Message of the Men’s Room

I wonder if it’s correct that you can tell a lot about a country’s culture by analyzing its commodes.

If that is true, then Japan is the world’s most sophisticated nation.  For it is in Japan where we encountered toilets featuring control panels with as many buttons and dials as a supersonic jet.

Before being seated, each person may choose his or her preference for the hue and strength of the bathroom lighting and the temperature of the toilet seat.  Once seated, one may make a choice of the music that will accompany the activities.…both volume and genre may be selected.  There are controls for the temperature, direction and force of the cleansing water. One can select an appropriate flushing force. And should anything mal-function, there is usually a telephone nearby for requesting assistance.

Many other countries will have bidets alongside commodes, and manual on-and-off faucets; but in Japan, it’s all-in-one, with push-button controls.

Such feature-laden loos are not everywhere in Japan, of course; but they are not rare for hotels and restaurants as well as in modern offices and upscale apartments.

Of the nations with the largest national gross domestic product (in order, the USA, China, Japan, Germany and the United Kingdom), far and away, it’s Japan with the most lavish lavatories.

And China has the worst……where a simple hole in the ground in an unheated phonebooth-size enclosure is common, and toilet paper is not.

Those who fear the Chinese juggernaut miss the message of the men’s room in most of China. They miss the meaning of eastern China’s polluted skies and poisoned waterways, and of western China’s impoverished villages and one-room school houses.  They miss China’s invisible disabled population, and a gap between rich and poor which dwarfs that of the USA.  They miss Chinese parents of means who choose to educate their children in high schools which provide a western education, and who send their children to colleges and universities in western countries.

China is a predatory lender to poor nations, and it is financing buildings, bridges, roads, ports and even vineyards in other nations around the world to prepare for impending disaster within its own borders.  Its educational system is a failure, its environment is toxic, equal rights are non-existent, and economic class warfare is inevitable. It is not because the country is so great that China is an external threat to world order; the threat is that there is so much out-of-order within China.

JER