So You Don’t Know How to Use a Japanese Bathroom

Japanese bathrooms have been an object of American fascination for as long as I can remember, whether it was that scene in Mr. Baseball where Tom Selleck needs someone to teach him how to shit, the Simpsons classic episode, or one of the thirteen sitcoms in the past three years to make fun of super-advanced Japanese toilets (also known as the reason that my students all insist that Japan is “like Minority Report”). Even Cracked.com, the site that I have openly and notoriously stolen this format from, has recently had an article about the horrors of Japanese toilets, which made it clear that the author had never taken a shit in his life, let alone one on a Japanese toilet.

But, quite frankly, these depictions of Japanese bathrooms really only go after the low hanging fruit of Japanese toilet humor. In my grand tradition of taking things to the lowest possible common denominator, this post will examine the greatness, the horrors, and general stench of Japanese bathrooms. For, you know, (social) science.

The Benzyou, or “that hole in the ground that you squat over in public parks”

There are probably dozens words for bathrooms and toilets in Japanese because, I theorize, it is the most scatological of all languages. Hell, there are two different words for bathrooms in Zen holy place, one for temples and another monasteries; obviously the word differs based on whether it’s a temple or a monastery because the poo of monks and parishioners have clearly different theological implications, since one is open to parishioners and the other only receives holy shit.

Important pro tip: this is not kitty litter.

Source: dragosroua.com

Many of these terms have different nuisance and levels of politeness. The two you’ll hear most often are otearai (literally “hand washing”) and otoire (a tortured Japanese version of the word “toilet”), either of which you can use openly in polite society. I tend to prefer otearai because I find it needlessly coy, but if there were a Japanese term for “water closet” I would totally use that. The other term which always hovers in the back of my mind is benjyou, which has the good grace to literally mean “shit place.” I like to translate to “shit house” because the term is just as coarse and generally unacceptable in Japanese as it is in English.

Toilets in Japan come in three variations: Western, sentient, and hole in the ground. We’ll get to each of them in turn, but we’ll start with the hole in the ground because it’s the one that I find most baffling and it’s the one form of toilet that I exclusively refer to as a benjyou.

These holes in the ground are obviously used by sitting on them with your genitals mashed into that raise portion.

I was actively sad when I discovered these directions.

The way one uses a benjyou is to squat over it and evacuate the bowels, a maneuver that I have never attempted and pray to a merciless God that I will never have to. I’m told that the best way to do it without making a mess of your pants is to take them right the fuck off because the one thing you don’t want to do while shitting is worry whether the state of your clothing will allow you to reenter society once you’re done. I have also heard it posited that you could use the benjyou on the buddy system with the bonus bathroom attendee helping the shitter by holding her hands and bracing her over the toilet.

“I swear by all that is holy, I will haunt your nightmares if you let go!” “Common! I wouldn’t do that… again.”

The advantage of the benjyou, I’m told, is that it’s hygienic (after all, there is no ass to toilet contact) and, according to science, it puts you in the optimal shitting position. That may all be true, but I’m still not going to ever, ever, ever try it because I have awful balance and the roughly two million gods of Japan do not need to be so sorely tempted to humiliate me. My portly visage and lack of attention are more than enough on their own, thank you very much.

Despite the popularity of Western style toilets, benjyou continue to be fairly common in Tokyo. They are almost always the only option found in bathrooms in parks and in every single train station where I have had to use the bathroom, but they also haunt random public bathrooms even in the most modern, upscale buildings. As a rule of thumb, if a public bathroom has more than three toilets, one of them will be a benjyou. An unfortunate corollary to this rule is that a benjyou will always stink disproportionately because the floor around them will be liberally seasoned with urine and because only people over the age of 50 use them, and there’s something inherently foul about the digestive systems of old Japanese people.

Super Toilets that Approach Sentience

Most Western jokes about Japanese toilets revolve around the idea that they’re full of computer chips and do amazing things (this clip is in German because… News Corp is terrible?). To set the record straight, I have never seen a Japanese toilet with lit fountain display, a camera, or a blow dryer. Well, I’ve seen plenty with blow dryers, but not a single one of them have worked, so I can’t attest to their effectiveness or their existence in a functional capacity. The super toilets have all had a couple of neat features: electronic bidet (always anal, sometimes a bonus vaginal one for vaginas), heated seats, and a fake flush button so that women can take a crap without anyone coming to suspect that they might be human. They also sometimes have horrifying names like the Shower Toilet, which just gives you the wrong mental image about everything.

