the tall blond guy goes to japan

Bathroom Stories

Daily Yomiuri

Some it's the subtle things about a culture that really start to unnerve me. One of the best ways to evaluate a different culture is to look at the bathrooms. How they're organized, what they're there for, and what they represent, cultuarally. Or maybe I've just been here too long.

Sinks. Note the toilet paper.

I work in an office with a bunch of other gaijin ("foreigners"), so this is not exactly a traditional bathroom scene. Most Japanese carry handkerchiefs, and they use them to dry their hands after using sinks. Therefore, there are very few bathrooms around that feature anything with which to dry hands. Even the very nice bathrooms in the Tokyo International Forum didn't have any way to dry hands. Perhaps that was my only complaint about that place.

So, for the benefit of us gaijin, some kind-hearted bathroom gnome put toilet paper by the sinks for us to use.

I don't think we're in Kansas anymore.

So the big name here in bathroom fixtures is "Toto". Now I feel like I'm pissing on a small dog whenever I have to use the urinals around here. Very unfortunate.

The last mysterious thing about bathrooms here is a completely new and foreign thing to me. Not that I haven't seen weird bathrooms before... in Paris, I was in one that was simply a hole down to nothing. Lovely! But this... this defies description.

Some kind of weird squatty thing.

Apparently, you have to squat here. I'm not sure which way around the squat happens, or indeed if it matters at all. A line from a Rowan Atkinson standup routine comes to mind: "I wouldn't trust them to sit the right way around on a toilet." More complicated than first thought! Luckily, there are in a stall, so if you are sitting the wrong way around, no one will know. Perhaps there are legions of gaijin who sit the wrong way around without knowing it.