Posted by
Rather Moore
at
11:26 PM
One of my favorite students gave me a book explaining Japanese Culture and traditions after asking too many questions.
“Japanese Traditions in Simple English” By Andrew P. Bourdelais.
I was flipping through the book before a lesson and found an entry entitled “Bathroom”.
Naturally I was very amused.
The Bathroom
In the old days, the bathroom was called the kawa-ya, or river place, because the Japanese people placed boards across rivers to answer the call of nature. However, it was common for the general public to answer the call of nature on roadsides or at the edge of the village.
Containers came to be used for toilets in the middle ages in order to keep human waste as manure for the fields.
Zen monks in the old days called this style of toilet secchin, which still remains as a term sometimes used for bathrooms today.
It is clear that there were wooden box toilets in rooms with tatami flooring in the samurai houses of the Muromachi period.
The Japanese thought that the toilet was unclean and called it the go-fu-jo, or unclean place. As a result, it was common for the bathroom to be built away from the main house.
On the other hand, the bathroom was also thought to be the special space the god was in, and there is a custom of visiting the bathroom with a newborn baby, called secchin-mairi.
