Japanese sanitary habits

Well, the title was maybe somewhat pretentious. I just wanted to de-mystify Japanese toilets, and as a bonus, tell you about Japanese baths.

All Japanese toilets I have seen until now have an integrated bidet function. Let me rephrase that: it has a bidet (front) and an ass-wash (back) function. There are separate buttons to activate those functions, and a third button to stop the water. Additionally, there are some more arcane buttons, such as water temperature (it is actually very nice to have your ass washed with warm water!), music (for privacy-minded people), position front-rear and left-right adjustments, water power and deodorant!

After having used them for a couple of days I must say that I want this in my home now! It is actually very easy to use after you get over the initial shock and confusion, and the clean feeling will never leave you(r ass) anymore!

The bath is another marvel of human automation. It turns out, there is a “bath management panel” in the bathroom and another identical one in the kitchen. If you press the button on the top right “fill the bath”, guess what, the bath will get filled with water of predefined temperature to a predefined level. Yes, you do need to manually close the bath drain but that’s a physical button on the bath.

Since it is customary in Japan that families share the bath water (yes, you need to take a shower first before you get into the bath), there is another button “reheat the bath”. That is, of course, much more efficient than refreshing the bath water from scratch.

When the bath is ready, a voice says in hyper-polite Japanese “your bath is ready” and you get treated to a joyful piece of music. Japan is a country of sounds, there are speakers everywhere and machines love to talk to you.

Bath management