Not because it is so amazingly clever, since it is obviously not that, but it is one of the first things to catch my attention as I arrived here.
Most people think of Japan as that place where you have to take off your shoes to go in the house. In fact, many people think this seems like a good i
dea to keep the floor clean, so they do it, also, whether or not they are in Japan.
In Japan, though, taking off the shoes goes way beyond just taking them off as you enter someone's house. I change shoes so many times a day here!
So, yes, when you are invited to enter a home and even in certain areas of certain restaurants and probably other places I haven't been yet, you remove your shoes at the entrance. You don't step down on the ground there with your bare or stocking feet, but you step right onto the entrance with your feet. Ok, fine.
However, sometimes you wear house slippers, but sometimes you don't. If there is tatami on the floor, you for sure do not wear anything but possibly socks.
Next, if you use the bathroom, you DO wear shoes. Don't worry...you don't have to go get them. They sit there, in the bathroom, waiting for you. Sometimes there is only one pair, or sometimes a smaller pair and a larger pair, often the larger pair is a little manly looking, but I don't think there is a rule one way or the other as to who wears which shoes. Do NOT wear these shoes back OUT of the bathroom
.
Also, there are shower shoes. I have yet to find the person who will tell me how and under what circumstances you wear the things. I have chosen to ignore them since no one is in there with me anyway...oh, wait...I did use one to try to gently get a LARGE praying mantis to go back out of the shower room, which is outside, by the way. Instead, the mantis climbed onto the shoe, so I carefully put him out the door and onto the grass.
No one else here has admitted to using the things yet. They are rather largish, rubbery, and blue. They are not like sandals, though they do slip on. I don't know if one is supposed to wear them to and from the shower, just in the shower room, or if one is supposed to wear them while showering during which time they would continuously fill with water and be quite uncomfortable and make me feel much worse thoughts about my feet having shared the shoes with someone else's dirty feet. As I said...bug removal...that is MY use for them.
5 comments:
Umm, someone stole your toilet and left a floor mounted urinal...
thought you might like to know...
Heheh...I noticed.
Actually, in my apartment building we have a set of toilets like those in the pictures, plus we have one that looks more Western but has a faucet on the back of it, something akin to the one that Will has in the photo that he took at his friend's house in Tokyo. It is actually quite convenient for space and water usage to have that faucet thing there, and surprisingly now seems normal to me and silly NOT to have it. (though I didn't think that when I saw it in Will's photo and I was still in the states...heheh).
The um...floor mounted urinal...well, those I have not gained a love for yet. Heheh. Those are often the ones I see in public bathrooms, though.
The funniest toilets are the ones that have so many electronic gadgets on them that you're not sure which button to press to flush the blasted thing. I will have to take some photos of the diagrams included on some of them. They are quite entertaining.
The thing with the bathroom shoes is because toilets are traditionally outside.
Well, yeah, I wondered if that was what was up with the shower shoes,too, since the shower here actually is outside. I am adjusting to having to climb down the treehouse stairs here with all my showering supplies, putting on my outside shoes, walking to the shower room, and then taking off my shoes...wondering what the shower shoes were for (was I supposed to wear them instead of my outside shoes...perhaps) and then disrobing in a little box-like shower cubicle outside where things like praying mantises just walk in through the edges sometimes. It is also slightly unnerving to walk by and hear someone showering. Kind of funny, and probably the biggest oddity, culturally, of the Japanese style apartment setting for me so far.
The Japanese custom of removing shoes in homes is wonderful.
I have an whole blog about removing shoes in homes: Shoes Off at the Door, Please You might like to take a look.
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