Just so that we’re all clear here, if it’s sentient, the fact that it lacks any rights is a crime against everything.

For some reason, Americans get really freaked out about the idea of a bidet, but I have always found them positive comment that is purposely nondescript. For those of you who are still apprehensive, I just have a couple of tips. These toilets are sometimes labeled in English as well as Japanese, but usually they’re not. To this end, most toilets have pictures and color coding. For the vaginal bidet, look for the pink button with a picture of a woman in a dress on a toilet, which should be confusing for a couple of reasons, none of which can be addressed in pictogram form. For the pooper power wash, as it’s totally not playfully known here, look for the blue or green picture of a butt. I’m sure this button is unisex, but I like to think it’s using an ass as synecdoche for men.

It’s important to note that you can control the strength of the flow of the bidet, but if you do not understand even simple characters, do not play with the goddamn buttons because this can lead to a very nasty surprise. Regardless of the strength used, I do NOT recommend bracing oneself for impact, as that gets real with a serious prison sex vibe rather quickly. Before pressing any the buttons, I like to give a little prayer to the god that lives in every toilet that the bidet does not use ice cold water, which totally happened to me once and it was not fun. The red button is always stop. I like to think of it as the “oh God, no more!” button. You must press this button otherwise the bidet will not stop until the city runs out of water or electricity. Whatever you do, do not stand up while the bidet is on, for what I feel are fairly obvious reasons, especially if it’s to take a bow.

The part of the electronic toilet that has always bothered me most may seem the most innocuous and welcoming features: the heated seats. It’s true that everyone hates a cold toilet seat, and I’m pretty sure cold toilets have started wars in the past. I couldn’t say which ones, but I’m guessing not many in the tropics. Christopher Titus, a comedian that absolutely no one has ever heard of, even had a routine about how his father would force him to sit on the toilet until it was warm so that he wouldn’t have to sit on porcelain from the ice planet Hoth. Personally, I find a warm toilet seat to be an uncomfortable reminder that other people use the bathroom, which is something I prefer to know as little about as possible. But here’s the problem with the electronically heated seat: in my experience, they don’t actually stop heating up. Maybe I’m profoundly misunderstanding the controls or every single Japanese toilet I have ever used has gone rogue, but they just get warmer and warmer. With frightening rapidity, there’s an unfortunate ass sweat situation that isn’t going to get any better because the damn seat is still getting warmer! This isn’t really a problem in the winter, but Japan gets very hot and humid during the summer, and… well, I don’t want to talk about it.

Toilets with a Hand Sink That Totally Don’t Use Toilet Water, but You Can’t Stop Thinking It Does

In Japan, even fairly typical Western style toilets tend to have a somewhat unique twist (at least to Americans): there is a faucet that pours water into a washbasin that drains into the toilet’s tank.

Essentially, the toilet gives you an opportunity to wash your hands with the water that will eventually be used to flush your excrement down the drain. It’s a pretty good idea because it conserves water by reusing it and flushing gives you an immediate opportunity to wash your hands with water that, and I can’t stress this enough, has yet to go in a toilet. This scheme largely eliminates that awkward moment when you wonder if your hands are clean enough to turn the tap so that you can clean your hands, the most scatological of all the Catch-22s.

Or maybe I’m the only one who feels like this?

The toilet sink, which still feels really gross to say, is not without its drawbacks. Japanese bathrooms, like many things in Japan, tend to be very, very small, leaving little room to maneuver. You have to lean across the toilet, which is not always possible to do gracefully without straddling it, something that cannot possibly be done gracefully, though some of the less stable people might contend it can be done sexily. Plus, it’s hard to do without looking like you’re AC Slatering the toilet.

I was going to make a joke about Mario Lopez, but I can’t let the shoddiness of this Photoshop job go without comment. Get a guy to Slater a toilet and Photoshop in the face or take a picture of Slater and add the toilet, but not both. Never both!

