Japanese toilets

by m. werneburg, 2006

Japanese toilets come in two varieties.

There first (in, I presume, chronological order) is the stainless-steel trough with a hole at the rear and (I assume that this is a feature for male toilets) a splash guard at the front. The splash guard contains a water spigot for sluicing wastes into the hole at the rear. To either side of the trough is a spot for you to stand. It's pretty simple, really. You crouch over it, and work out the thigh muscles.

Then there's the other, modern type. Which is basically a "Western" toilet in form, but with a control panel, a (sometimes bilingual) instruction panel, and a host of other interesting features. Not least of which is the multi-functional bidet equipment which is designed to not only server as a "shower" for women, but to "shower your posterior". Additional features may include "deoderant spray", heated seating, a knob for adjusting aforementioned shower "intensity" (if that's the word) and of course a big red "stop" button. Some also have a miniature sink at the top, where a spigot pours into a small basin atop the toilet's tank.

My first encounter with one was, strangely, in Toronto in the mid-late nineties. It was at the home of a woman in the High Park area who had lived in Toronto for some years. I ignored the fancy features and used it like a normal toilet. And of course, this is possible in Japan, where the multi-function toilet is the norm in public places like restaurants.

Then I started working in Japan. And that meant sitting in a stall in the men's room. And hearing strange water sounds coming from the neighbouring stalls. The first time I heard this strange constant-flowing sound, it struck me that the fellow next to me had had a particularly urgent need to piss, and that his flow was unusually even.

Then of course, I realized that he was using the shower feature.

I can assure you that as a foreigner of moderate capacity for adventure, this was a bit much. Actually listening to someone else shower their anus in the men's room is a bizarre thing. At first, anyway. Eventually you get used to anything, of course.

And since I like to think I'm an adventurous duck, I decided I'd try it myself rather than just complain about it (to the locals, who were uniformly put off by my vulgarity in discussing it at all).

So I gritted my, ah, teeth, and gave it a whirl. And what do you know, the water is heated. I'd been expecting a jet of cold toilet-bowl water, I suppose, and was relieved—or some approximation of that—when I felt warm water instead. No, relief isn't truly the word. But anyway, I'd given it a, uh, whirl.

I've since gone as far as trying the control knob. Fearing that it was something along the lines of a shower-head's dial for different spray/pulse/jet settings, I was downright pleased to learn that it was nothing more than a strength setting. No anal massaging, I guess. Or at least, in the model I've got here in the cheap hotel (where the toilet is the only thing that remotely resembles a luxury item).

So yeah, the moral of the story is that Japanese toilets can be daunting when you can't read the language and like your toilet seats unheated. Especially when you accidentally trigger the security alarm that they can come equipped with. I did this at a friend's place, and the local rent-a-cops actually came to respond (forty minutes later, which might seem like a long time for an emergency in the "washroom" that is worthy of calling the cops, but that's another diffuse rant).

I guess the real moral of the story is to be unafraid to try new things when travelling abroad, even if it means having your anus sprayed by tepid, deoderizing water. It could be worse—you could be Japanese and forced to deal with unheated, unspraying toilets, which must seem cold and aloof and unhealpful in comparison.