J-List is a wonderful toybox of things from Japan - come see
Every time you don't click over to J-List, God kills a kitten

The personal log of Peter, owner of JLIST.com, the home of "wacky things from Japan"

Monday, June 02, 2008

Magical Toilet Sound Obfuscating Water Princess!

I know I write about toilets in Japan quite often. For some reason, there's a lot of interesting culture to be found at the porcelain altar, between the seatless Japanese-style toilets that present foreign visitors with their first major culture shock in Japan to those wonderful "Washlet" toilet seats that clean and dry your rear end while you do your business. Once I went to a restaurant with my daughter, who was about five years old at the time, and had an interesting experience. She excused herself to go to the ladies' room, but came out a minute later saying she was too scared to go because there was a "strange sound" in the bathroom. She insisted I come in with her, so I ducked inside to see what this scary sound could be. It turns out it was a device called Oto-hime (a play on the name of a goddess from Japanese mythology, 乙姫、with the characters switched around to mean "Sound Princess," 音姫) which makes a chirping sound when ladies use the toilet, because Japanese women hate the idea of anyone being able to hear any sounds they make while they go. Before the device was introduced in the 1980s, it seems that female patrons in restraunts would flush the toilet multiple times to mask the sounds, which wasted an incredible amount of water. Since males don't usually go into public ladies' rooms, the existence of these strange sound-emitting devices is quite mysterious to men in Japan.

Here's a video of how they work. Just wave your hand over the button and the sound of water will come out of the device, allowing you to do whatever you need to do with without nervousness of people listening to the sounds you make.

 

2 Comments:

Blogger SailorAlphaCentauri said...

I would really like to have this device here. It would've really been helpful when I was an undergrad living in the dorms. I would actually use the bathroom in the main library on campus just to not be in there with people I knew, and I would bring my Walkman to drown out the sounds of everyone else (and I worried that other people would hear me at the same time).

2:24 AM

 
Blogger Peter in Japan said...

Ah, I guess a dorm would be good. I never lived in a dorm but had a girlfriend who did, and it was very educational, all the stuff that went on in there. I learned a lot from that semester, I can tell you.

9:11 AM

 

Post a Comment

<< Home

 


,