I am going to provide an end-of-vacation interlude here. This is the last internet I'm likely to have before I leave for home on Monday. I will, of course, continue to post stories and photos from the trip, but they will not be so excitingly on-location. And by the time you're all sick of of me and Japan (hey, I am not going to torture you with my three million pictures of forest and greenery at least!) we'll be back to regularly scheduled programming.
The interlude is on the really interesting relationship the Japanese have to the idea of being clean. This has a couple things to do, it seems, with their relationship to technology, but more on that later.
Feet are a problem because they touch the ground, and then whatever is covering them is soiled, and that makes everything else less clean. Three million pairs of shoes is the solution. You take off your outdoor shoes to go indoors. You wear other shoes or slippers indoors. Frequently, you put on yet more shoes in order to go to the bathroom, because bathroom floors are not of the same kind of cleanliness as other floors. For me, this tends to mean a lot of sitting up and sitting down to tie my stupid sneakers, because any slight movement in my shoes tends to chafe my poor feet.
The baths are also really interesting, because you go through this whole ritual in order to soak in really hot water, in a public place (in the US, this wouldn't exactly be or feel clean), and it's almost fetishistic in terms of what you must do before you are properly clean. You go into the changing room, and you leave your shoes by the door. You get nude, although the long small towel you use tends to be there to provide some cover. As far as I can figure it, on the one hand, you have to be totally comfy being naked around a bunch of other ladies, but at the same time, you shouldn't be drawing attention to it in any way. Then you go into the shower and bath room, and you sit on a little stool, and scrub yourself and wash so that nothing from you is likely to go into the shared bath. This makes good sense, of course, and I'm glad it's this way, but at the same time, some of the ladies wash like they might scrub their skin off. For me, this is one of the times I feel the most foreign, because my pasty self is on display in ways that it isn't anywhere else, and moreover, none of the Japanese women emerge from the hot bath looking like boiled lobsters.
Then there's the toilet situation, and here's where technology enters the picture. The Japanese love technology, and that's the stereotype, but tradition also runs strong here, and the relationship with innovation is a little bizarre. On the one hand, there's the preponderance of traditional squat toilets. Utilitarian and awkward as hell for those of us raised exclusively on Western toilets, and not particularly easy to associate with a cleanliness-loving society.
On the other hand, there's toilets that do pretty much everything besides thanking you for using them, and I'm pretty sure that's actually an option on some models I haven't met. On the low end, you get a choice between a little flush and a big flush. The next step up introduces a control panel with at the very least "bidet" and "spray" options, which are slightly differently angled, and a variety of other features depending on the model. You might have a blow dry option, or a button that plays a flushing toilet sound for modesty, or a "powerful deodorizer" button that I am too afraid to press. The really swanky options involve heated seats, a softly lit bowl, and toilet lids that sense your approach and lift for you.
This all seems to be a bit of a muddle, especially when you're coming in with Western ideas of cleanliness. On the one hand, really super clean, on the other hand... squat toilets and slippers that you share.
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