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.
