Musings of a Drunken Monk: Individual Entry Archive

Last night I was gently reminded by a fellow JET that I need to get my ass in gear and produce some writing on this painfully overlooked page. Thusly, I bring to you my thoughts on Japan, as seen from four (is it five yet?) months into my adventure.

Let me expound on the virtues (or lack thereof) of the wonderful bathroom mystery known as the squat toilet. Basically it's a hole in the ground with a hood and some sort of porcelain trough into which you do your business. Why is it a mystery, you ask? Well, the mystery is actually twofold:

• First, after having used these nefarious devices perhaps four times I only then discovered that I was facing the wrong way. "Face the hooded part!" I was finally told. Not that facing in the other direction made it any easier to take a crap. The problem is lack of hand rails. While I'm taking a dump, I really don't want to be making effort just to squat there. This is why Western toilets are a million times better. Western people, it seems, are inherently lazier and therefore invented a much better system for taking a shit. "It already takes effort (sometimes)" it seems that they said, "so why should we make it any harder?" Amen. In being here, I have noticed that all the schoolgirls with hiked up skirts (and no I'm not specifically looking so shaddap) have insanely beefy legs. We're talking softball/soccer/karate legs. These legs should be on women probably weighing 20 more pounds. This has been a mystery to me for a while, until I realized that it is probably from using these ridiculous squat toilets. Considering that every time a woman needs to "heed the call of nature" she needs to use the medieval torture device/squat toilet, it's like she's doing two-to-five-minute squats every hour. No wonder they have enormous quads.
  


• The second part of the mystery lies in motivation. Why the hell would anyone choose this sort of torture over the much more convenient Western toilets? At first I thought it was because there are usually less Western toilets available. But time and time again I have unfortunately witnessed men heading straight for the squatter. God knows why, because the position of the body and the distance from the "receptacle's" surface makes for some heinous bathroom sound effects. I, for one, will only use the evil squat device if it is absolutely necessary. I will gladly wait, if possible, until I can experience the luxury of the Western toilet. Add on a heated seat, which is available in most decent public restrooms (barring my school and the train stations), and you have a winner in my book. Go ahead guys, keep fooling yourselves that you're keeping Japanese tradition alive. Big quads are for sissies anyway!
  

Related is what I like to term the "smells like Japan" phenomenon. Peter recently mentioned that as a child, when he smelled a particular odor back home in the states, he would mention to his Japanese mother "it smells like Japan!" What he meant to say was "it smells like raw sewage!"

Being that I lived in Boston, I got fairly used to smelling something very stank every once in a while. New Yorkers are surely used to smelling it almost everywhere (especially after the entire city crapped itself when the Red Sox completely schooled their baseball team ... suckers), since every time I visit I tend to smell it more than in Boston. Outside of the cities, though, I rarely smell such a thing in the States. As a result, I tend to associate that terrible smell with urban centers. No longer. It seems that no matter where you are in Japan, you will smell it. Oh is it often, too. Somehow, it almost always seems to waft into my (huge and therefore extremely sensitive) nostrils right before I want to eat, thereby ruining any appetite I may have had. Even in the middle of a small town in the countryside you can smell it. It's not like there's rivers of sewage running through the streets here! I'm talking here about the world's most technologically-advanced society, and it still smells like shit. This bodes ill for futuristic fantasies about poop smelling like roses. Being that this is Japan, I expected that there might be some sort of feces-zapping invention by now, but alas, they are concentrating on more important things like high-tech vibrators and mirror-cellphones.

Of course there are many cool things about Japan that I haven't yet mentioned, but they are most likely much less amusing to read (and write) about. Can one really make it funny to read about the karaoke cell phone? I don't think so.

Until next time ... keep squattin'