Tidee Didee

This time I will provide a couple of photos, to offset what might be considered an unseemly repetition of subject matter...These photos of lotus flowers were taken at Beihai Park, which I will tell you about in due time.

I stayed in Japan for a night, at the Hotel Emion Tokyo Bay, where all is spiffy and neat as a pin. In contrast to the complaints of my last blog about the facilities in China, the Japanese toilet is something to behold. One might think that these amazing devices are provided only in the 5-star hotels, but no! they are also at the airport, and a woman en route to the hotel told me that they are all over the place in Japan.

OK. In the downstairs bathroom of this hotel there is a little dispenser of sanitizer that you can squirt onto a piece of TP and use to clean your toilet seat (more ecologically sound than paper toilet-seat covers, don’t you think?). When you sit down, a little humming noise immediately begins. Not to worry; that is just your toilet seat warming up to a cozy temperature. When the reason for your visit is complete, you have some buttons to choose from. There are three larger ones that say “Shower” “Bidet” and “Stop” and two smaller ones that allow you three “strength” choices. What is the difference between “Shower” and “Bidet” you might ask. Well, it has to do with the part of the anatomy that is struck by the flow of water from beneath. Let’s just say that “Bidet” is especially for women. Of course, you are still provided with TP for the purpose of drying your derrière.

Now for the best part of all. In public toilets, (such as the airport ones) another button is provided. This one says “Flushing Sound” – that’s right, just the sound, without the actual flushing. This is what we would call a “cover-up” sound, if you take my meaning. At first I had a hard time believing this, so I decided I would push the “Flushing Sound” button right before I pushed the actual flusher. The somewhat embarrassing thing was that the fake “flushing sound” went on a LOT longer than the actual flushing sound, which meant that I sheepishly left the stall with the sound still reverberating forth. But, of course, no one gave the slightest indication that anything was amiss, in this land where people are trained to provide for one another’s privacy.