Warning: Don’t read this when you are about to eat your lunch!
Going to the loo has been turned into an exhibition at Tokyo’s Miraikan National Museum of Emerging Science and Innovation. “Toilet!? – Human Waste & Earth’s Future” includes a giant toilet that you can slide into, hats that look like a dollop of poo and singing toilet seats; you certainly wouldn’t want to take a picnic with you if you were visiting!
Believe it or not, this exhibition has not been designed to shock, but to address a very serious issue. The museum’s Tami Sakamaki explains: “Toilets and faeces are normally thought of as very unclean topics, but I would like for people to actively talk about them instead of just thinking that they’re dirty.”
Staff at the museum worry that “in Japan, some children have trouble using the school toilets because of embarrassment or some other reasons” and going to the toilet is not “talked about openly”.
The exhibition also hopes to address the serious issue of faeces on a global scale, looking at the fact that 2.5 billion people in the world are unable to use toilets, leading to illness and loss of life.
It also discusses how dealing with sewage is expensive and has an impact on the environment, adding: “If we could devise a system that can remove and utilise resources from excrement, we could reduce the effect on the environment and obtain those precious resources.”
The exhibition will include workshops for parents and children to take part in….yuck, I dread to thing what they will entail!
http://www.miraikan.jst.go.jp/en/spexhibition/toilet/