Jeju has a unique toilet culture called “dotongsi” that sets it apart from the rest of Korea. In Korea.

each region has its own livestock industry, and Jeju in particular raises a lot of pigs compared to other livestock, which is related to dotongshi.

According to a video provided by the Jeju Museum, dotongshi is a traditional conventional toilet in Jeju, and the word is a combination of the Jeju language words “dot,” meaning pig, and “tongshi,” meaning toilet. In other words, it is a toilet with pigs. The people of Jeju came up with a clever idea to combine a toilet and a pigsty.

It's made by building a pigsty out of stones, stacking the stones about a foot high on one side, and placing two wide pedestals on top of it. When people defecate on the wide pedestals, the pigs below are fed their human waste.

Before the construction of fullscale modern city buildings on Jeju, when the houses on Jeju were thatched, it was installed in every house on Jeju. Originally, they could be found not only on Jeju but also in the southern part of the Korean Peninsula, but nowadays only traces of them remain in Namwon, Jeju, and nowhere else.

At that time, the manure, which was difficult to dispose of due to the lack of sewage facilities, was used as food for pigs, solving both the problem of excreta disposal and the problem of food.

In addition, food waste generated at home was also fed to the pigs to ensure that no resources were wasted. In other words, dotong shi facility is a system that can be highly effective in procuring food for livestock, solving the problem of excreta disposal, and saving resources for wasted food.

Dotongshi contains the wisdom of our ancestors and their love for nature. It shows how our ancestors lived in symbiosis with nature; they utilized nature's circulation system without artificially interfering with the environment or being wasteful.

Nowadays, there are environmental problems that break the natural cycle by artificially intervening in the environment for people's convenience. Looking at dotonshi, we should think about how we can develop resources from the natural natural circulation system.