fishydreams

Japan really is some country! There are so many wonderful things there – beautiful buildings, temples, bullet trains, courteous people, great cuisine and on and on. These things, and more, we expected we might find and we were never disappointed, but one thing that truly surprised me was the toilets of Japan. I do not mean to be discourteous or trivial or rude to our Japanese hosts in making these observations. The truth is that their loos demonstrate, if anything, the ingenuity of Japanese in an area of life that is relevant to all of us every day. They have given toilets much more thought than we in the west have ever done.

They were full of surprises. Trinny needed to powder her nose on one occasion was amazed to find that as soon as she sat down on the loo seat, a Mozart piano concerto that came into being, unsolicited. As it happens, the toilet included a design feature to conceal any embarrassing noises that the occupant might generate. This is not a bad idea, particularly when many Japanese, in places like Tokyo, are forced by high property prices to live in an apartment the size of a hamster cage. In such a place you may not want to produce noises drawing attention to your activities when your mother in law might be separated from you by a barrier the thickness of rice paper.

And, anyway, who doesn´t like Mozart?

If there is a function to play music in a Japanese toilet, presumably there are others for music selection or volume adjustment? There are. There are myriad other functions too like heating the seat and various ways that the occupant can (how to put this politely?) clean up hygienically when they have concluded their business. These include jets of water that can be aimed towards the “bull´s eye” with extraordinary precision. And of course, this feature lends itself to further adjustments in force and direction and temperature. All these controls need to be within close reach and so, if you are finding it difficult to imagine what a toilet looks like, just think that you have been asked to fly a Boeing 747 and you settle down into the pilot´s seat and take a look around you. It´s a bit like that.

My initiation into this high tech world was, curiously enough, on a riverboat. The boats I am most familiar with are fishing boats on Irish loughs and taking a wee over the side while trying not to fall overboard is not uncommon unless you opt for the safer option of relieving yourself into the bailing bucket and then chucking the contents overboard. Better still, wait until you pull up on some shoreline or island and put the Kelly kettle on. There is much to be said for terra firma.

In our Tokyo river cruise things were far more sophisticated. Inevitably, the combination of free alcohol and my Irish heritage made frequent visits to the loo inevitable. I was bamboozled by the panel on the wall and understood nothing of what the various controls and buttons meant. I wanted simply to flush the thing but didn´t even know where to start. For all I knew some of the controls might have been emergency call buttons or even activate a cockpit ejector seat. As it happens, the flush function is located somewhere else, maybe on the opposite wall.

I did try out a few options as time went by and my confidence grew but I remain a bit nervous about what might happen and so many of the elements of the experience remain mysterious to me. I imagine it is not so with the average Japanese person with the requisite experience and expertise. For them, I guess, it is just a matter of sitting down and strapping in and glancing to the familiar array of controls before stating confidently “okay! let´s get this baby off the ground”.