\n<\/p>\n
As artistic inspiration goes, public toilets don\u2019t usually stir the spirit.<\/p>\n
Then again, most toilets aren\u2019t like the public bathrooms in Tokyo.<\/p>\n
So when Wim Wenders, the German film director of art-house favorites like \u201cParis, Texas\u201d and \u201cWings of Desire,\u201d first toured more than a dozen public toilet buildings around the Japanese capital city in the spring of 2022, he was enchanted by what he described as \u201clittle jewels\u201d designed by Pritzker Prize<\/a> winners including Tadao Ando<\/a>, Shigeru Ban<\/a> and Kengo Kuma<\/a>. Those stylish commodes provided the creative sparks for his latest movie, \u201cPerfect Days,\u201d<\/a> which has been nominated in the international feature<\/a> category for an Academy Award and opens in theaters in the United States on Feb. 7.<\/p>\n The movie \u2014 a poignant character study of a public-toilet cleaner with a mysterious past who lives a spartan existence and works with the care of a master craftsman \u2014 actually had its roots in a bit of propaganda. Wenders had been invited to Japan as the guest of a prominent Japanese businessman who hoped that the director might want to make a series of short films featuring the toilets, which had been conceived as showcases for Japanese artistry and hygienic mastery.<\/p>\n Koji Yanai, the son of the founder of Fast Retailing (the sprawling clothing giant best known for its Uniqlo brand) and a senior executive officer there, had spearheaded the public toilet project to be an architectural display of \u201cJapanese pride.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n \u201cIf I say Japanese toilets are world number one, no one will disagree,\u201d Yanai said in an interview late last year. He had recruited the architects to design the public buildings with a distinctive aesthetic that would make them as much art as public utility.<\/p>\n Originally built to welcome the world to Japan for the summer Olympic Games scheduled for 2020, the toilets did not get their moment because the pandemic forced the postponement<\/a> of the Games to 2021, which were then staged without spectators<\/a>.<\/p>\n After the quashed Olympic debut, Yanai was seeking another path to promotion. He reached out to Takuma Takasaki, a screenwriter and creative director at Dentsu, Japan\u2019s largest advertising firm, to help hatch a plan to champion the toilets internationally.<\/p>\n Takasaki suggested recruiting a filmmaker \u2014 Quentin Tarantino, perhaps, or someone like Martin Scorsese or Steven Spielberg. The wish list also included Wenders, and Yanai, a fan since seeing \u201cParis, Texas\u201d<\/a> in college, recalled that the director already had an abiding interest in Japan, having made a documentary, \u201cTokyo-Ga,\u201d<\/a> a visual diary and homage to the great Japanese director Yasujiro<\/a> Ozu<\/a>.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n When the invitation arrived, it was the middle of the pandemic and Wenders was feeling nostalgia for Japan, which he had not visited in eight years. \u201cI always felt strangely at home in Tokyo,\u201d Wenders said, as he peeled the wrappers off chocolates his staff had laid in front of him in a bare conference room during the Tokyo International Film Festival<\/a> last fall, where Wenders was serving as president of the jury.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n Having come from Berlin, Wenders was dismayed by the deterioration of civic spirit during the pandemic as residents had trashed a park near his home. In Tokyo \u2014 and in the designer toilets in particular \u2014 he believed he saw the embodiment of purer impulses like cleanliness and community cooperation.<\/p>\n \u201cI have never seen any toilet anywhere in the world that was done with so much care for detail,\u201d Wenders said. He may have attributed to civic spirit what was accomplished by sanitary workers: Yanai funds cleaners to tend to the architectural toilets two to three times daily, whereas standard public toilets are cleaned once a day.<\/p>\n Before he left Tokyo, Wenders decided he wanted to make a feature-length film where the central character would be a toilet cleaner. Yanai had suggested Koji Yakusho, one of Japan\u2019s most well-known actors, who had gained an international following after he starred in the 1996 romantic drama \u201cShall We Dance?\u201d<\/a><\/p>\n To begin crafting a story, Wenders felt like he needed to know where the main character would live. He spent his last days on that Tokyo reconnaissance trip visiting locations. He settled on Oshiage, a working-class neighborhood in the eastern part of the city where low-slung apartment buildings crouch in the shadow of Skytree, a broadcast tower that pokes out of the landscape.<\/p>\n \u201cThe neighborhood for me was very essential,\u201d said Wenders. \u201cI need to love a place in order to set up a camera.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n Shortly after the director returned to Berlin, Takasaki joined him, and in just three weeks, they hammered out the script, which is all in Japanese.<\/p>\n Wenders developed the character into a man who pays quiet attention to detail and derives joy from cherished cassette tapes or shadows of leaves on the ground. The director was channeling his idol, Ozu, even naming the toilet cleaner Hirayama after the family in \u201cTokyo Story,<\/a>\u201d considered one of Ozu\u2019s masterpieces.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n In conceiving of a daily routine stripped down to a few essentials, Wenders wanted the character to be a \u201cbeautiful sign of reduction.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cReduction is one of the great tasks of our contemporary civilization,\u201d Wenders said. \u201cAnd we can only do better with the planet and the climate if we learn how to reduce ourselves.\u201d<\/p>\n Before shooting began in the fall of 2022, the director and Yakusho visited the apartment where they would film the lead character at home, caring for a collection of treasured plants and reading translated works of Faulkner from a neat shelf in his bedroom. Wenders asked the actor to think about how to streamline the props supplied by an art director so that only the items most vital to the character remained.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n \u201cI would say \u2014 would I really have such a thing?\u201d Yakusho recalled during an interview in a rented office late last year. \u201cAnd we would get rid of unrealistic things.\u201d<\/p>\n Yakusho spent two days with a toilet cleaner learning his techniques, including how to use some custom-made tools. He said he wanted to perform the role as if Wenders was making a documentary. The director said he had never worked with an actor who \u201cso totally became that character.\u201d Yakusho won the best actor prize at Cannes<\/a> last spring.<\/p>\n