OK, so I’m English and I am therefore fascinated by toilets. Well, at least that’s what Kate Fox reports in her book “Watching the English” (amongst many other insightful comments about the English). Apparently, many Westerners in Japan go to the loo only to come back and dig their cameras out of their luggage. I’ve resisted this urge and you won’t find photos of toilets on my gallery. However, there are some very strange things about toilets in Japan which I feel compelled to share.

Along with the Italians, the Arabs and a number of other nationalities/ethnic groups, the Japanese have long used “squat over a hole” toilets rather than “sit on a hole”. These have evolved in Japan, unlike many of the other places where they are still just holes in the ground, albeit often now with a flush capability. Japanese squat toilets are an inset bowl in the floor rather than just a hole. In many places where there are multiple cubicles you will find some squat toilets and some seat toilets.

At the Atami Onsen where I was at the weekend the rooms had seat toilets. Unfortunately, these had obviously been retrofitted in rooms designed and plumbed for squat toilets. This led to a rather bizarre arrangement whereby there was a space of about 8-12 inches behind the toilet with the clean water pipe across it, and about three inches between the front of the seat and the wall. This made it really interesting to adjust clothing in both directions, if you see what I mean. One of the other Westerners remarked that he was always concerned about braining himself on the wall when standing up.

Now, that is all understandable and apart from occasional failures to buy the right plumbing (there are toilets that would fit in the space better than those at the onsen). What is a lot stranger is the electric toilet seat.

Yes, that’s right, the electric toilet seat. Some may have heard of this. In quite a lot of public buildings such as universities, I’ve come across electric toilet seats. At the basic end of the scale, these are simply slightly heated. What this is doing to Japan’s carbon emissions is something they should consider, I think. Sometimes the seat is just not cold. In other places it’s actually noticeably too warm, although I’ve not felt as though I was in danger of being burned by one yet.

The more sophisticated seats come with little control panels, usually off to the right hand side. These allow control of bidet functions and similar. The “and similar” here includes such bizarreness as the “toilet flushing” sound. I’m not sure whether this is supposed to be used to mask the sound of the bidet in use or just to mask any sounds at all. I’m strenuously resisting the urge to start writing like a Ben Elton or Clive James here (well, not that I think I’m as good a write, but their styles are strongly coming to mind).

Some of these toilets have full or partial English labels on the various buttons. Some only have Kanji. Unlike the Archchancellor of Unseen University, I’m not about to start messing around with buttons I don’t understand.

For those of you visiting Japan and worrying about hygiene, don’t worry. The flush is either a press down handle on a cistern as in most UK bathrooms or a press lever faucet switch as many French, German and some US toilets. You don’t have to figure out the Kanji-labelled control panel in order to flush.

However, after departing the cubicle, that’s not the final weirdness. Many places use automatic water dispensing in the wash basins. Wave your hand under the tap and it switches on, move it away and it switches off. There is generally no temperature control on here and this is where I found it very weird today on a visit to Saitama University today. The toilet seat was over-heated to almost an uncomfortable level, but the water in the basin was ice cold. It’s between teaching and exam periods here, so this may have mostly been due to few people using the building and it is quite cold at the moment (though not yet bitterly cold). That would have been strange enough, but then that washroom also turned out to be on of those without towels, or hand driers. Not that I could spot anyway, and at least one other person was drying their hands on their own little towel as they departed, so I don’t think I missed it. I’ve been told that not all washrooms in Japan are equipped with hand drying facilities. In fact, the tenegui of the type that the Nippon 2007 bid and con have been giving out/selling are carried by many Japanese for this purpose. So, “Always know where your tengui is”.