Why, do you ask, am I greeting you with this picture of a Japanese toilet?
(1) The design has put me off ever visiting Japan…EVER! I mean…LOOK AT IT! It’s a glorified bidet with emotional problems!
(2) It’s the perfect lead in to today’s blog…
On the back page of every weekday issue of The Globe and Mail, you will find the Facts & Arguments section – a daily collection of interesting/weird/unique quotes, facts, and figures. Here’s something I found in today’s issue:
“In Japan, fortune tellers are advising those who want to be successful in life to start by scrubbing the bathroom, reports Reuters. A recently published book, Cleaning the Toilet to Attract Luck, is the latest in a series advising readers on how to attract good fortune with a brush. The idea has been taken up by magazines and television programs. Linking a clean toilet to good fortune and perhaps even greater beauty has existed in the country for many years, says book editor Yuka Soma.”
Ok, so getting passed the idea that any publisher would buy a book titled Cleaning the Toilet to Attract Luck…
I have a clean bathroom. I have a bloody clean bathroom. You can eat off my bathroom floors. I have three bleach tablets in the tank, guaranteed to kill anything & everything! I have a new shower curtain, and my bathtub maintains a beautiful white sheen. Every week I attack my toilet bowl with enough chemicals to strip the bronze covering off the Statue of Liberty.
I should have luck oozing out of my pores. I should be winning the lottery, curing all forms of cancer, and earning my third Phd on multiple scholarships! And, after all these years, my mother – who trained me in the ways of obsessive-Eastern-European-cleanliness – should be Queen of the Universe!
Instead, all I have is a clean bathroom.
Bah, I say. Bah!
It must be some mystical Japanese-only thing. Perhaps their toilets are different. Perhaps they’re somehow sentient…perhaps they flush with the sound of Godzilla roaring out his rage against Tokyo…perhaps they’re self-cleaning, and the art of toilet scrubbing is lost on our oriental brothers…
Perhaps I should stop reading the god-forsaken back page of The Globe and Mail!
