Lost in Translation

Like every good American patriot, I am unnaturally intrigued by foreign toilets, so you can imagine my excitement and trepidation when I showed up to the Intercontinental Hotel in Tokyo where the toilet is akin to the Starship Enterprise. After 14 hours from Dulles with only the standard thrill of a toilet that sucks your waste out into the atmosphere to become a vile snow cone, I arrived to find a toilet that is as complicated as a Tivo. The thing has knobs and buttons and multiple seats. There are four solid paragraphs of instructions in Japanese printed under the toilet seat. I later learned that one of the seats is heated and I will spare you the exact details, but you can imagine my surprise when my seat became a sudden and unexpected hot plate. Once you know that’s the case it is quite fanciful, but the virgin journey was kind of scary.

I yelped.

But that was only the beginning of my ill-fated and poorly thought-out experiment. You see, there is this button that says “bidet.” Now I am no novice and have been around bidets before, but they have always been a unit separate from the toilet itself – a kind of bizzaro toilet, like the toilet’s evil and sad twin adjacent the vessel to which I was accustomed. But here, it appeared to be all one machine and I was naturally curious, so I couldn’t resist opening the lid and pushing the button. But nothing happened. So I pushed it again. Still nothing. And then I realized that the back of the toilet seat had a little dark eye, a motion sensor of some kind. Smart guy that I am, I held one hand in front of the sensor and pushed the bidet button again with the other. This time there was action. I watched with morbid fascination as a small tube extended from the back of the bowl underneath the seat. So slowly did it creep that it reminded me of the little mouth that comes out of the big mouth of the giant ferocious creature that taunts Sigourney Weaver in Alien. It crept out further and further towards the center of the bowl as if to fulfill some noble yet disgusting burden and at the very last second I realized the extreme folly of my ways. I dodged to the left as a surprisingly forceful jet of water shot out of the tube, arcing across the bathroom, out the open door, hosing the wall outside in the foyer of my room some eight feet away. My stunned but intact wits compelled me to lunge for the giant button labeled “stop” on the toilet’s master console and I ceased the torrent, but I was left to clean up the watery mess, exhilarated and ashamed.

What a rush.

I promise you that I will never ever EVER push the button that says “shower” on the toilet controls. God knows what that would do.

Kampai from Tokyo,

Ben