Over the years, the recurring conversations that I’ve had have not always been the obvious ones.
One of the more surprising recurring conversations is that on the cleanliness of bathrooms.
“Why are American Bathrooms So Dirty?”
When I was five, and had just moved to Japan, there was a girl at my preschool who became my friend. She was loud and rowdy, and one of the first things she did was lead me into the bathroom, where we opened every stall one by one. The stalls were small, with little preschooler-sized toilets, and did not have locks on them. So we opened each one, regardless of whether there was someone inside, screamed, “Benjo!” (a rude term for “toilet”) and slammed the door, moving on to the next stall.
I’ll call this girl Snowy. Snowy was born in the US, but her parents moved back to Japan while she was still an infant. She had no memory of living there, though she did recall a visit or two.
One day, Snowy inexplicably had an outburst.
“Why are American bathrooms so dirty?” she asked me.
At that point, I’d been living in Japan for a year or so. I’d used all sorts of bathrooms: seated and squatting, old and new, clean and filthy.
Still, when she said that, four specific bathrooms came to my mind. The pristine bathrooms of my grandmother’s house, and the old, shabby-looking (but clean) bathroom of our apartment. Then I thought of the old, dirty, squatting bathroom I’d used in the baggage claim area of Narita Airport, and the clean, seated bathroom I’d used when we were at Niagara Falls.
So, “American bathrooms aren’t dirty,” I countered at once. “Japanese bathrooms are dirty!”
“No they’re not!” she shouted. “Japanese bathrooms are clean! American bathrooms are dirty!”
War commenced. We argued until the teacher intervened. I don’t remember what she said. I do remember that the bathroom question was one we never resolved.
The Moral of the Story is…
My mother and I read a lot of Chicken Soup books back in the 90s, volumes that we would laboriously bring over from the US, or occasionally receive in packages from friends and family.
There was one particular story—I would guess that it was in Chicken Soup for the Kid’s Soul—that I remember with particular clarity.
It was a story about two children arguing over a sphere.
“It’s black,” said one child, standing on one side of the sphere.
“No, it’s white,” said the other, standing on the other side.
They argued until the teacher came and picked them up, and moved each of them to the other side of the sphere.
“Now what color is it?” asked the teacher.
“White,” said the first child.
“Black,” said the other.
This story confused me. Why were they so determinedly standing on opposite sides of the sphere? Why did they never attempt to move to the other side?
It was a stupid story, I thought.
I remembered this fight I had with Snowy about the bathrooms. Now, if only that fight had been so easily solved by moving a few steps, I thought.
For some reason, the story of the sphere and my fight with Snowy became entwined in my memory anyway. Years later, I finally understood that we were simply generalizing based on a few limited experiences. I’d seen a few dirty bathrooms in Japan, and she’d seen a few dirty bathrooms in America, and we’d decided that this was how it always is—even though I, at least, had definitely seen clean bathrooms in Japan, too.
Somehow, the dirty bathrooms had expanded through my consciousness, until it seemed suitable to define an entire country by them.
It took me even longer to see that there was a reason the story of the sphere had stuck to that memory. Metaphorically, the two had always been the same story.
Deja Vu: Italian Bathrooms
23 years after Snowy and I railed at each other over whether American or Japanese bathrooms were dirtier, I was sitting in a bar drinking with a handful of my Japanese friends. One of them was a sweet girl whom I’ll call Casta, and she was talking about her honeymoon in Italy.
“That must’ve been nice,” said another girl, whom I’ll call Lapis.
“Oh, but the bathrooms there are so dirty,” said Casta.
“Really?” blinked Lapis.
I snorted into my drink. “It depends on the bathroom,” I said lightly, thinking of all the bathrooms I used during the year I lived in Italy.
“Oh, it was so bad,” said Casta, almost gleefully. “I couldn’t believe how dirty they were.”
“I guess that’s how it is overseas,” said another friend, a guy I’ll call Shin.
“It depends on the bathroom,” I said again, a little more emphatically.
“Yeah,” Casta agreed, looking at Shin, not me. “That definitely wouldn’t happen in Japan.”
“It depends on the bathroom,” I said yet again, but it didn’t matter.
Shin was launching into his anxieties about his upcoming honeymoon to Australia—his first time overseas, and the place being his wife’s choice, not his.
He railed at the prospect of dirty bathrooms in foreign countries.
I listened for a while without arguing, because suddenly, I understood. This wasn’t about the bathrooms. It never had been. It wasn’t even about countries.
It was about discomfort, or unhappiness.
The Bathroom Metric as a Comfort Gauge
When I was a child and a teenager, my parents—as most traveling parents do—planned trips without consulting me or my sisters.
There were a few trips in particular that we made in India when I was a teenager, that I desperately didn’t want to go on. From those trips, I mainly remember grimacing at dirty bathrooms in the places where we stayed.
