Blahgorrhea

The toilet paper at worked is branded “Marathon,” which I can only assume was meant to warn the user that wiping one’s rear with it would result in chafing as if having run a marathon without proper protection.

And while we’re talking about toilets, Japan has public bathrooms all over the place. It is an excellent service. They were for the most part clean, but there was one drastic flaw. Most of the bathrooms offered no way to dry your hands after washing. So you end up in the middle of winter walking out of a public bathroom onto a cold street with cold wet hands (no hot water in these bathrooms). Then again, the ones that offered automatic hand drying machines featured a high powered dryer that you stuck your hands down into and slowly raised as the water was blown off them. Worked like a charm.

Squat toilets, more commonly known as “Japanese style” toilets in Japan, are the ones that pretty much resemble a hole in the ground with some added plumbing. No, these toilet are not the most comfortable to use, but in terms of cleanliness, assuming you manage to keep from pooping on your pants, the Japanese style toilet cannot be beat. You don’t touch anything with your bare skin that someone else has touched, assuming like me, you push the flush lever with your foot. Sure, these toilets don’t work for the American standard of relaxing on the crapper for a half hour as you read the Sunday Times, but I am not advocating these things for use in American homes, only in public locations where many people use the same toilet. But I definitely do not advocate their use on trains, airplanes, buses or anything else that moves. That is a disaster waiting to happen.