Doing battle with Japanese toilets - and other oddities from the East

I had some other non-porn-related items of interest left over from my trip to Japan that I hadn't gotten around to posting - so I'm going to do that now.

First of all, Japanese people take pooping very seriously. My hotel room was equipped with one of Japan's notorious electronic bidet toilets, which I affectionately refer to as the Robotoilet. It features a heated seat and a wireless LCD control panel. This is a close-up of the control panel:



The buttons at the top control Robotoilet's most exciting feature: a little motorized device which extends out from underneath the toilet seat and shoots your puckered brownhole with a blast of warm water, sending a brief shiver up your spine and leaving your formerly poop-encrusted asshole feeling oh so fresh and so clean. The sensation is odd but not entirely unpleasant, although it's alarming how accurate the device's aim is. You'll see in the picture that the icons on the buttons represent butts, and water spraying at said butts. I never pressed the pink "bidet" button - that one's for the ladies - but I assume it's the same thing, only aimed a bit differently to target a different hole. In retrospect, since I don't have a vagina it probably would have sprayed my balls, which might have been interesting. Ah well, live and learn.

Anyway, when you've decided that your bits and pieces are good and clean (it's up to the user to determine how long the spray continues), you can finish up with a gust of warm air that comfortably blow-dries your ass. I have absolutely no idea what the LCD panel is meant to display, but maybe it has something to do with temperature of the drier or the heated seat (which, by the way, is a much nicer luxury than you might imagine).

I was so fascinated by the ass-cleaning Robotoilet that I wanted to see it in action when no one was sitting on it. I tried pressing the "wash" button with the lid open, but nothing happened. Robotoilet, it seemed, had outsmarted me, by way of a sensor somewhere which informed it that no one's asshole was present to receive a cleansing. So I waved my hand around near the toilet seat, continually pressing the button until I found where the sensor was. You see that, Robotoilet? I'm smarter than you after all. Holding my hand over the sensor, I watched in delight as the little spraying device extended mechanically from within the toilet, and took its position a few inches underneath where a dirty butthole would normally reside. This is so exciting! It's going to spray! And then it sprayed - all over me. Robotoilet, angry at my sphincter deception, had retaliated with a powerful blast of water! The pressure was far greater than I'd anticipated, and, without an ass to break its trajectory, the stream of water shot high above the toilet seat and out onto my pants and my shoes and the floor. This photograph I found at Wikipedia illustrates the situation pretty well, just imagine me on the receiving end of that spray:



Robotoilet: 1. Rob: 0.

But if Robotoilet is the pinnacle of pooping luxury, the traditional Japanese "squat toilets" are, to use a terrible pun, the dumps. The squat toilets are often found in public restrooms throughout much of Asia, and, instead of the chair-based toilets we're used to, are built into the ground, requiring one to squat over them in order to take a shit. This is what they look like - this is not some kind of urinal, or bidet, but an all-purpose toilet:



I'd heard about these before, but I was strangely excited when I saw one (so much so that I took that picture) - it was one of those "Oh look it's funny how foreign people go poo" moments. Observation, however, was not enough. I wanted to try this thing. I wanted the full experience. So I waited, and waited, and waited, until a rumbling in my bowels told me the time was right, and I rushed to the nearest squat toilet for a one-of-a-kind immersion into Eastern culture. As it turned out, it wasn't as easy or fun as I'd imagined. Maybe I have weak legs, but squatting over something so low was extremely tricky, particularly while concerning myself with keeping my ass out far enough to avoid shitting all over my pants. I had to stabilize myself with one hand against the wall while my skinny little trembling legs (my bad knee didn't enjoy any of this one bit) fought to keep me from collapsing into a pile of my own fecal matter. The sheer effort involved in preventing poop from falling onto my pulled-down pants left me convinced that I was doing something wrong. Do Japanese people take their fucking clothes off when they do this? Do they have some kind of third leg we don't know about, to prop them up? How else does this set-up even begin to make sense? What the hell happens if you have explosive diarrhea? I left the toilet stall with a sore knee, a great deal of questions, and a strange new affection for my old nemesis Robotoilet.

For everything you ever wanted to know and then some about Japanese toilets, check out Wikipedia's page on the subject.

Now let's move backwards up the digestive tract to the subject of food. Japanese food, as you know, can be exceptionally good. It can also be incredibly, inedibly horrific.

I am adventurous when it comes to unusual food - I'll try anything once, just for the experience. Of the many weird food items I punished myself with in Japan, by far the most horrible were "octopus balls." I found them at a small stand in Shibuya which exclusively served these delicious treats - and how could I see a big sign that said "octopus balls" and not need to know what all the fuss is about? I thought maybe they'd be some sort of fried thing, like calamari. I like calamari. Instead, octopus balls were doughy, gooey balls of octopus parts (lots of tentacle chunks and suction cups) and unidentifiable slime, covered with soy sauce, mayonnaise, and unbelievably smelly fish flakes. If that sounds bad, I can assure you that eating it was a thousand times worse. And the smell... Oh God, the smell. I made the mistake of attempting to eat the octopus balls in a car, and the stench of dead fish became so unbearable I had to throw them out the window.

A similar snack we discovered was a giant bag of squid tentacles, sold on a rack alongside potato chips and chocolates. We saw the package - pictured below on the left - and couldn't believe that we'd open it up and find exactly what was shown on the front. Well, we did - the contents of the package are picture below on the right.



They didn't even look real, they looked like rubber toys. They tasted like rubber toys as well, but slimier and fishier. Yes, I tried one. I regretted it.

Tentacled snacks aside, even a couple days of good Japanese food left us craving something familiar. So when we passed a Shakey's Pizza - the last thing we ever expected to see in Japan - it called to us with the promise of delicious American comfort food. I wouldn't even notice a Shakey's Pizza in the states - it's not even very good pizza, I don't think I've eaten there in years. In fact, do they even exist anymore? Whatever the case, Shakey's suddenly seemed like the best thing in the world. Unfortunately, the familiarities we were so craving were nowhere to be found. Shakey's served its pizza buffet-style, with several options laid out on a table for you to pick from. Missing were the staple selections like pepperoni, cheese, sausage, etc. Instead the pizza varieties included: tuna & corn pizza, squid & pork pizza, and egg & seaweed pizza:



Thankfully we found a KFC later on, where we were able finally satisfy our craving for shitty American food, and also where we found the adorable Japanized Colonel Sanders:



At one point we went to a weird little amusement park in the middle of Tokyo. We rode on some cheesy rides, played some carnival games, and stumbled upon this incredibly bizzare scene.

We also encountered the highly mischievous French Fry Man, who guarded the french fry stand and seemed to enjoy eating pieces of his own head:



And we got some weird little pastries of peoples' heads, one of which had been lobotomized to display his delicious brains underneath:



And we saw some Japanese wanted posters, which take the curious approach of making their criminals look incredibly unthreatening by cutting out their heads and pasting them on undersized cartoon bodies:



Those guys are definitely guilty. Especially the one on the upper right. He looks like he's spent some serious quality time with the butt funnel.

Okay, that's all I have from Japan. Time to get some sleep.