Perhaps, I realized, when we are unhappy or uncomfortable and looking for something to blame, a dirty bathroom is the perfect outlet. Disgust at a dirty bathroom is totally understandable, and easy to express. It’s a thing we can look at and say to ourselves, “See? Of course I’m unhappy. Look at this place!”
It’s an explanation that means we don’t have to look inward at ourselves.
Unhappiness, of course, can from anywhere. It comes from families, or marriages, or friendships, or self-loathing. It often throws us off-balance if we realize that things that we always took for granted, opinions we always thought were common sense, are actually entirely up for debate.
Traveling—or moving—is one of those strange actions that can force us to stare these unhappinesses in the face. Routine, home and the familiar give us all the nooks and crannies to stuff our problems away like we’re teenagers hiding secrets from our parents. But traveling strips all those things away, and suddenly we can see the problems we’d forgotten about.
When we suddenly are faced with misery—of course it’s easier to look at a dirty bathroom and say, “See? This is how this place is, and that’s why I’m miserable,” perhaps conveniently ignoring the dirty bathrooms we’ve seen elsewhere that we didn’t expand to define an experience or a country.
Of course, this gauge is predicated on encountering a dirty bathroom, which is objectively an unpleasant experience. One might still complain about a dirty bathroom one had to use despite enjoying a trip overall. Complaining about a dirty bathroom isn’t, by itself, a predictor.
But when that experience is part of someone’s description of an entire country? Then it would seem that one has some dissatisfaction with the country, or the trip, that one desperately wants to express somehow.
The Country of Unbearably Spicy Food
But what if there is no dirty bathroom to blame?
When I was seven, we also made a week-long family trip to China. I was miserable. My parents were both attending a conference, so a strange woman babysat us. But my sisters didn’t like her much—perhaps they couldn’t understand her English through her accent—so I ended up looking after them. I liked taking care of them on occasion, but after the first day, I was tired and bored. We had to stay in the apartment all day, and there was nothing to do. My sisters were two at the time, and equally unhappy, which contributed to my frustration.
I was in the throes of my horse-obsession then, so at the end of our trip, my mother bought me a beautiful hand-carved wood decoration of two horses galloping majestically through a wave-like design. I loved the horses, but the trip was engraved into my memory with misery anyway.
Perhaps all the bathrooms we encountered were clean, because I don’t remember them. What I do remember is one evening when I was particularly hungry, but the food was so spicy I could hardly stand it. I was hungry enough to force it down, but I didn’t enjoy it.
And so for over a decade, China remained in my memory The Country of Unbearably Spicy Food.
I even almost forgot the misery of being stuck in an apartment taking care of my also-unhappy sisters. After my mother’s death, I was looking at my horse carving, trying to decide whether it was worth trying to keep it.
One of my sisters recalled being frustrated that I was the only one to get a gift like that.
And suddenly, I remembered:
My sisters crying when our mother bought me the carving, because they wanted to get something too.
My mother explaining to them that this was a special gift, because I’d been a good big sister to them.
I felt delight at hearing that—delight that I attached to the horse carving alone. Meanwhile, the one night of spicy food continued to define my entire food experience in China—and, at times, China itself.
Back to the Bar…
Casta and Shin were deep in rapture about the dangers of international travel, gushing about the comforts of Japan.
I listened to this for a little while in silence. I felt I could see Shin’s fear and insecurity in his new marriage. Casta was a romantic soul in an arranged marriage, so that her honeymoon was not a blissful getaway did not surprise me. On both counts, I sympathized with them.
I decided to discuss the literal level of the conversation anyway.
“You’re talking about the bathroom at the place where you stayed, right?” I asked Casta. She nodded. “Not everywhere has dirty bathrooms.”
“Sure,” Shin countered. “But there’s no way to know that stuff before you go.”
“There are review sites online,” I countered back. “When you look for a hotel, find one of those review sites, and read some of the reviews. If there’s something like dirty bathrooms, there’ll be reviews that say so.”
Casta and Shin stared at me, as if I’d just blown their minds.
Again, I sympathized, because in a way, I figured I had. I’d taken away an excuse they had to justify their feelings—for the night, at least. Memory is a funny thing, and perhaps the next day they went right back to thinking as they had been before.
A Final Note
It’s a dangerous thing, presuming to know how other people feel. I don’t actually know what Snowy, Casta or Shin were thinking or feeling. Mostly, I’m just guessing at the root of their complaints. It’s not impossible that one or more of them is just particularly clean or even germaphobic, and complaints of dirty bathrooms were, truly, about nothing more than dirty bathrooms.
However, such complaints of my own have never been at the roots of any such unhappiness I’ve experienced over the years. Such complaints for me—and there have been many, increasing in complexity as I’ve gotten wiser to the tricks of my own mind and confusing myself has become a more elaborate process—were always a short-lived band-aid over some underlying unhappiness.
Perhaps it’s just me. Perhaps it’s just a prevalent mentality in Japanese culture.
But when I look outwards, that’s what I see.
At the end of the day, I just find it funny that it so often comes back to dirty bathrooms.
