Notes on Japanese toilets

There are times when even as a seasoned traveller you can feel pretty vulnerable. For example, breakfast: I’m as happy to tuck into raw mackeral as an evening meal, but there’s something about it for breakfast that is so unexpected that it takes you aback.

I’ve had similar double-takes with Japanese toilets. I went to Satoshi and Akane’s house for a lovely meal and, as you do after lots of soup and beer, felt the natural urge to micturate. Although they have a lavish toilet control panel (all of them do) I couldn’t work out how to flush.

After asking my gracious hosts, I learned that it was activated by infra-red. This is in contrast with the toilet in my hotel room, whose control panel had English language controls, and squirted water up my bum and around my bum at user-selectable strength (below), but didn’t seem to have a flush button.

I eventually located a traditional manual flush on the opposite side of the toilet bowl, and satisfactorily dismissed my ablutions.

Most Japanese toilets have heated seats, which is a bit of a win but odd when alone in a hotel room as you can’t help but wonder who has snuck in to poo while you were cleaning your teeth. Many flush for an inordinately long time automatically the instant you sit down; I’m told so that this means you’re unable to hear the sound of ladies urinating, as it’s masked by the flushing sound. I suppose that if you’re bashful about exposing the fact that ladies pee (they do, you know!) this would be a useful solution in a traditional thin-walled Japanese house in which sound would travel easily.

This theory might be borne out by the testimony of a lady attendee of the Web Directions East conference who told me that each ladies’ loo in the conference venue (consequent apologies for lack of photo) has a button marked “flushing sound” that played a loud recording of the sound of flushing, presumably to conserve water.

(@johnmcc sent a photo of a loo with a “flushing sound” button.)

Talking of water conservation, the apotheosis of lavatorial environmental responsibility was witnessed in my colleague Daniel’s apartment. On flushing the toilet (a laudably easily accomplished action, I might add), the tap on a small sink mounted above the cistern started automatically. I washed my hands and wondered how to turn the tap off. Then the brilliance of the design hit me: instead of re-filling a closed cistern, the washbasin drained the soapy water into the reservoir below, thereby flushing the toilet with the grey water that the previous visitor had washed his/ her hands in while simultaneously saving space in the compact Tokyo dwelling.

Genius. If I could work out a way to import them and sell them in the UK I’d make a million.