There are further issues of what to do with soap and a hand towel. I have seen maybe a handful of these toilets that actually had some place to put the soap. At least the next time you flush the toilet it will be full of hand soap, something that doesn’t actually make the toilet any cleaner if you listen to the fascists I used to live with. No matter what you do, though, you are absolutely going to get water all over the toilet seat while you reach for a towel, I promise you because I’ve never seen a towel rack in a reasonable place in a Japanese bathroom. Although you will see this kind of toilet in public bathrooms, the whole part about washing your hands is kind of irrelevant because I’ve never seen one that actually had soap or a towel nearby so, good fucking luck with that.

The Old People Are Seriously Trying to Kill Me

The fact that there are three different types of toilets is irrelevant because you will never be able to use one. Every single old person who has ever used a public bathroom in Japan will take twenty minutes using a toilet of any variety. Only five minutes of this will produce… bathroom noises. The other fifteen minutes are spent lingering, possibly even malingering, with the only outward signs that they’re in there being a locked door and series of coat rustlings and flushes that makes it sound as though they’re just about done. When waiting for an old person to exit a toilet stall, however, it’s very important that you not be taken in by anything that makes it seem as though the wait will ever end. It is, after all, a well-established fact that, at any given point in time, 125% toilet stalls in Japan are occupied by old people doing something that has nothing to do with using the bathroom; this figure infinitely approaches an infinity of toilets if there’s a line.

I’m not trying to imply they’re doing something nefarious in there; I simply don’t know what could possibly take that long. It’s my theory that Japanese people don’t age linearly, but rather save it up and do all of their aging at once in public bathrooms while young, toilet hungry people go wanting. It’s like Benjamin Button only aging forward in such a way that it keeps me from shitting. It’s possible that this is all a form of payback for the fact that they had to go through the war. Further research is necessary, but is difficult to conduct because old people in public toilets are like subatomic particles, except it’s not mere observation that determines their behavior so much as it is the desperation of the observer to occupy a toilet stall. They only way you could possibly test it under laboratory conditions is to have a nearly endless supply of people who need toilets now, but the difficulty of conducting these experiments in Japan is compounded by the lack of Mexican food in Tokyo.

Japanese Bathrooms Hate Towels and Hand Dryers

Once you’ve actually used of the three types of toilets available in public bathrooms (I’m not going to comment on Japanese urinals except to point out this unfortunate trend), it’s time to wash your hands. Good fucking luck getting through that one alive. First off, Japanese bathrooms do not universally have hand soap. Not, like, they occasionally run out, but rather some straight up don’t have it. Those that do often have these weird bulbous dispensers that always contain a pink, viscous liquid that I imagine someone thinks is soap, except that I honest to God have yet to actually get anything out of there. The “dispensers” don’t twist or pump. They’re like a tank of red goo in a J.J. Abrams project: they raise more questions than they answer. It’s possible you’re supposed to squeeze them but that’s just too dumb and I’m not going to do that.

If there even is soap, you still face the problem of how to dry your hands. Most (and I am not making this up to be fucking hyperbolic; most, goddammit!) Japanese public bathrooms do not have paper towels or hand dryers. What you’re supposed to do is carry around a small hand towel or handkerchief around with you wherever you go. The official reason, or so I’m told, is that paper towels and hand dryers waste precious resources, which sounds like a libertarian dystopian way of telling everyone who ever lived to fuck right off and take personal responsibility by pulling a full on Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy and carry a fucking towel with you wherever you go. I’m pretty sure at this point that some of you are saying to yourself that the only reason I’m bitter about this disgraceful reality is because I’m too lazy, stupid, and incompetent to carry a handkerchief with me like a big boy, and right you fucking are! I am absolutely incapable of remembering to put one in my pocket every morning, and I’m not going to apologize for it. Where I fucking come from, establishments put a hand blow dryer in the bathroom that doesn’t fucking work and no one pretends it will, so that when you walk out of there, drying your hands on your pants and muttering about how you miss paper towels, you feel exploited in such a way that you can at least take comfort in the fact that someone literally did the very least they could possibly do to satisfy your bathroom needs. And that’s the way we like it!

