Zen and the art of toilet maintenance

From Japan / we want to wash / the whole world’s bottom

Hola Jigsawers,

I’ve spent the last week traveling around Spain with my brother and his family. We visited the magnificent Alhambra in Granada - more about which in a forthcoming post. I’ve also been busy with promoting my new book, Orienting: An Indian in Japan, which will be in bookstores from August 3, and is available for pre-order on Amazon.

For this week’s post I thought I’d share an extract from Orienting to whet your appetites. I hope you enjoy it. Do let me know what you think in the comments section, and please share widely with your networks.

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Zen and the art of toilet maintenance

I’ve been toilet obsessed for many years; a penchant I hasten to add that is more sanitary than scatological. Long before Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s latrine-building spree, I’d concluded that toilets and the infrastructure surrounding them took the pulse of a society better than GDP figures or dazzling skyscrapers.

Dinner date with a toilet

Imagine then my excitement at moving to Japan. The Japanese commode was the stuff of legends. From what I’d heard a Toto toilet (the brand that reigned supreme) could do pretty much anything short of eating dinner with you. 

As soon as we’d touched down at Narita airport I’d hastened to the ladies’ room, fully prepared to be washlet-wowed and so I was. The cubicle looked ready for lift off, the number of buttons crowding the toilet control panel rivaling those in an airplane cockpit.  I’d pushed everything, activating a variety of oscillations, sounds and sprays. I’d doused and dried my rear (and front), raised and lowered the toilet seat, increased and reduced the intensity of the gush, and played chirping bird music to mask any embarrassing noises.

I’d studied the buttons and their accompanying pictures and labels with fascination. There were knobs for pressure, sound and spray. But one, titled “wand sanitizer” in English, left me miffed. What could the ‘wand’ be? It didn’t warrant dwelling on, but I couldn’t help it. Upon googling I discovered (to my relief) that the “wand” referred to nothing more risqué than the nozzle that emerged from the toilet bowl to spray water.

The “wand” expained

Being confounded by a Japanese toilet was almost a right of passage for visitors. Often the controls were not labeled in English and the functions and icons varied by model. It could be nerve wracking trying to figure out which button to push. You might want to flush but end up pressing the emergency call and be caught with your pants down by a Japanese SWAT team in crisis-control mode. Or you may want to gently spray your posterior but end up vigorously sluicing your anterior.

Toilets smarter than you

There was a story about a hapless foreigner who wanted to adjust the bidet function and ended up with tickets to a six-hour long Kabuki (a classical Japanese dance drama) performance instead. The story is likely apocryphal, but it was a fact that there were things that could be done by a Japanese toilet that many a state government might have difficulty accomplishing as efficiently.

Manufacturer Matsushita’s ‘smart toilet’ took urine and stool analysis and could check the user’s blood pressure, temperature, and blood sugar while at it. One of its models was even equipped with electrodes that send a mild electric charge through the user's buttocks, yielding a digital measurement of body-fat ratio.

I was at pains to hide this fact or any others like it from my mother whenever she visited us in Tokyo. My mum liked her toilets unadorned and unintelligent. In Japan, she tended to return from the washroom looking as though she’d gazed into the abyss. The heated toilet seat, which to me rivaled Kyoto in full cherry blossom bloom in its delights, was her particular bête noire. She was convinced that it would electrocute her. The profusion of buttons to choose from confused her. The self-raising seat intimidated her. The whole experience left her as wobbly as a mochi.

The poetry of the Japanese toilet

….….Long before the commode went high-tech, the toilet had occupied a special, almost lyrical place in Japanese culture. In his essay on aesthetics, “In Praise of Shadows,” Junichiro Tanazaki called the traditional Japanese toilet a “place of spiritual repose......the perfect place to listen to the chirping of insects, or the song of birds, to view the moon...”[1]

It was the toilet, Tanazaki theorized, where haiku poets were likely to have come up with most of their ideas.

Consider Kobayashi Issa’s 1822 poem:

Even the outhouse
Has a guardian god...
Plum blossoms

A couple of centuries on, Toto, the reigning heavyweight of the Japanese toilet industry,[2] began holding an annual ‘Toilet Poetry Award’ in 2005. Every year since, the 20 best poems are printed on rolls of toilet paper and put on limited-edition sale.[3]

A few examples of the winning entries from the 2016 competition:

Woshuretto / kangaeta hito / arigatō

To the person / who came up with the Washlet / Thank you!

Meron Kame

Futa no ato / gaikokujin no / kuchi mo aki

After the lid / the foreigner’s jaw / drops in surprise

Nonbiri

Nihon kara / sekai no o-shiri / araitai

From Japan / we want to wash / the whole world’s bottom

 Teishu Tanpaku

Toilet God

Potty humour aside, toilets in Japan were not a laughing matter. In folklore, Kawaya-no-kami, or the toilet god, was a popular deity. Traditionally the waste from outhouses was used as fertilizer, so Kawaya-no-kami was associated with good harvests and fertility. The deity was also invoked to protect people from falling into the toilet pit and meeting a rather messy end.[4]

In homes a properly appointed toilet was decorated and kept as clean as possible, since Kawaya-no-kami was imagined to be very beautiful. In some communities the state of the toilet was believed to influence the physical appearance of unborn children. Pregnant women asked the toilet deity to give boys a "high nose" and dimples to girls. If the toilet was dirty however, it was said to cause children to be born unattractive and unhappy.

[1] In Praise of Shadows, Tanazaki, Tuttle, 1977, pp 10 [2] As of 2018 Toto had sold over 40 million washlets (as its commodes are called) worldwide and boasted over 60 percent of the Japanese toilet market share. [3] Mark Schreiber, Toto rolls out droll toilet humor with a whiff of class, The Japan Times,  March 13 2017, https://www.japantimes.co.jp/life/2017/03/13/language/poetic-praise-for-japanese-toilets/#.Xdzjm7-Lkxc. See also: https://jp.toto.com/senryu/ [4] Anna Fifield, How Japan’s toilet obsession produced some of the world’s best bathrooms, Washington Post, Dec 2015

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Wishing everyone a fantastic weekend. Until next week

xoxo

Pallavi