Ok, let's start with your basic toilet. The typical "Japanese style" toilet looks like the one above on the left--it's a squatter. The idea is that because you're not touching any part of it at any time, it's much more sanitary than a toilet you sit on. Having experienced this type of toilet many times throughout my life in such places as Taiwan and China, I am going to respectfully disagree with this point of view. I think they're vastly underestimating the splash factor. The toilet on the right is called a "Western style" toilet. As you can see, it's a regular sit on the seat toilet. The Japanese have somewhat improved upon the sanitation of this model by making toilet cleaner dispensers widely available in stalls with Western toilets. Usually this is a spray that you use to wipe the seat. Most public restrooms featured both types of toilets, although public school restrooms and a few subway restrooms remain Japanese style only. From a discussion of our homestays, however, it seemed that nearly all Japanese homes have converted to the Western sit-down model.
The Western-style toilet above has a feature that I saw several times, on both Western and Japanese style toilets. Notice that the toilet tank is actually a sink, so that the water you wash your hands with is actually then used to flush. Ingenious! (I thought)
Now a few words about the amenities of a Japanese bathroom. In the picture above, you'll notice that the trash can in this bathroom stall can be opened by a wave of the hand over a motion sensor in the corner. These motion sensors were very common, for soap, faucets, and flushers, and the flusher sensor would often be located in the wall so that you can control when it flushes (unlike many automatic flushing toilets in the United States that awkwardly flush whenever you move slightly on the toilet).
I failed to get a picture, but Japanese bathrooms almost always also have some sort of device to create sounds--sounds of flushing, sounds of waves, just ambient noise, whatever--whose sole purpose is to cover up whatever sounds you might be making! Wow that would've come in handy in high school, when I went through that phase of not wanting to ever pee whenever someone else was there because then they could hear it.
Last but not least, I can't discuss amenities without talking about the fancy options on the Toto, the biggest manufacturer of toilets with serious options. If you return back to the picture of the Western-style toilet at the top, notice the buttons on the left. This is a less fancy version that probably doesn't do much more than spray bidet water at a couple of different pressures. The fancy ones will spray, dry, warm up the seat, and probably more things I never learned. I saw toilets with more than 10 buttons. I will say this--it's nice to sit on a warmed toilet seat. Let's definitely bring that to America. The bidet I could take or leave.
Japanese public restrooms also consider babies and small children more so than other countries I've been. Many bathrooms offer (left) small urinals for young boys who go to the restroom with their mother, and (middle and right) stalls equipped with baby seats for moms who don't have anyone to hand the baby off to when it's time to pee.
Regrettably, the Japanese do not seem to be overly interested in hand soap, which strikes me as strange, given all the other lengths they go to for the sake of cleanliness. I guess it just goes to show we all have different ideas about what's clean and what's not. In any case, a very high number of public restrooms, even fancy ones, were noticeably lacking hand soap. Note the pictures above. The one on the left features a special hook just for your umbrella--but no hand soap. The one on the right has taken care to provide you with a special garbage can for nappies--but no hand soap. And it's not like we have a situation where nothing is provided for--in China you always have to carry your own tissues with you because you never know if there's going to be toilet paper or not, but in Japan I didn't see an empty roll even once. Yet no hand soap. I don't get it, Japan.
The other random thing I noticed was that maybe Japanese toilet designers don't really think about privacy when they're designing. There were a number of instances when men doing their business was COMPLETELY visible from the entryway of the bathroom, two prominent examples above. Now, on one of my last days in Tokyo I went to this reproduction of an Edo-era village, and noticed that the town lavatories were designed so that the doors only came up about 3 feet, so when you're squatting people can still see your head. The logic is that that way people know whether or not the toilet is occupied. I noticed the next day on the train that the men's urinal had a WINDOW in the door so that you can see the back of whoever's inside people. Same concept? Hmmmmmm.....
Finally we come to the bathroom of the Japanese home. Unfortunately, I sort of forgot to take pictures in the houses I stayed at (hey, you don't bring your purse to the bathroom at home!) but here are a couple of the few I did take. In Japanese homes the bath/shower is always a separate room from the toilet, and there's often also a completely separate sink area for washing your hands. This is probably because people spend a significant amount of time in the bathtub, so you've got to make sure the toilet is available for other people to use. On the left, we have the bath/shower room. The shower is just the room itself with a big drain in the floor. When you take a shower, you sit on a little stool and scrub yourself down. Then you hop into the tub to soak. You clean yourself first because the same bathwater will be used for every person who takes a bath that night. In the picture, you can just barely see a digital display over the bathtub, letting us know how hot the water is and making sure it maintains temperature.
The middle picture is actually my hostel bathroom, not a home. But many homes, especially the more traditional ones, will have a separate set of slippers to be used only in the bathroom. They stay in the bathroom and are shared by the entire family.
And last, I just thought this scale was hilarious. ;)
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