Of course, I’m not being fair to the Japanese because many places put out a single hand towel for those who are too useless to have their own. I like to believe that this is how they punish sanitation-conscious serial killers in prisons that are overly progressive in their methods of torture. The sheer audacity of the idea that bathroom patrons should all share the same towel is enough to stagger not just the mind or even a team of oxen, but large portions of the Western hemisphere.  I once picked up the common rag out of a morbid (and, if my greater fears turn out to be true, possibly moribund) sense of curiosity, and the other guy in the bathroom looked at me as if I just ate something out of trash and declared it superior to sushi in Tsukiji. So, if the Japanese are also terrified at the practice, why, exactly, is the towel still there? Are these all just towels that various people have abandoned and everyone is too afraid to touch them to get rid of them? The worst part is that I’m pretty sure this is none of my goddamn business.

There Are No Toilets in the Bathroom

Most of the discussion thus far has focused on public bathrooms, but it might surprise some readers at this point to discover that the Japanese have bathrooms in their homes as well! It will quickly become clear, however, I have been using the term “bathroom” in the colloquial American sense in which a bathroom need not contain an actual bath or even a shower. In Japan, the common practice in homes is to spread out what an American would consider a bathroom into two rooms, and it often spills out into the hallway. These rooms consist of a toilet contained in a very small room that is roughly large enough for a toilet and a person using said toilet, and a bathroom where the bath is kept. Often, there will be more than one sink, frequently with one in the hallway.

This is the bathroom in my apartment. 

Note the conspicuous absence of anything other than a bathtub.

When you think about it, this arrangement makes a hell of a lot more sense than the American fashion. Why, precisely, is the toilet in the same room as the bath, other than plumbing issues that are easily dealt with in the construction of a new home? This practice is objectively gross (for example, even though there’s no clip on youtube, see the episode of Mythbusters when they showed that there is feces on everything in the bathroom) and has caused more arguments with my sister over the years we lived together than the number of times I’ve grossed myself out writing this post (which is to say, a lot). There’s no reason that I shouldn’t be able to take a piss while my roommate showers, and the fact that he is consistently not cool with that when the toilet and bath are in the same room is all the evidence I need to separate them. Having a sink in the hallway is also quite useful, as every single person who has ever stayed at a reasonably nice hotel has discovered.

The division of toilet and bath also allows for another nice feature of most Japanese bathrooms: there’s a drain right in the middle of the floor, so it doesn’t matter if you splash when you’re in the shower and overfilling the tub is not the end of the goddamn world. For this reason, I have only seen two shower curtains in all of Japan, and they were both so covered in mildew that no one wanted to be within twenty feet of them. The only downside is that my bathroom floor is always covered in water and, since I don’t have a hallway sink, I have to take my slippers and socks off to use the bathroom sink to brush my teeth. I could just use the kitchen sink, but I’m not a barbarian.

My Bathroom, like Dylan, Has Gone Electric and It’s Ruining Everything

A Japanese room wouldn’t be complete without a series of needless electronic gadgets and the bathroom is no exception. My apartment has a tankless water heater that I have to turn on whenever I want to use hot water. For the most part, this means I press one button before taking a shower and another when I get out, and I save electricity. Yay all around. It’s only a little annoying that, though I can vary the water temperature with control pad, my bathroom water maxes out at 40C, which is not quite where I want it but close enough.

The electric experience reached a whole new level, however, when I realized that my bathroom has a bath button. It’s a button that, with a single press, draws a bath, with water reaching a preset height without the need to monitor it as if that was a major issue in anyone’s life. It’s useful enough, however, that it makes up for its complete lack of necessity, and it does have one very interesting: the bath will periodically heat the water without adding more, thus keeping the level of the bath steady. Of course, this is a fucking trap because the bath will wait until I’ve just decided to get out to heat the water, thus keeping me in the tub well past the point when pruning sets in. I’m trying to decide if the tub is deriving nourishment or pleasure from keeping me in it or if this is all part of a conspiracy to lull me into complacency until the bath makes its final move.  Considering the fact that my apartment has a half bathtub (it’s half the length with twice the depth, thus assuring that no one is happy about any part of it), it might just be its way of apologizing for just being fucking awful.