• せかいのおきく (Okiku and the World)

2/25/24 (Sun)

When you hear a movie is about two guys peddling sh*t, you’d normally assume they were selling trivial products. But the guys in this movie are in fact dealing in excrement – and we learn that their job was an essential function in Edo society. Who knew?

The time is the mid 19th century at the tail end of the Edo Era, when the entire system of government is about to be overthrown – but the characters here don’t know that. Yasuke is a purveyor of manure, buying the product from homes (after digging it out of the outhouse pits) and selling it to farmers. The latter need the waste as fertilizer to grow food, which is eaten and processed through people’s bodies as new waste product in a virtuous cycle for the likes of Yasuke. The gathering and reprocessing of waste served a critical role in Edo in keeping the villages clean; while Yasuke was dirt poor and at the absolute bottom of the social rung, he was actually more important in the scheme of things then the higher-ranking samurai, who received money from the state for doing very little.

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