Japanese Toilets

A couple of years ago, I wrote a blog post about chickens. I expressed some surprise at that time that I would be devoting an entire post to that subject. Today, I am way more surprised that I wrote about toilets. But here we are.

Walk into any hotel bathroom or restaurant toilet room or public toilet at an airport or train station in Japan and you are likely to find a water closet that looks a little different than you will find here in the United States. No, I'm not talking about the all-too-visible outdoor urinals we found at Daigoji Temple in Kyoto or on the ferry to Miyajima (right outside the unisex toilet room). I'm also not talking about the floor-level porcelain squatty potties they have in some of the public toilets out in the cities. I mean the ones that look just like the water closet you have at home with a tank and a toilet seat. Only with the wires.

"The wires?" you might ask. Yep, the wires.

Can't believe I'm taking pictures of toilets on vacation? Yeah, neither can I. Not my proudest blogging moment.

Water closets here at home in the United States are plumbing fixtures. By that I mean they operate by gravity flushing water out of the tank and into the bowl which sweeps anything in the bowl down the sanitary lines and out into the sewers or septic tank, depending on just where you are. They are simple. They work on principles like gravity and the ability of rushing water to carry away liquids and solids just by the power of its current.

Water closets in Japan are NOT plumbing fixtures; I would maintain that they are appliances, as complicated and necessary as your refrigerator or stove or any other convenience of modern life. And they require electricity, which means the water closets come with wires. They need to be plugged in. And they come with a control panel with various buttons and settings. For the first time visitor, this may be a little disconcerting.

So why do you need buttons and settings? Well, that depends on what model of toilet you actually have, but at a minimum you are going to find a "Shower" button and "Bidet" button. These buttons will project a stream of water before you move in to clean up with some toilet paper. "Shower" for the butt (sometimes there's "Rear" button instead) and "Bidet" to take care of other parts for women (sometimes it's just a pictogram of a woman getting sprayed from below; a picture is worth a thousand words, right?). Sometimes, you'll find buttons to adjust the pressure and temperature of the water. Careful with these buttons, please. Don't want to spray too hard and for sure don't want scalding hot water down there.

We were fortunate to find some bilingual toilets; when in Japanese only they can be a challenge to even flush.

If you are lucky enough to find a more deluxe water closet, you may find other features that will enhance your bathroom experiences. Notice a wire running to the toilet seat? It's likely there's a warming feature. You don't want to be sitting on a cold seat first thing in the morning, do you? Embarrassed that others may hear you doing whatever you are doing in there? Well, if you get lucky you'll find a toilet that simulates the noise of rushing water to drown out other sounds you might be making while seated. And if the room needs a little freshening up, some come with a deodorizing feature, although honestly we couldn't quite figure out this function very well.

In the most deluxe spots we visited in Japan, we found a toilet which automatically lifted the toilet seat when you entered the room. Somehow this function must have been electronically tied into the strike of the door or something; it knew when you opened the door. We also found some stalls in the Narita Airport outside of Tokyo which played music. I guess this is sort of the same as the water rushing white noise feature described above. I doubt it's for long extended sessions where you just want to jam to some tunes.

I apologize for those of you out there who think this post may not be in the best of taste but the point of writing this blog is not just to describe the monumentally wonderful things I have seen on my travels. Sometimes, we have to look at the mundane aspects of life elsewhere that fascinate us. And make no mistake, the toilets in Japan for sure fascinated me. So if you are headed to Japan any time soon, be prepared. And if you find yourself in the Narita Airport bathrooms, happy listening. Now back to our regularly scheduled programming.

Deodorizer AND music?? Score!!