We've been collecting some pictures and thoughts regarding the ways in which Japan is different from our home in the US and other places we visit. This is the first installment of the "In Japan" or "In (country name)" series.

One of the unavoidable facts of travel is that travelers will experience the toilets in foreign lands.  Compared to India, Sri Lanka and Thailand, Japanese toilets are a clean, porcelain dream. Though, there are difficulties to be had.

For instance, for the first time on the trip, I could not distinguish between the men's and women's toilets.

 Hat or bowtie?  Which is more manly?  Sachi wasn't there to help with the kanji either.  The men's room is on the right.

In Japan, some of the toilet seats have nice cotton covers- which is an indication of the general trust in the responsible actions of men, or maybe I was in the girl's room and didn't know it.

 In Japan, it's impossible talk about toilets without mentioning the buttons, or more precisely the number of services provided by the buttons.  Your basic, everyday toilet has these buttons, with the possible exception of a control for the seat warmer and size-of-flush control. Little water heads actually come out and spray upwards- potentially creating a toilet fountain for those unintitiated.

In Japan, travelers sometimes come across the Batmobile of toilets, like this 17 button beauty:

Among the various bidet style functions, this one has a dryer, controls for lowering and raising the seat and various buttons and a screen that must do very important things that are opaque to me.

I'm conflicted, personally.  I like some of the features and I do think some improvements could be made to our home toilet.  But, I can't help but think that the toilet features, like the Shinkansen, are a bit gratuitous. In the high tech world I would say that the toilets in Japan suffer from "feature creep"- meaning that the designers were more focused on "could" than "should" - which usually creates a less user-friendly product.  In Japan, many things seem to be over-engineered, but that's a different post.