Japanese bathrooms are quite different from our North American variety. My family and I recently spent a couple of weeks in Japan, where I experienced these differences firsthand. They had, shall we say, their ups and downs. Not just the toilet seat, but the whole bathroom enterprise.
I knew about their futuristic toilets thanks to The Simpsons, where the Japanese toilet tells Homer that it’s, “honoured to accept [his] waste.” I also had an inkling about how they sit down to bathe, thanks to movies like Perfect Days and TV shows like Tokyo Vice. There was a harrowing scene in Tokyo Vice where a Yakuza hit happens in a public bath house.
So, let’s pretend this is some fancy influencer travel blog and you (for some weird reason) want to hear all about my adventures in the typical Japanese bathroom. Join me in the Japanese john! (I will try to relay this to you without being gross or giving you mental images you can’t unsee. I’m also not sure why I find myself adding disclaimers like this in so many of these essays).
Our first stop was an AirBnB in Tokyo. We think we’re so superior in the Western world, but we are slovenly savages with shameful, uncivilized toilets. We might as well be pooping in bushes and howling at the moon. For starters, the Japanese toilet had a heated seat! It doesn’t just keep your tush comfy, it warms your entire soul, through your bum. Thank you, Japanese toilet industry, for resolving the centuries-old disagreement between science and religion about whether the human soul exists. It does, and it’s apparently up your butt and around the corner.
Very few of the toilets I saw in Japan had primitive North American flush handles. Most of them had Star Trek-like control panels on the wall beside them. Of course, the controls were all in Japanese, so I couldn’t read them. I used the Google Translate camera, but it isn’t perfect. The characters translated to things like, “sewer dog,” “magic brush,” and “tugboat Captain.”
I figured nothing too crazy could happen, so I just mashed buttons like a curious, dimwitted monkey. I discovered that most of them controlled the variety of water you can have sprayed on your nether regions. A built-in bidet, if you will. A front spray and a back spray and all kinds of sprays that to the uninitiated, like myself, frankly felt a little perverted. I tried a few of them for novelties’ sake, but ultimately abandoned them quickly. I’ll stick to TP or the Three Seashells Method, thank you very much.
Even with Japanese characters, flushing was easier to figure out. The panel had three different buttons, each with little whirlpool icons to indicate, I assumed, flush strength. I decided the whirlpools looked like wee galaxies of stars, which made me think that perhaps their toilets are so amazing that your waste doesn’t go to a sewer. They flush it through a Stargate that dumps out somewhere amongst the cosmos. A portal potty.
So anyway, overall, toilets in Japan are everywhere you wanna be. And before we keep bragging about the superiority of our Western ways, we should catch our toilets up to the 21st century.
Oddly enough, I had more trouble with the shower. It confounded me.
Most of the showers I used in Japan were not what I was used to. Strangely, they were often in a totally different room than the toilet. Instead of a contained space like a tub or shower pad with a shower curtain or glass partition, it’s just a room. Apparently, some people call these wet rooms. As in, the whole room is allowed to get wet. Our Tokyo bathroom had tiled flooring and a long drain near the door. Leaning ominously against the wall was a big squeegee. I immediately disliked the squeegee. It suggested responsibility.
There was a normal showerhead wand attached to the wall. Below it was a plastic stool. In front of the stool, much lower on the wall, was another tap. You sit on the stool and turn on the lower faucet, using a washcloth to bathe yourself. In that episode of Tokyo Vice, a Japanese man had been washing himself, right before assassins came in and murdered him. So, I was in the know both about how to wash and how to wait until someone is distracted with scrubbing their nuts in order to kill them.
Since I pride myself on my situational awareness, I wasn’t going to use the stool and leave myself open to attack. Instead, I turned on the shower. Standing up felt right, but everything else felt wrong. I was instantly filled with anxiety, spraying water in a room with no barriers, curtains or glass walls. The Japanese are fairly reserved people, so I’m not sure why they’d need to hose a whole room down like a mad firefighter dousing a raging house fire.
When I aimed the water at myself, I yelped and jumped back — it was freezing cold. I fussed with the mechanisms but all they did was switch on the lower tap, which meant ice water sprayed all over my feet (and the floor!) at an alarming rate.
Did they not take hot showers in Japan? Tokyo Vice hadn’t commented on that.
I did some naked investigating. I looked all around. I went back to the room with the toilet in it. I saw another control panel on the wall. I found my phone and read some more weird Google translations. “Volume,” “channel,” and “input.” Was there a TV in here somewhere? Something to watch while you warm your buns on your toilet throne? Pressing random buttons once more, I eventually determined it was the hot water control.
I returned to the shower and eureka! Hot water spraying all over the room!
After my shower, the floor was covered with water (duh). I suppose I could have just left it and let it dry on its own or be someone else’s problem (my long-suffering wife?). But then I heard a high-pitched voice calling to me.
“Hey mister!” it said. “Over here!
I looked over to see the squeegee leaned up against the wall.
“My, my, my,” it said. “Water everywhere. Shameful!”
I shrugged sheepishly. It wasn’t my fault! I’m not used to this wet-room thing!
“Say, you can always use me to take care of this mess.”
I took the squeegee up on its offer and made a mental note to take less of whatever drugs make squeegees appear sentient. I grabbed it and started squeegeeing the floor like my life depended on it. I pushed all the water towards the drains. Mind you, I was still nude, so the disconcerting feeling continued in full force, even as I got rid of the offending water.
Hey dummy, wrap a towel around yourself!
Well, sure, but it’s not like I can keep a towel inside the room that’s being sprayed indiscriminately with water.
That first shower was so traumatic that I sat down on the toilet again to let the warmer reach up my butt and around the corner to heat my soul a little.
Of course, as human beings, we adapt. We get used to things. When I got home to Canada, I was a changed man. And not for the better. My own bathroom, especially the toilet, was like something an archeologist would dig up.
And worse, after spending two weeks in the dizzying freedom of the wet room, I could no longer be contained to my normal shower and its little glass-walled prison. It was wet death, a claustrophobic tiled coffin. I wanted to spray water all over the bathroom! Let my damn wife yell at me! We’ll buy a squeegee!
Anyway, if you’re planning a trip to the Land of the Rising Sun, don’t just visit the shrines, ramen spots, and Mount Fuji. Go to the can. It might be the most culturally enlightening thing you do.
