In the land of wonder

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 21/03/2015 (4090 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

SAPPORO, Japan — Everything you’ve heard about the toilets in Japan, gleeful tales of magical mystery bum-washing machines, every word of them is true.

The stories and photos don’t tell the whole of it, of course, because gushing jet-lagged travelogues and artfully filtered Instagram photos never do. Not every toilet here is a “western-style” toilet; some are squat. Of the pedestal toilets, not every one has the ability to erupt jets of warm water directly at your butt.

Still, there you are, and they are there. In a stall deep in the featureless warrens of Narita airport. In your restaurant, in a hotel, in the corner of a video-game arcade spewing neon lights into the sleepless dark of Susukino. You sit, you settle, and in a minute (or, you know, five) you feel cleaner than ever in your life.

If this is your first time in Japan, maybe you vow to write or tweet or tell everyone you know about the toilets, though at first you’re not quite sure why.

That understanding will come later, while you’re nursing a plate of cold soba noodles in a bar no wider than your average NBA player. The dish is a revelation, just perfect buckwheat tendrils peppered with flakes of dried nori, mixed with a smear of fresh wasabi and plunged into soy sauce. Perhaps, if you don’t speak Japanese, and can’t sort out the vast array of kanji, hiragana and katakana characters that reveal that language, the process of ordering was an embarrassment.

There was a picture menu on the window. Pictureless vending machine at the door. You stared at it, then stared at the yen clutched in your hand, then stared at that inscrutable vending board again. Without really meaning to, you let out an uncertain whimper, the traditional distress call of the first-time Japan traveller.

The Japanese are used to this, they expect nothing less from an obvious visitor. The hospitality in the country is frequently called “famous,” though in practice it seems like much of that owes to their patient efforts to rescue you — the gaijin, the outsider — from being a public embarrassment.

There is the cheerful soba cook who soldiers out to reassure you with tone of voice alone, recognizing that you share no common words. She guides you through the ordering process — three tries, before you get it — and when the machine finally spits out a ticket, she accepts it with both hands and a vigorous brief bow.

For a moment, you feel proud, forgetting you did not accomplish this very basic feat of social and environmental navigation on your own.

More, more, every day, nearly every hour. The man at the ramen joint who leaps up from the table, to show you how to open the door back to the street. (There’s a little red button on the wall, apparently, that you never would have seen.)

A man in a jogging suit at the subway station who, sensing you are overwhelmed and stuck, guesses where you might be headed and beckons you to follow. Down the road, around the corner, before he unfolds his palms with a flourish at your intended destination.

What amazes you more: that he so easily took action on your plight, or that he took a stab at guessing where you were headed, and got it right?

Or, and cross the heart this happened, there is the sharply dressed young woman in the washroom at an arena, who stops on her way into a stall to call out to you.

“Hello, hello,” she says, and the melodies that live in Japanese lift her English. “Over here, is the western-style toilet. Would you like the western-style toilet?”

You’d never even asked. At no point had you ever guessed that you would come to Japan for unsolicited toilet advice, but when it comes, it does so as a gift.

Which takes you back to what it is, to get excited about toilets that shoot water: it’s that they are the most basic, intimate way to feel yourself as the Other.

The lure of that experience has drawn westerners to Japan for generations, at various times and ways more damaging than others. Sometimes the lure is reverent, humble and respectful; sometimes it is acquisitional, hungry to devour, to know and to control.

Consider the tendency among white western writers, upon immersing themselves in Japan for the first time, to lean on words such as “enigmatic” or “unknowable.” Of course, these terms are tainted with Orientalism and also flat-out wrong: Japan is perfectly known and knowable to about 130 million people who live there, who breeze through its water-painted rural landscapes or electric urban puzzles as easily as a song.

It’s just that, arriving here as an outsider, it is not meant for you. The many wonders of the country, they are welcoming but simply not meant for you.

So you wander back out onto the street, ghosting along the margins of this different place, this different pace of life. The days slide by in a mural of soba joints, flickering pink pictures, and salarymen flipping newspapers in cutely themed cafés. You communicate in an exchange of silent smiles and gestures. You are alone here, a visitor here, and in a surge of gratitude you realize — that’s right. In fact, nothing has ever felt more OK.

melissa.martin@freepress.mb.ca