If you’ve seen Lost in Translation you might remember the terrifying toilet with more buttons than most VCR remotes. They’re real, and all the hotels in the country really do have them. They’re called washlets and they’re usually made by the Toto Corporation. Apparently they’re to be thought of as combination toilet/bidets. Terrifying and hygienic.
Meanwhile, at Chris’s place in Erimo lies the opposite end of the toilet technology scale. Somehow, my mind has blanked out the precise details, but I vaguely remember having to turn a knob to get the water to run, and then turn it again to stop. I think there was a sink somehow integrated into the toilet in a less-than-appealing way. The room was unheated.
Actually, now that I think of it, all of Chris’s plumbing was a little weird. The shower was at an odd angle and had a wooden floor. The kitchen sink was utterly inscrutable and was surrounded by hoses. The clothes washer was oddest of all. Chris warned me not to use it (for reasons he dared not speak), but after a week of living out of a suitcase I was desperate, so I submitted my wardrobe to a couple hours of obscene grinding noises, and then to the drier, which didn’t actually dry my clothes but got them into an odd state where they became dry a few seconds after I removed them. This makes no sense but Chris says he has observed the same phenomenon: you take the clothes out and they’re cold and damp to the touch, but then after several seconds to a minute, they become dry.
Clearly we cannot comprehend the advanced ways of the Japanese.