Toilet need and the sign that stopped me

I think that I have lost my way a little bit when it comes to this blog. I have let a number of lighter, but ultimately meaningless topics come in the way of the core, what I'm about and what I do best. The Earthquake, commuting, buying houses, babies and all that, it's just distractions from the real purpose of this blog; me and toilets.

This is not a blog about Japan, this is not a blog about professional insanity, this is not a blog with amusing bizarre trivia, it's meant to be a toilet blog. This is what I do best and the driving force in my life. To give this recognition, I have now created a new label called "Salaryman and Toilets" (ok, there's plenty more on the site, but some of the layout of the old posts gets messed up when I try to add the label so I gave up, so just search for "toilets" and you'll get most of it).

I brought this topic up in a previous post, but the situation has not improved. During certain hours of the day (usually from 10AM to 11AM and then after lunch for a couple of hours) the toilets are chronically occupied, no lines outside or anything, just complete silence. Earlier in the week I felt a certain pressure in my bowels and felt a quite urgent need to relieve them, as this was about 10 AM I was not surprised to see the booths taken (no sound from inside), so I went back to the office and soldiered on for another ten minutes before going back to see if an opening had become available. Obviously this was not the case, four closed doors and complete and utter silence.

With the need to go now becoming quite urgent, I tried doing something that I have never ever tried before; going out the stairway taking the stair down to the floor below, hoping to be able to do a guerrilla type raid in their toilet facilities. Do my thing and then just vanish again back up the stairs to where I came from, without anyone having any clue as to what I had done. The plan was perfect, or so I thought... When I walked down the stairs and approached the door, this is the huge sign that was taped to the door (see the picture). It says "The toilets are for the tenants of the offices on this floor. For every one's comfort, please use the toilets on your floor or the common toilets on the first and second floor". It should be noted that our little stairwell door on the 18th floor does not have this type of sign...

Having lived too long in Japan, the authority of the sign scared me off my little adventure and I scurried back upstairs to the office and somehow managed to hold down the fort, so to speak, until a little past eleven and magically all the booths were available. I did have to suffer a bit of a stomach ache for the whole day though. What bugs me a bit is that our stairwell door does not have this sign which makes me suspect that the toilet sleepers come from other floors as there is no warning like this to stop them...

Maybe I should have braved the authority of the sign, but it felt too risky, what if someone would have caught me? Would you have dared challenge a sign like this?!

Preparing for the Apocalypse - Toilet Warrior

The earthquake, tsunami and Fukushima pland disaster and the consequences they have had to the Tokyo region has brought many important lessons. One scary thing to consider is that this quake is not the long overdue Kanto area earthquake, that one is also bound to come sooner or later. I think it's important to keep in mind that Tokyo actually wasn't hit particularly hard by the quake, sure, it was scary and confusing for a while, but there only were a handful of unlucky victims here (I think the death count ended up at 5 in Tokyo, nothing compared to the thousands in the prefectures hit worst).

As a Westerner, I have grown up picturing the post-apocalyptic world as something from Mad Max, where gasoline would be the most valuable resources and trading chip. However, it has become clear that this would not be the case for Japan, the most sought after resource would be toilet paper (and tissue paper to a lesser extent). Sure, gasoline was hard to come by and bottled water was also sold out (the ongoing "low levels of radioactive iodine found in Tokyo water" doesn't really help either) but plenty of other bottled drinks were available all the time during the aftermath. In the post-apocalyptic world of Japan, the person with the most toilet paper will be calling the shots. I can see a scenario where people are divided into classes depending on how dirty their assholes are; perhaps people would greet each other through sniffing butts to quickly identify their respective social statuses?

So now I'm considering to start hoarding toilet paper in huge amounts to be able to come out as the Mr. Big in my local area after the apocalypse and have people bring me food, drinks and serve my family for some filthy used strips of toilet paper. You have to think ahead!

Toilet sleeping

As my office is not a huge entity worthy of occupying a building or even a whole floor of a building on its own, we share a floor with 4 other companies. This is basically nothing particularly exciting and doesn't really cause me any problems or discomfort, just some infrequent bouts of curiosity on what our floor comrades might be doing for business (but never really enough to warrant the effort to google them and actually find out). Our floor comrades also seem to be quite regular companies with no particularly freaky people.

Sharing the floor means sharing some other spaces as well. One would be the small sink and wash up space and the other major shared space is the toilets. Again, this is not really any problem since they seem to consist of a regular boring bunch of salarymen of reasonable hygiene who are not punishing the toilets with more wear and tear than the cleaning staff can handle.

There is one issue though... I strongly suspect that a few people among our neighborhood companies are systematically taking post-lunch naps in the toilet booths. I can understand that the pressure on the toilets get a bit higher post-lunch, but every day from 1-3 pm the booths are chronically occupied... Once, when the need was quite pressing, I actually waited outside the booths for around 5 minutes in the hope of an opening but no luck. During my wait, no sound was heard from the booths, none of the regular natural bodily sounds, tearing of toilet paper and spinning of rolls or flushing. Just complete silence.

The thing that would contradict this theory is the lack of snoring noises but I am set to get to the bottom of this matter! With a gap between the door and the floor as well as between the door and the roof, some form of telescope could help me solve this pressing matter.

Nein! Nein! Nicht der Flachspüler!!!

In one of my greater moments previously, I made an in-depth look at the differences on toilets between Japan and some of the major types of toilets used in Europe (post here).

In the comments section of that, my dear Penguin brought up the German "Flachspüler" toilet, a toilet so completely insanely designed that it's hard to believe it unless you actually have to do your thing in one. As my travels as a Salaryman takes me around the world, I ended up utilizing a bathroom in the airport of Vienna yesterday (or today or what it is, it all kinda blurs together...) and found myself face to face with this monstrosity...

The basic premise of this toilet is that there is basically only a small hole filled with water at the front of the toilet meaning that there is significant splash damage when peeing in it from a standing position; however, the simple remedy to this problem is sitting down. The problem with crapping in one of these is significantly more worriesome... Due to the lack of a larger area filled with water, what comes out of you will end up on the "ledge" of the toilet producing significant stink since the product will not be immersed in water. I took the liberty of illustrating this more clearly for you here;

I do pity the poor Germans and Austrians who have to utilize this misfit of toilets and I really wonder how the sales reps selling this toilet design go about to have their customer chose this instead of a toilet model that actually is user-friendly and makes sense...

You will know me by the trail of…

As I have alluded to, the Salaryman-Sunshine household has moved away from their previous haunting grounds, something that will be described in all the gory details in the upcoming "buying a house in Japan" series that I'm sure you all are eagerly awaiting.

That said, I can't stop myself from rushing in advance here a little bit since this new lair has a hi-tech toilet of the type that Japan is famous for. Out of all the functions (spray, blow, heat etc.) that the little critter is capable of, one has left me extremely impressed; the auto-flush function... This function has revolutionized the way I go to the bathroom; I do my thing in the toilet bowl (this basic function has not yet been innovated upon), and then I just walk out, no looking back. As I stride out I can hear the toilet flush behind me, but I can focus my energy on other, greater things and need not to worry.

But there is a nastier side to this as well... I'm now getting so used to my new "fire and forget" style of toilet behavior that regular, simple toilets without the auto-flush function can cause problems.The problems are not as much to me as to the person coming after me to use the toilet finding a surprise that wasn't automatically taken care of.

Meanwhile I'm on my merry way, perhaps whistling a gay tune as I make my way to the next bathroom without a care in the world except that little pressure in my bowels!