Sometimes you think that a topic would be interesting to research, but don’t have time to do it yourself. I figure that this is exactly what blogs were invented for. So, without further ado, here are some links about toilets presented without discussion (although the juxtaposition of stories is not always accidental). Feel free to add your own in the comments.
Taiwan’s Modern Toilet Restaurant:
Picture by Fun Fever.
Japan sniffs at Taiwan’s toilet culture:
Japanese tourists are said to be frequently distressed at the lack of clean public toilet facilities in Taiwan. In particular, they are horrified at the sight of bathroom trash bins filled with used toilet paper.
Mainland Toddler Poops In Taiwan Airport, Predictable Uproar Ensues:
In a Taiwan airport recently, someone snapped a picture of a toddler defecating onto a newspaper in the middle of the ground, reportedly with a bathroom nearby.
Toilet Paper: How America Convinced the World to Wipe
Currently, the United States spends more than $6 billion a year on toilet tissue—more than any other nation in the world. Americans, on average, use 57 squares a day and 50 lbs. a year.
Don’t Just Sit There! How bathroom posture affects your health:
there’s now some empirical evidence for the claim that defecation posture affects your body
Improving Women’s Status, One Bathroom at a Time
For thousands of women across India, the existence of a toilet near their workplace is no small thing. It affects women’s ability to work, their safety… and their mobility.
Bride, who demanded toilet after marriage, rewarded
Anita Bai Narre of Chichouli village of Betul district in Madhya Pradesh was handed a cheque for Rs. 5 lakh by Union Minister of Rural Development Jairam Ramesh, on behalf of Sulabh International, for standing up for her dignity on reaching her husband’s place and demanding the construction of a toilet.
Slavoj Zizek about toilets and ideology
UPDATE: Plumbing the depths: Toilets, transparency and modernity – a special issue of Postcolonial Studies.
@Kerim
Don’t know if he has published it yet, but Allen Chun ( http://sinica.academia.edu/AllenChun ) at Academia Sinica has done research on Japanese toilets. You might want to check and see what he’s got.
Of course he did. Thanks. I’ll see if I can get a copy.
OK. Thanks to John, I found that there was an entire issue of Postcolonial Studies devoted to the topic:
http://www.tandfonline.com/toc/cpcs20/5/2
What a photo. A recent news article remarks on calculations about the global need for water for hygiene, a lack of sanitation having been estimated as more expensive in the long run than clean toilets; I’m uncertain the calculations include the cost of water use with respect to other local resources or the regional environment: http://www.trust.org/alertnet/news/lack-of-toilets-clean-water-costs-world-260-bln-a-year-liberia-president and http://www.wateraid.org/documents/Saving_Lives_Notes_Final.pdf.
Also, just to add to your notes in case you don’t already have this in there somewhere, there is a World Toilet Day: http://www.trust.org/alertnet/blogs/alertnet-news-blog/world-toilet-day-chance-to-fight-sanitation-indignities-women-face-activist-helen-pankhurst/.
Hi guys, we’ve had some interesting posts on toilets on Material World Blog over the past months and years…
http://www.materialworldblog.com/2011/05/everybody-goes-designing-age-friendly-public-toilet-solutions/
http://www.materialworldblog.com/2011/03/feminist-technologies-are-assistive-technologies-what-the-feminist-technology-movement-can-learn-from-the-disability-rights-movement/
http://www.materialworldblog.com/2010/11/of-toilets-and-taboos/
Thanks @Jane and @Haidy for the great links.
As a doc who has worked or lived in several countries, I could tell many stories of various customs, some of which have medical implications.
Example: In rural Zimbabwe, our patients wouldn’t use toilets (including the pit type toilets that flushed in our hospital) because of the smell: They preferred the nearby woods… the local slang to defacate was “go to the forest”…Alas, the problem of water contamination and hookworm in crowded areas was a result.
There was a very good story on RadioLab about the history of hookworm in the US:
http://www.radiolab.org/2009/sep/07/sculptors-of-monumental-narrative/
Do check out the toilet museum in Delhi, depicting history of toilets over the world…
@Vidhi
You know, that’s been on my “to do” list for a while, but I never seem to stop in Delhi long enough to make it over there. One of these days I will!