National Geographic Story – Japanese Toilets and Robo-toilet Nonsense

If you watch the video, you’ll here some wacky stuff. Now maybe I don’t go to enough “hi tech” buildings to have used the “smart toilet” but this is the kind of over-generalized news about Japan that drives me crazy.

Here’s the video about the crazy robo-toilets that are “commonplace” in Japan these days.

If you watch the video, you’ll here the narrator start by how much you can learn about a culture from their bathrooms… well, it would help if you were looking at their actual bathrooms.

Although it’s true that these kinds of toilets are being made and sold, they are far from commonplace. Washlets are in fact commonplace, the “otohime” is also found sometimes, but the generalization that “many people flush twice or more to conceal the sound” should probably be qualified a bit more.

Even in the U. S. there’s such a thing as a “sympathy flush” for the benefit of other people who have to listen to or smell the people in the next stall.

The video does not contain any straight out falsehoods, but does not paint a very accurate picture of what the bathrooms in a typical home or building in Japan are like. If anyone reading this has ever had to use the facillities around Osaka station (especially before the slight renovations done inside the station near the Central Exit) I doubt you have ever had the opportunity to enjoy a little Blue Danube while tinkling.

Technoratiのタグ japanese toilets, national geographic