Japanese Bathrooms

Japan is great. Strange, totally incomprehensible in some ways, but great. It has some of the best food on the planet - and on the other hand, it has some of the most terrifying food on Earth too! It has beautiful scenary, spectacular cities, and as people are usually very friendly it’s a brilliant place to wander around it. However, some things about Japan really really scare me from time to time.

For instance, toilets. Now it can be a little difficult to believe when you walk into a plush department store or hotel that the traditional Japanese toilet is a squatter. The loos installed in these places look as if they`ll launch you into orbit!

We went to a department store in Sapporo today and used their toilets after lunch. In the ladies they had a whole selection of goodies for children: little urinals for little boys visiting with their Mummy, mini toilets in the cubicals next to the real sized toilet for little girls, a baby holder seat in each cubical to keep little devils from wandering around while Mum is otherwise engaged… And the toilets came accompanied by some fun things too – toilet seat disinfectants (which are a bit boring now we’ve seen them in the UK) and an ‘auto steriliser’ – some mysterious device you seem to activate by putting your hand over the back of the toilet to give it a mini-flush!

As for the toilets themselves, well, as you might expect they are the highlight of any Japanese bathroom. They vary a bit in complexity, but the ones we just met in this department store were some of the best I’ve seen. First, the toilet seat is warmed for optimal comfort. And as you sit down it flushes a little water to make sure everything is clean (a bit disconcerting before you get used to it – I jumped up the first time wondering what was happening!). Then you have a whole control panel of different options at your fingertips. As you can see from the photos, the ones in this store were scarily all in Japanese characters, so you wouldn’t have a clue what you were pressing. Very dangerous! I know for past from more helpful control panels with English text or pictures some of the things these loos can do. They can play relaxing bird song or the sound of the sea washing against the shore to cover embarrassing noises. You can control the temperature of the seat in case it gets a little chilly. And most terrifying of all, you can use them as a bidet! At the touch of the wrong button these evil things will launch vindictive jets of water up out of the toilet bowl at you! The diagrams I’ve seen imply that you can of course choose the ‘aim’ of the jet and the ‘water pressure’ as you desire. And people use these things to feel cleaner afterwards? Euagh!

Anyway, I hope this is a useful warning for anyone coming to Japan. On the plus side, going to the toilet in the UK is never this interesting, whereas here the sheer weirdness of it can make it the most memorable thing of the day!