It’s been a somewhat hectic season of travel that has taken me literally halfway around the world twice within one month. I feel like I should make a new game, akin to the famous “Around the World with Nelly Bly,” a board game from the late 19th Century about an actual female journalist who traveled around the world. Except my game would have the added twist that this woul be a game about the adventures of a game researcher.
I am writing from Tokyo Japan, less than two weeks after leaving Perth Australia. This is my first visit to an Asian country. Indeed it’s my first visit anywhere that is not a European country or one of its colonies. As my friends know, I have been endlessly fascinated with all the cultural blendings and nuances of European Colonialism. Yet when I was in Australia, I was, it sounds a bit snobbish to say, growing weary of the endless variations of European culture hybrids. Australia, including its people, was in many ways more like the U.S. than any other country I’ve been to, including Canada. Surprisingly, it actually bore a somewhat striking resemblance to L.A.
Tokyo is an entirely different creature. Yes, the Japanese have certainly absorbed and integrated U.S. culture, but they’ve also made it their own in interesting ways. Actually being here I feel more like I am seeing U.S. culture being colonized than the other way around. Walking around over the past week, at times I feel like I have landed on an entirely different planet. Unlike every other place I’ve traveled, I look completely different from everyone else (except of course the largely Scandinavian and Nordic populace of the conference I’m at.)
I’m here for DiGRA, or as I have renamed this instantiation, DiGLA, the Digital Games Research Association’s bi-annual conference. It is not insignificant that Tokyo is the site of the third DiGRA; Japan is a Mecca for gamers. My students who have come and lived here adore it. My nephew, who has never been here, taught himself Japanese out of his love of this nation’s games, Manga and Anime. Japan has special significance for my ilk. So in that sense, it’s quite an epiphany.
At the same time, when you go to a new country, in this case an entirely unfamiliar culture, I find that what generally captures your initial attention are the more mundane aspects of culture. Not the exciting, exotic, not the sensory nor aesthetic. But the common interfaces of everyday life. Such as lights switches, which in the case of Denmark for instance are outside of rooms. And bathing apparati, which in the case of England and Italy seldom include showers. My friend once called me from France with the brilliant business proposition that we open up a shop there selling shower curtains, an innovation, which had apparently not yet been introduced there. Upon arrival on a foreign shore, these are the things that truly fascinate and vex.
In Japan, I think all foreigners would agree…at least pretty much everyone I spoke with here did…it’s the toilets. The toilet facilities in general are curious and mysterious, but the actual toilet devices are the most wondrous and bizarre of all. To Americans, who are so prudish we can’t even say or write the word “toilet” but instead must resort to euphemisms like “rest room” or the older gendered variant “powder room,” the Japanese magnificent obsession with this device as an object of design…one might go so far as to say fetishism…sets the mind reeling. It also makes one wonder if perhaps the quality of the toilet experience is the hallmark of a highly advanced culture.
Japanese toilets, as anyone who has been here finds from the moment you disembark from your 10-20-hour flight, are marvels of high technology and interface design. Anyone interested in HCI should do an extensive study of them. I have included a few photos here just to give you the basic idea. The description below, I must qualify, naturally describes the experience in a female facility.
Your experience of the Japanese toilet begins often before you even take a seat. Many of them are equipped with an audio device that automatically activates when you enter the room. This device simulates the sound of a flushing toilet to cover any other unsavory sounds that might issue forth from your stall while you are interacting with the toilet. In anticipation of your response to the last two sentences, I need to assure you that this is not a joke. In fact, I have documented this to provide evidence. Here it is:
After you have recovered from being startled by this (and fortunately the first time I encountered it, I had already been forewarned), you are likely to experience surprise number 2. In many cases, the toilet begins to flush as soon as you sit on it. As if that weren’t enough, depending on the…quality of the establishment…the seat will also be warm, much warmer than the ordinary warmth produced by a prior occupant. Upscale establishments, a nice restaurant or hotel for instance, will have a particularly warm and cozy seat, so much so that you might be tempted to stay there all day.
If you are thus tempted to linger, you may then find your attention drawn to what might best be described as the toilet controller or console. These vary from toilet to toilet. Although this one is labeled in Japanese, the international symbol-style icons provide a fairly good indication of what each button does. I am not sure what the gradient control at bottom left is for—possibly a temperature control, or perhaps to regulate water flow.
Once you have completed whichever of these activities you feel is appropriate or necessary, you may arise, at which point, about half the time, the toilet will automatically flush on its own, avoiding the unsavory task of having to actually touch the handle. Too bad these other functions are not available in “hands-free” mode as well.
Some toilets also include some kind of discretionary aroma abatements method, although these tend to be far less developed, often consisting simply of a spray can of air freshener.
Once you have concluded these procedures, you will naturally expect to enjoy at the very least the standard ablutions afforded developed societies, e.g., the washing and drying of hands. This is perhaps the most baffling part of the entire experience. Why, we asked each other repeatedly, would the facility include soap and water, but no means to dry the hands. After about four days, we conjectured that maybe the substance we thought was soap was actually hand sanitizer that did not require rinsing. I tested this hypothesis and found that, in fact, this seemed to be correct in most cases, although every once in a while you would find it to be soap. However, a few questions remained unanswered. Why, in some cases, was there then a cloth towel, a single cloth towel (not the type that circulate through a machine for sanitizing), and one which had obviously been used by numerous other patrons. This seemed to fly in the face of the level of hygiene provided in the sanctified cubicles within. And, if the substance in the dispensers was simply hand sanitizer, why then, was a sink even necessary at all?
I will leave you to ponder these mysterious until my next post…