The plight of the public potty
thebaffler.com
thebaffler.com
They show up on Maps apps and have reviews. I remember walking a few minutes more once, in Osaka, to try one that had excellent reviews (it was a fun and original design).
In some more rural areas these became squat potties with no toilet paper, so carry a pack of tissues with you.
When I first went to Japan I felt like we in the west live like fucking savages.
Since there are no trash cans, you have to carry garbage with you until you're back home, or maybe find another store where you can dispose of it.
The toilet paper and tissues in Japan are extremely thin and in my view quite inconvenient.
The toilet paper sucks, sure, but that's just cheap single-ply for public use toilets. People can and do buy the good stuff for their homes. Hardly an issue to worry about.
The hotels and public venues also had the cheap single-ply stuff.
I was not able to find any decent tissues in stores, so I doubt that people all buy the good stuff for their homes.
However, 99% of hikers in Europe carry their own trash bags. It took off in the early 2000 and now it's almost a culture thing, especially amongst young hikers, and not having one is basically a social error (well, littering is, you can always ask people for an empty trash bag if you forgot yours). Honestly I can see why they choose that solution.
I didn’t find the “carry your trash with you” to be too big of a hassle but what is truly barbaric is the social taboo on strolling through a park on a nice autumn day sipping your coffee!
Just since I’m posting here I did not experience what others have with the restrooms. The ones in the kobini were nasty and we often weren’t able to find public restrooms unless we happened to enter into a mall or somewhere like that where they seemed clean enough but not noteworthy. The Japanese excell in other areas of cleanliness though and you can be sure that many products will be aggressively double or triple-plastic wrapped.
Wait, what? Has anyone ever said anything to you when you strolled around a park drinking coffee? I've been in Japan over 10 years and do that all the time, no one has given a shit about it. The only time I ever hear about these "taboos" is when foreigners try to tell other foreigners how they should behave in Japan, like it has some mystique about it or something.
Now yea of course as an obvious foreigner nobody really cares because lol foreigner and even more so in super busy touristy areas but my understanding is it really isn’t done. Same with walking and eating.
They could do better, and I see no need to pretend that everything over there was perfect as is.
For what it's worth I think a middle ground leaning closer to the west is the best approach. Save injection sites like the one in Vancouver have been a disaster, however
There is nothing savage about the way Japan treats those who are incompatible with civilization. On the contrary, to parley with the savages is what makes you a savage too.
I have every type of turd. A sampling of soft, skittles, lumps, explosive, and everything in between. All have been water-soluble.
Who could have thought that with investment rather than letting everything crumble things would get better?
Meanwhile here everyone is close to tears if you propose anything for the public, because that might lead to lowering the tax break for some huge multi national that then would not get the well-deserved pay-off for their lobbying work.
And to be fair who wants to live under a regime that is the worst kind of communism, treating people who want need pee, but don't pay with respect, like Japan? (sarcasm)
I don’t know if that’s a key contributor but with those economic policies you also it seems wind up with low economic growth and in a time when you might end to raise interest rates doing so is catastrophic - leaves little room for flexibility.
Japan can largely ignore its public debt because its mostly owned by the Japanese themselves, and thus contained within the nation & erodible via inflation.
Most other countries are restricted from doing this due to the massive foreign ownership of national debt, & ending up in hands/firms/governments outside of their nation.
I'll go out of my way to support companies that do the right thing.
Is this really such a common occurrence for people? Because I feel like toilets are being discussed way too much.
If anything, toilets aren't discussed nearly enough. There is a huge lack of public toilets pretty much everywhere in the world.
I can personally attest that having mild gi issues can make most of Europe a bit of a hellscape, with their expensive and simultaneously gross toilets. As an Australian I never appreciated clean public toilets before going there.
I need to micturate a lot.
ie. for some urinate and pee are just as bad as piss or wee.
Luckily my cup runneth over and I can decently speak of pissing, going for a slash, splashing the porcelain and otherwise making water in a multitude of ways in my own locale.
Of course I might simply be taking the piss.
Thy micturitions are to me,
As plurdled gabbleblotchits,
On a lurgid bee,
That mordiously hath blurted out,
Its earted jurtles,
Into a rancid festering confectious organ squealer.
[drowned out by moaning and screaming]”
—Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy
It is quite interesting to note, that when I read this as a teenager, I did not even try to find out what “micturitions” are, because I confidently assumed that these were all nonsense words.
One is the act of expelling fluids from the body, the other is the complete whoa to go system of fluid capture, pipelined filtering, storage, treating, and feedback system for expulsion along with the pipe discharge.
To clarify, micturition is very much just the process of voiding, the wave-like contractions of the detrusor muscle and the relaxation of the internal and external sphincters, and the signals that trigger that process.
The study of micturition, how far back you might chase to fully grasp what's up when voiding has issues, gets a bit more expansive.
It's a stretch to look as far back as the kidneys, sure - but you likely know how compulsives get when they're getting deep in the wees.
(Comparing to, for instance, people campaigning against hunger. Those folks seem keenly aware that food for the needy has to come from somewhere - whether donated or paid for - then be sorted and stored, possibly repackaged and transported, maybe prepared and cooked, then regularly distributed to those needing it. And if you botch even one step, then you have failed at feeding the poor.)
Well, they are. Just as drinking fountains.
> Public restrooms don't come from Santa Claus, and they cost a lot both to build and maintain. Then there are the costs and miseries of security. Gratitude toward business providing restrooms seems nonexistent.
s/restroom/park/g. Hey, it's still true! And explains why there are almost no public parks around.
Edit: oh, and before someone comments on unhygienicity of drinking fountains: you're not supposed to kiss the nozzle or, heavens forbid, to fellate it to drink. Let about 1/2–1/3 of the top of the spout inside of your mouth and drink it; leave the rest outside.
They are the losers, the educated affluent, the youthful of our society.
They are the problem. What is the solution?
It's certainly a different environment from a large American city, though we also have misbehaving youths and a few drug addicts that are perhaps homeless.
This is society. Its origins are people banding together to collectivize violence and its legitimate uses in order to protect themselves from the state of nature in which the strong take what they will and the weak suffer what they must.
Result is all the clean and useful bathrooms are private, because only thus can shit-smearing vandals be reasonably excluded (and only then, somewhat.)
It's not that hard to make toilets that are nearly indestructible and can be very efficiently cleaned by a guy in a "hazmat" suit with a pressure washer. It probably wouldn't be that hard to largely automate this. But the market for this is small and mostly governments, so prices are high and innovation is low.
If taxes are what matters, America would have the best public restrooms in the world because it's the richest country.
But what really matters is culture. If you have a small percentage of people who are bad actors and are not punished for it, they ruin it for everyone.
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Let me give you a small example of culture and enforcement. I live in a small city in Romania. I once traveled by plane to London. The airport in my city is very small. When boarding, despite the fact that the zigzag queue was 3 lines long, people lifted the cordon and went straight to the door. I was probably the only one who followed it.
When we arrived at Heathrow, people did the same thing. The zigzag queue at Heathrow is very long, so it feels slightly fairer to skip it if there's literally no one in front of you (it was 2 AM or something). But as soon as the first person skipped the line and a second person was going for it, a guard noticed him and ordered him to go back. He tried to "negotiate" but the guard only lifted a finger and told him to "go back".
No one tried to skip after those two.
When you have a culture with no enforcement, a small minority (maybe 2%) of people ruin it for everyone and you feel like an idiot still following the rules. This makes the majority imitate the bad actors because "I might as well too".
No amount of money in the world can fix bad culture.
Toilets and water should be basic infrastructure (and in some places they are). Business with toilets are a really unreliable way to offer toilets, since they will all come up with their own rules.
And it is ridiculous to pretend they can't be afforded. Ever been to Japan? Every train station has toilets since the 80s, literally every other store has freely usable public toilets. They all use the same signage. They are clean and free to use.
What is the point of society if not creating an environment within which we all can thrive? Yes I know, some want it to maximize the thriving only for certain (rich) people. I call these egoists.
It's like saying child labor should be legalised because your business would go bankrupt without underpaid child workers: it just means your business model isn't viable!
But that's all the more reason to get and keep the infrastructure working.
Cities should not be incompatible with basic human existence. I can bring a bagged lunch and eat it on-the-go. Would people be as open to me taking a shit in a bag on the sidewalk?
Many of the people who downvoted you may want nice things, but would never contribute back. They're exactly the people who would immediately ruin it. Sometimes the grass really is greener, and it's usually because there's a system at work to keep it that way.
You on the other hand would definitely not want to contribute, and if any were built you'd go out of your way to ruin it, though indirectly (e.g. by working to reduce/remove funding for maintenance)
But - my experience - it's just another day of the week when advocates for hunger relief do everything from spending money on mass-market advertising, to showing up en masse at city gov't meetings to argue for the laws|zoning|city support|whatever they need, to personally mopping the floor at the soup kitchen after the meal has been served.
Vs., as a generality, "support" for public restrooms seems to consists of complaining about the status quo either privately or on the web, then going back to suffering.
Based on how involved various churches seem to be in hunger relief stuff, I'd bet most of those groups' organizational advantage comes straight from pulpits and pews. Say whatever you will about the Bad Things that religions have done all through history, or about their deities and beliefs being BS - but organized religion is organized, and understands how to make stuff happen. And it's pretty common for their Believers to also believe in working pretty hard to do just that.
Vs. - at least in private comments I hear, and the occasional essays I recall seeing on HN about this - there have been essentially zero suggestions of ever lifting a finger to address the public restroom problem. Send an unhappy email the Mayor? Nope. Google search for what a city council candidate might have said on the subject before you vote? Never. Even being tidy in the restroom of a non-restaurant business, and showing some hint of gratitude to the clerk? It is a point in favor of this particular article that it doesn't advocate an entitled and thankless attitude.