Tuesday, November 08, 2005

Oteairai (toilet)

This is my Japanese-made toilet, aka The Sooper Pooper. It is completely different from the toilets I had stateside and a prime example of the ability of the Nihonjin (Japanese) to improve upon anything. For starters, it's a friendly, soothing powder-blue colour, not just your regular institutional white, as my other toilets have been!

Actually, colored toilets seem to be pretty common in Japan. My neighbor has a pale green one. AH has a rose-colored one. Anyway, aside from the colour, another feature of the SP is a heated toilet seat. I didn't like the heated toilet seat at first, because I would sit down and be like "Whose ass-heat is this? (Chris isn't allowed to use my bathroom) Who's been s(h)itting on my toilet? Eeewwww!"

However, after my first Misawa winter, where venturing into our unheated bathroom was like going on an extended Arctic expedition, complete with frostbite, I came to apprecate the gentle warmth of a heated toilet seat upon my fundament. But I digress. While fancier than the toilets I had in my home stateside, the SP is not a top of the line Japanese toilet. Unlike the pricier models, the SP doesn't play music or have a built-in fan to blow away "exhaust", nor does it have a "dryer" function, but like them, it does have a bidet and a "girly wash" cycle.

Here are two close-ups of the "control panel" (you can click to enlarge). Check out the butt-wash icon! The orange button is damare (stop); the blue is oshiri (backside); the orange is bidet. The round dial is water pressure. From a different but equally disconcerting experience, I can tell you the water pressure produced by the SP is very, very good. The first time I made use of the oshiri airaimas (wash) function, I was quite suprised to learn this. I was even more suprised to find that I had not, indeed, blown my asshole through the top of my head. But again, I digress.
The two small buttons are for a back-and-forth fanning action for the oshiri and bidet funtions respectively.

Under the "hood" of the SP are the temperature controls. The little stems are for water temprature and toilet seat temperature and I always get them mixed up--or at least I used to. The uppermost one is water temperature. If you look carefully at the circle surrounding each stem, you can see each has an area of orange, indicating the where all the "hot action" is.

By the way, the water heater to which the SP is connected (you can see the lines in the first picture) is another example of the Japanese ability to improve upon anything, usually by making it smaller and more powerful. The heater lives under the stairs of my house, accessible by a door on the outside of the house, but the thermostat is conveniently located in my kitchen. It looks like this (click to enlarge):In case you can't figure out the indicators, I have my water heater set to the highest possible setting. This is because I am a lazy sod and don't want to have to put the kettle on and wait for the water to boil so I can have my tea or hot chocolate. My water heater is the Little Water Heater That Could (and That Is Also On Steroids). After about 20-40 seconds (it varies), the water that comes out of the tap is sufficiently hot enough to produce pretty good tea or a pretty bad scalding. Anyhoo, you can probably see where I am going with this.

I like the Sooper Pooper. I really do. I also like an immaculate bathroom, so I am particular about the Sooper Pooper's state of cleanliness. As a result, I scrub everything like mad and even clean under the "hood" on the control panel. In doing so, I sometimes inadvertantly twist the controls all the way up, although I usually remember to set them back down to appropriate tempratures.

The morning after cleaning the toilet, I sat down on the SP for my daily constitutional. A regular woman is a happy woman. A woman without dingleberries is even happier and dispatching dingleberries is a speciality of the SP. So I did my business and hit the oshiri button. Shortly thereafter, I hit the ceiling. By now you are probably, as the kids say, ROTFLMAO, because you have realized, just as I did, that after I was done cleaning the SP, I turned down the wrong temperature dial. I simply cannot further describe the indigity of having my little pink pucker parboiled, so end of post.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Jodi........I.....I just dont know what to say to that...I hope no one makes that mistake at Thanksgiving...although the rest of us would be thankfull for getting such a great laugh! :) ~Tater