“Constipation is reading two comic books cover to cover.”

This summer children up and down Japan will be trying to master the art of crafting similarly scatological phrasing as Toto’s 6th Toilet Senryu (poem) Competition gets underway. Winners of the competition not only receive a high tech toilet seat, they also get their poetry printed on limited edition bog roll thus reaching a wide audience of captive readers.

The quote above was one of last year’s winners and exemplifies the noble art of the senryu. Senryu, with its traditional 7, 5, 7 meter is similar in structure to haiku, but lighter in style than its more serious cousin, often containing bawdy humor rather than deep observations on nature. The meter rules of Japanese poems are a little different from Western ones: The ‘on’ units don’t equate exactly to a syllable. For example, this is how the poem quoted earlier breaks up into units: