Crying Wolf in the Shower

It's not listed on my resume, but I'm pretty good at squat toilets, if I do say so myself. I'm particularly skilled at using them in a skirt and heels. (This actually makes it easier.) I've also mastered the bucket shower. Therefore, I thought I had the international bathroom situation covered.

That was before I got to Japan.

The Japanese bathrooms I've encountered so far really want to make my life easier. They have a lot of things they'd like to do for me, if only I'd ask properly. This personification may seem like overkill, but the shower has a brain AND a larynx.

The shower has a panel of about eight buttons in different colors with Japanese characters written on them. I had an initial lesson in shower usage my first night, but I was too jet-lagged to remember it. Two control the temperature. I understand that part of the shower brain, and it's nice to be able to pick an exact temperature for my shower. When I press those buttons, the shower speaks. I assume it's telling me what temperature the water is.

There's also a button that fills the tub, and buttons you can use the specify how full you want the tub. Once the tub is filling, there's a button that controls whether the drain is open or closed. I think this button might do something different if the tub isn't filling, but I'm not sure.

My first few showers, I wound up pushing a lot of buttons helplessly and giggling at the shower as it told me lots of things in Japanese. Lo and behold, one of these buttons is a green "emergency" button for elderly people. As I put conditioner in my hair, the message "Help! I've fallen and I can't get up!" was broadcast over the house intercom over and over in Japanese. Poor Rachel and Brett debated whether to barge into the shower on the off chance that I actually had fallen and wasn't able to get up.

When this happened for a second time, I got a second tutorial on how to use the shower and have been steering clear of the green button ever since then. I hope to gain an in-depth understanding of the full shower/bath combo by the end of the month. The bathtub looks kind of amazing.

I went in a public restroom that had three or four buttons over the toilet. I was terrified (what if I fell and was unable to get up?) but finally took a lucky guess, pushed one, and ran.