When it comes to toilets, Japan presents several paradoxes. On the one hand, public toilets are ubiquitous, easy to access and, for the most part, quite clean. On the other hand, they can also be primitive, or at least to a Western sensibility.

Though there don't seem to be any statistics available, in our experience, most public toilets that aren't located in office buildings or retail outlets tend to be the squat type, which may present problems when all those visitors descend on Tokyo for the Olympics in 2020. Two years ago, shortly after it was announced that the capital would host the games, Chiba Prefecture set aside a supplemental budget that would subsidize the replacement of squat-type toilets in public rest rooms with commode style units.

Another paradox is the status of toilets in the home. Japan is rightly famous for giving the world the most sophisticated toilet bowls ever imagined, which are so high-tech that they do everything but pull up your pants after you're finished. However, within the house itself toilet facilities are often poorly designed and placed. This flaw can be blamed partly on the paucity of space and partly on certain entrenched design parameters — but mainly it has to do with a lack of imagination.