An Honorable Profession

When I was a kid, baseball cards were hot stuff—collecting them, trading them, flipping them, poring over the photos on the front and statistics on the back. But if you told me that someday collectors in Japan would be going from city to city to seek out trading cards featuring manhole cover art...well, that would have sounded as strange as trying to sell me a card featuring Willie Mays in a Dodgers uniform.

But during a recent trip to Japan to present on trends in the North American water treatment market at the Japan Ozone Association's annual conference, I got my very own manhole trading card courtesy of Junya Tsukahara at Nihon Suido Consultants . Nihon Suido Consultants is one of the largest water and wastewater consulting engineering firms in Japan as well as a first-rate host. Tsukahara-san and his team were knowledgeable and informative, and they created the opportunity for me to visit one of Tokyo Metropolitan Water Department's largest drinking water plants.

Not only are the engineering and technology first-rate, the hospitality in Japan is incomparable. Even simple things, like the use of the honorific "-san"—I am "Jim-san" there, which always makes me smile—hammer home the importance of hospitality in Japanese culture. That commitment to hospitality extends to water and wastewater treatment plants opening their doors to ratepayers and explaining how they operate to create a safe, clean environment across the nation.

And that's where the manhole trading cards come in. In Japan, even a manhole cover creates an opportunity to share art, culture and beauty. For instance, the card I was given (pictured above) depicts a colorized image of a striking manhole from the town of Reihoku featuring two beautiful, local flowers, the delicate Hamayu (the Crinum lily) and the Tsubaki, or Japanese camellia. The graphic is as beautiful and according to what I saw via Google Translate, the text is as informative as any collectable card I've seen. Best of all—the original art is available to everybody on streets across Reihoku. Just look down.

And that's just one card, one town, one design. Members of the Japanese Ground Manhole Association have been creating manhole art since 1986. Casting artful manhole covers grew from an effort by a civil servant named Yasutake Kameda to get locals excited about Tokyo sewer improvements. The movement caught on across the country, and today there are more than 6,000 unique manhole cover designs in Japan, celebrating cultural touchstones ranging from flowers to squid to anime characters.

In 2016, the Gesuido Koho Purattohomu (Sewer PR) Platform launched the trading cards at a manhole summit, and a new collectors' craze was born. As of 2022, they had issued 170 manhole trading card designs.

Manhole art and the trading cards that celebrate it are cool—there's no doubt about it. But what's REALLY exciting is the fact that Japan's wastewater industry has taken infrastructure that is invisible in the rest of the world and made it fun. Engaging. Beautiful. Want local art and culture? Look down and find a manhole. Study it. Contemplate its story. Want a manhole trading card? Go visit the local wastewater treatment plant and talk about sewer systems.

It's no secret that America needs more than just art to get our water and wastewater infrastructure back in order. We could certainly do well to borrow a page from our Japanese colleagues' beautiful book.

We've also got outstanding examples of outreach here on our shores. For instance, I met Christopher Francis , operations manager when I graduated from Citizen's Academy at my local wastewater utility, Napa Sanitation District. (Yep, it's called NapaSan.) NapaSan's Citizen Academy is a public education program that pulls back the curtain and teaches locals about Napa's wastewater treatment system.

Even with simple manhole covers and no trading cards, NapaSan's outreach program is precisely what utilities should be doing: telling the story of the water and wastewater industry to the ratepayers who don't even realize how much they and the environment around us is benefitting from their heroic work.

At NapaSan, we learned about the entire process, from sewer pipe inspection to maintenance and repair. We learned about filtration, laboratory analysis, as well as how they safeguard our health and protect our communities, both human and natural. We learned how NapaSan utilizes the co-products it creates, including recycled water for irrigation, biosolids used as fertilizer to grow feed for local cows, and methane that supplies almost half the energy consumed by the treatment plant. We learned how effective, efficient wastewater treatment benefits us, our community, and our landscape.

Just like Japan's wastewater utilities are trading cards and insights with stakeholders, NapaSan is trading information—sharing best practices and perspectives with colleagues in the industry through its involvement in the California Water Environment Association (CWEA) and Bay Area Clean Water Agencies (BACWA).

NapaSan truly earns its honorific (even if it was originally just an abbreviation). And domo arigato to Nihon Suido Consultants and my other generous hosts in Japan—not just for the great insight, gracious hospitality, and beautiful trading card, but for demonstrating how all of us around the world can step up our story-telling game and demonstrate on every street corner and in every public interaction the beauty of what the water and wastewater industry does.

We are fortunate to work in an honorable profession indeed.