SKYE stephenson

Toilets may seem like an unusual topic for a column about health and healing, but please bear with me. I write this from Japan, where toilets are given quite a bit of attention. In fact, many Japanese see a connection between how we tend to our toilets, and our good fortune.

I was first made aware of this belief a month ago thanks to a short YouTube clip: Eight Simple Japanese Habits that Will Make your Life Better. One of the top habits given – to my great surprise – was cleaning your toilet every day. Samurai Matcha, as he calls himself, claims to clean his toilet first thing every morning. And that some top Japanese executives actually do this every day in their offices. One executive even goes as far as to clean all the toilets in the building, every day. And he sees this habit as one of the keys to his success in business.

How, I wondered, could cleaning a toilet – that task many of us consider one of the least pleasant household cleaning tasks – possibly bring success?

According to Samurai Matcha, there are two reasons. The first is that cleaning toilets makes you humble. And it is a good thing for anyone, especially a leader, to be humble.

Second, cleaning a toilet helps you notice other things that are not clean, or perhaps not working well, in your surroundings. This “not working well” or “being dirty” can extend beyond the physical, to other kinds of issues as well.

Now I am in Japan for a short trip, and toilets are present in ways unheard of back home. To begin with, public toilets are ubiquitous. Whether in a park or on a busy street or in a train station, you can easily find public toilets with clear and bright signs. At one toilet I recently saw the following sign: “Please use toilet for your convenience and happiness.”

It is wonderful to travel to someplace where you never lack a public toilet if you need it. And when you enter, the facility is spotless and may even have fresh flowers.

Not only are toilets easy to find in Japan, but they are also interestingly designed. Some are very high tech – with heated seats, different water flows that can be chosen, and more. Typically, the toilet seat is squishy and comfortable when you sit on it. All this makes going to that bathroom not just a utilitarian experience, but also a very pleasant one. Relaxing and soothing.

I confess to not enjoying very much cleaning toilets. For quite a few years, I never had to. When I lived in Latin America, we had a full-time maid who did all this kind of work. It was the norm, as it is in many places in the world where there are vast income disparities, and some people work as servants for others – doing their dirty work and housecleaning for them.

Many years ago, I briefly worked at the Immigration Court in Boston where there was a very nice Colombian woman named Maria who was a translator. She had moved a few years earlier from Colombia, upon marrying a man from New Hampshire. She told me that the hardest thing for her new life in the USA was cleaning the toilets. She said the first time she had to do this, she burst into tears. She had never cleaned a toilet in her life. “Since then,” she told me, “My husband always does it, because he knows how hard it is for me.”

Marie Kondo’s book The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up speaks of the importance of paying attention to our things, and how we treat them. She writes convincingly about how too much stuff can weigh us down. And how important it is to tidy up and stay organized – by getting rid of, or eliminating from our lives, items that no longer bring us happiness and joy.

So, this brings us back to toilets, because our toilets receive what our body no longer needs. And this elimination is very important at so many levels – for only by eliminating the worn out can we receive fully a fresh newness of possibilities.

Published in The Monadnock Shopper News May 24-30, 2023