terrible toilets

Toilet stalls in Japan are magical places. They have eight foot walls, toilets with heated seats, and toilet paper for miles. Life at OUA can sometimes be overwhelming. Toilet stalls have become my secret fortresses - places where I can escape from the confusion.

You can imagine my confusion, then, when I entered a stall to find the above monstrosity.

At first I thought it was a bizarre architectural misfire - clearly a builder was drunk and built a urinal on the floor. As I ran across more and more of these the probability of a Japanese drunk construction worker pandemic became less and less likely. People actually use this thing.

It's called a squat toilet - some sort of arcane hybrid of a toilet and the dirt trench latrines I used to dig as a boy scout.

The logistical pratfalls are obvious. Using a public toilet is dubious enough when you're seated - add the challenge of trying to maintain a squat position in the midst of a bowel movement on a urine-pooled floor and you're just begging for disaster.

So what do you do if you run into one of these terrifying little bastards? Hold it. Can't? Find a sink.
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I am afraid of public bathrooms.

And if you were as tall as me, you would be too.

It works out like this: I enter into the bathroom and slide into a stall. I then, with the grace of a dancer close the door, lock the door, and lift the toilet lid all without using my feet. For a moment I reflect on my skill - how clever I am, locking the door with my foot . How skilled. It's at that point I realize that the stall around me is only tall enough to shield me from the nose down.

Instantly I panic. All it would take is one other tall person - perhaps one similarly disgusted by the prospect of an open-air urinal - to drop trau in an adjacent stall to urinate. I would suddenly be at eye level with a peeing man. We would never aknowledge eachother's presence, desperately trying to urinate as fast as possible and escape. Awkward.

I thought about all this as I sipped my third rum and coke - a beverage I consume mostly because I don't know enough about alchohol to get anything else - weighing this negative against the positive: my kidneys not exploding.

I wonder if the girl I was next to - a girl who referred to herself as my brothers' band's "like, only groupie or something" - could sense that I found bathroom etiquette much more interesting than how her ride like totally left her, or how shit-faced she was.
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