That's right – heated toilet seats. It is quite an amazing thing, and now that I have tried this technology out, it will be hard to go back to stone-age cold toilet seats. The toilets here actually range from traditional style Japanese toilets where you squat over a hole in the floor to these high tech beauties shown in the photo.
These cadillacs do everything short of stopping off at the bank and paying your credit card off. I haven't explored all of the functions yet... but from what I can tell on the buttons, there are “personal shower” functions all the way to a temperature and timer setting to adjust the heated seat thermostat. There is also a button that you can press to have the toilet play music or play the sound of flowing water. The idea with having noise isn't the one obvious to us westerners, but rather to cover the noise from tinkling because they are shy about those things here. There are a lot more buttons that aren't labelled with a cartoon, so I am really at a loss to even imagine what else one would want a toilet to do, but I am sure that by the end of my stay here I might have it figured out. The photo below shows the control panel that is on the side of the throne.
It is precisely these kinds of technological wonders that lead me to believe that I would have a nice office to myself, with a clean floor and even maybe a phone and/or computer to use. It has hard to adjust to, but here at the university at least, the “office” conditions are less than ideal. I have spoken with researchers in other faculties and they have all said that they have encountered the same situation. I am not sure if this simply the way that things are here at this university (one of the top in Japan however) or if all universities are so scarce of the comforts that we take for granted in a typical Canadian work environment. At least I have a great toilet to use during the day!
