleged class-A war criminal Ryōichi Sasakawa, the New York Times reported that “critics have suggested [Sasakawa’s] charities were part of an elaborate public relations campaign meant to divert attention from other activities.” This will sound familiar to anyone who has spent time reading up on the board membership of cultural institutions such as MoMA or the Whitney, and it suddenly places Nippon’s patronage and rampant promotion of bespoke pissoirs in a garish new light. The campaign, the Times recently noted, was conceived as “an architectural display of ‘Japanese pride’” during the 2020 Summer Olympics, until the pandemic forced the games to be postponed by a year and then to be held without spectators. Searching for alternative ways to showcase the sparkling shitters, project organizers landed on a cinematic approach. Quentin Tarantino, Martin Scorsese, and Steven Spielberg were all considered for the director’s chair, but it was eventually offered to Wenders, a self-professed Japanophile with a reputation as an auteur-for-hire who relies on commercials and music videos to offset box-office bombs.
Hirayama is design-washing’s humble manservant, jury-rigging all manner of creative tools to get the grime out of ill-gotten gains.
Near the end of Perfect Days, Hirayama’s sister Keiko shows up outside his apartment building to reclaim her runaway daughter. Stepping out of a chauffeured black sedan, Keiko hands him a shopping bag containing chocolates purchased from a luxury shop (“They’re your favorite,” she tells him). Blanching with embarrassment, Hirayama can’t even get a “thanks” out. When she suggests that he pay a visit to their ailing father, he avoids the topic. “Is it true that you clean toilets?” she finally asks, after another awkward pause. Hirayama gives a stiff nod, and Keiko reacts with an expression of horror.
Hang on—is our heroic potty polisher just a rich dude in proletarian drag? His refined tastes, the reference to an estranged father, and, perhaps most importantly, the fact that Keiko does not offer to give her brother a little money when she learns of his foul day job imply that the two siblings were once in a similar tax bracket—that Hirayama chose the vocation that so scandalizes her. Though Wenders keeps the brief scene ambiguous, he is more explicit in the film’s press notes:
I imagined a man who had a privileged and rich past and who had fallen deeply. And who then had an epiphany one day, when his life was at its lowest point, watching the reflection of leaves created by the sun that was miraculously shining into the hellhole he was waking up in.... Such an apparition saved Hirayama and he chose to live another life, one of simplicity and modesty. And he became the cleaner who he is in our story.
And so a rich man came down from the mount to shine porcelain monuments to other rich men. As a man of lapsed privilege (alcoholism is implied in the film’s penultimate scene), Hirayama is the ideal caretaker for these opulent outhouses, his dedication to spotlessness a form of penance. A custodian by choice, he squeezes a spiritual freedom out of an otherwise shitty occupation, and this makes his thankless toil meaningful in a way that buffing bidets normally never could be.
On my first viewing, Perfect Days, with its neorealist sympathies and engagement with the underclass, seemed out of step with contemporary cinema. But as an evocation of the shell games that finance public-facing projects today, and the neoliberal impetus to fabricate an all-inclusive vision of the commons that is nonetheless deeply exclusive, allowing only certain personalities and sentiments to filter in, the film is depressingly of its time. The Tokyo Toilet passes itself off as “an amazing public social project” (Wenders’s words). A solicitous campaign to raise the standard of civic infrastructure that is bolstered by top-shelf talent and elaborate narrative tie-ins, all while highlighting idealized aspects of national culture, likely stands opposed to real civic infrastructure. Viewed in this regard, rather than the near-religious treatment they receive in Wenders’s film, the headline-grabbing bathrooms can be seen for what they are—a reputational gift by the ultra wealthy to themselves, disguised (as ever) as a gift to the people. Hirayama is the physical embodiment of that disguise, and the edification he seems to find in the gutter is nothing less than the squeaky-clean feeling of a laundered reputation. He is design-washing’s humble manservant, jury-rigging all manner of creative tools to get the grime out of ill-gotten gains.
What should we expect from narratives about civic infrastructure? They’re a rare breed, about as difficult to find as a serviceable latrine in New York City when you’ve really got to go. Perhaps they don’t often take the form of bingeable, edge-of-your-seat content because they shouldn’t be exciting. Ubiquitous, well functioning amenities fade into the background, and the extent to which they are taken for granted might serve as the high-water mark for the civilization in question, whether we’re talking about the aqueducts of ancient Rome or the plentiful, architecturally unremarkable privies that exist all over present-day Japan, somehow persisting without the help of creative directors and public relations firms.
With Perfect Days, Wenders has made a fantasy film about public amenities, the work that goes into their maintenance, and the people who do the work. I still love it, simply because it dares to imagine that such things are worth our time, that some satisfaction and serenity can be found in the least glamorous tasks, and that the quietest lives might be the most fascinating. But it’s hardly representative of the untold numbers whose labor isn’t exalted by auteurs like Wenders. All around us, ranks of invisible people moil uncinematically day in and out. May they have some little thing to look forward to at the end of a shift, even if it’s just a blissful glimpse of sunlight through leaves.