320 Years of History
Gold Member
So, with all the recent hoopla about bathrooms, it occurs to me that there is something I consider far more disturbing than whether or not a transsexual happens to be in the bathroom when I'm in there. The state of American toilet seats is that problem.
In the U.S., we like to think of ourselves as having the "the best" of everything in many ways...the highest standard of living, the best tech, the best food, the best nation, etc. Yet when it comes to toilet seats, the ones typically found in American restrooms are, well, functional but nothing more than that. Contrast that with the toilets I most often come by in Tokyo.
I mean really. The only thing pleasant about what goes on in the loo is the relief one feels upon having done one's business. But for the love of God, why is it that the U.S. doesn't ubiquitously have fully automated toilets that include personal cleansing features? This is not new or difficult to design/build/deploy tech. It's been all over the place in Japan since well before my first trip there which was in the 1990s.
At the very least, it seems reasonable to expect that public toilets at the very least would have seats that are cleaned automatically after each flush. And yet, I've only rarely seen such in the U.S. Never mind that for some dumbass reason, many U.S. cities don't even have public toilets. Why? When did man ever not need to "take care of business" at inopportune times and on sometimes unanticipatable schedules? Portland, Beijing, London, and a host of other large cities have figured out how to install public restrooms for exactly that purpose.
I think that if there's any one thing that tells us a lot about a place, it's the way its citizens/government leaders have chosen to deal with the most mundane yet essential things. In the course of daily living, it doesn't get any more mundane or essential than going to the loo. That doing so in the U.S. is both a travesty in comparison to other countries and that we feel compelled for any reason to mandate who can go when and where is even worse. Puh-lease!
In the U.S., we like to think of ourselves as having the "the best" of everything in many ways...the highest standard of living, the best tech, the best food, the best nation, etc. Yet when it comes to toilet seats, the ones typically found in American restrooms are, well, functional but nothing more than that. Contrast that with the toilets I most often come by in Tokyo.
I mean really. The only thing pleasant about what goes on in the loo is the relief one feels upon having done one's business. But for the love of God, why is it that the U.S. doesn't ubiquitously have fully automated toilets that include personal cleansing features? This is not new or difficult to design/build/deploy tech. It's been all over the place in Japan since well before my first trip there which was in the 1990s.
At the very least, it seems reasonable to expect that public toilets at the very least would have seats that are cleaned automatically after each flush. And yet, I've only rarely seen such in the U.S. Never mind that for some dumbass reason, many U.S. cities don't even have public toilets. Why? When did man ever not need to "take care of business" at inopportune times and on sometimes unanticipatable schedules? Portland, Beijing, London, and a host of other large cities have figured out how to install public restrooms for exactly that purpose.
I think that if there's any one thing that tells us a lot about a place, it's the way its citizens/government leaders have chosen to deal with the most mundane yet essential things. In the course of daily living, it doesn't get any more mundane or essential than going to the loo. That doing so in the U.S. is both a travesty in comparison to other countries and that we feel compelled for any reason to mandate who can go when and where is even worse. Puh-lease!
