Read Online The Big Necessity by Rose George - Free Book Online Page B

culture (whose title in Japanese apparently expresses the extreme relief of someone who has been desperate for a restroom and finally finds one), wonders “how the people could use a Western-style toilet. The Western style is the same as sitting on a chair. I had a terror that if I got used to it, I might excrete whenever I was sitting on a chair anywhere, even at a lesson or at mealtimes.”
    The new ceramic sitting toilet had other disadvantages. Visiting an outhouse during Japan’s freezing winters can never have been pleasant, but at least with a squat pan there was no contact between skin and cold material. The new style changed that. Now, flesh had to sit on icyceramic for several months of the year, a situation worsened by a national resistance to central heating that persists today. A homegrown solution was devised by sliding socks onto the seat, but this technique only worked on old horseshoe-shaped seats, which were becoming less common.
    TOTO spotted a flawed design that could use some innovation. In 1964, the Wash Air Seat arrived in Japan. Produced by the American Bidet Company, this detachable seat featured a nozzle that sprayed warm water and also blew hot air for drying purposes. In the United States, the Wash Air Seat had been aimed at patients who had difficulty using toilet paper or reaching around to wipe themselves. It was a niche item that TOTO thought had mass appeal. But their version failed. It was too expensive. The bidet function was too foreign. History and habit were both against it.
    Â 
    First, there was the bidet issue. In toilet customs, the world divides, roughly speaking, into wet (flush) or dry (no flush). In anal-cleansing terms, it’s paper or water, and, as with driving habits, cultures rarely switch. India and Pakistan have a water culture, so that no visit to the bathroom is possible without a
lota
(small jug or cup) of water to cleanse with after defecation. Alexander Kira writes that nineteenth-century Hindus refused to believe Europeans cleaned themselves with paper “and thought the story a vicious libel.”
    In their toilet habits, the Japanese were a paper and stick culture. Wipers, not washers. But they were also a cleansing culture with strict bathing rituals and firm ideas about hygiene and propriety. Keeping clean and unpolluted is one of the four affirmations of Shintoism. Stepping unwashed into a bath, as Westerners do, is unthinkable to the Japanese, where a tradition of bathing communally in cedar-wood baths functions on the assumption that everyone in the bath is already clean.
    These hygiene rules stopped at the outhouse door. The Japanese were as content as the rest of the paper world to walk around with uncleaned backsides. Using paper to cleanse the anus makes as much sense, hygienically, as rubbing your body with dry tissue and imaginingit removes dirt. Islamic scholars have known for centuries that paper won’t achieve the scrupulous hygiene required of Muslims. In a World Health Organization publication that attempts to teach health education through religious example, Professor Abdul Fattah Al-Husseini Al-Sheikh quotes the Prophet’s wife, Aisha. She had “never seen the Prophet . . . coming out after evacuating his bowels without having cleaned himself with water.”
    Paper cultures are in fact using the least efficient cleansing medium to clean the dirtiest part of their body. This point was memorably demonstrated by the valiant efforts of a Dr. J. A. Cameron, who in 1964 surveyed the underpants of 940 men of Oxfordshire, England, and found fecal contamination in nearly all of them that ranged from “wasp-colored” stains to “frank massive feces.” Dr. Cameron, though a medical man, could not contain his dismay that “a high proportion of the population are prepared to cry aloud about footling matters of uncleanliness such as a tomato sauce stain on a restaurant tablecloth, whilst they luxuriate