Toilet Use

As well as differences in design between Japanese and western toilets there are also several aspects of toilet use that are different too, and these can result in some interesting new experiences for visitors to Japan. Apart from getting to grips with squat toilets and figuring out how to flush baffling washlets, the use of toilet slippers in homes, hotels and some other buildings is most likely to be a new experience for a lot of foreigners.
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Toilet Design

As with so many aspects of life in Japan, toilets truly evoke the old cliché about the country being a blend of east and west, old and new. At one extreme, public toilets are very often Asian-style squat toilets, simple toilets resembling a hole in the ground that require the uninitiated to engage in a tortuous balancing act to use them. At the other extreme, toilets in people’s homes are often high tech affairs such as ‘washlets’. These are based on western-style toilets but with the addition of a perplexing control panel – press the wrong button and your bare behind will receive an unexpected surprise in the form of a jet of water or a blast of hot air.
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People often use the cliché ‘old meets new’ when describing Japan, a reference to the country’s unique mixture of tradition and modernity. The cliché can also be applied, however, to several anachronisms found in Japanese culture.

Although the difference between ‘anachronism’ and ‘tradition’ is perhaps difficult to distinguish, anachronisms are basically things or practices that appear to belong to another time, the most common cultural examples being those that appear outdated because they’ve been superceded by new technology or more modern practices.

Since Japan is such a technologically advanced country, there are also numerous anachronistic examples of stuff that is so cutting edge that it seems too futuristic to be contemporary, but for the purposes of this series I’m just going to focus on the former type of seemingly-outdated anachronism.

The way we view anachronisms is, of course, highly dependent on our own culture as this informs our perceptions of the ‘here and now’ that are essential in determining what appears anachronistic. For example, someone from a developed country might regard oxen being used to plough fields in a developing country as an anachronism because they are used to seeing tractors being used for the same purpose in their country, despite the use of oxen appearing entirely contemporary to the farmers using them.

My interpretations of Japanese anachronisms are therefore influenced by my being a foreigner, yet undoutedly seem natural and contemporary to Japanese people; in this series then, I’ll be focusing on why these anachronisms became popular (i.e. their history), why they seem like anachronisms to foreigners (i.e. thinking about what they should logically have been replaced by) and considering how likely their continued use is in the future.

I’ll add the links to the list below as each post appears on Big On Japan:

• soroban (abaci)
• kasshu (cash)
• kanji (Chinese characters)
• fakkusu (fax machines)
• hanko/inkan (name stamps/seals)