It came out of the blue. There we were, sitting in an upmarket Japanese restaurant, having one of seven intricate courses. The straw-matted surroundings with buff-coloured wallpaper and pricey porcelain assortments painted with traditional motifs lent an air of ritualised ceremony.
“Have you used a washerette?”
I begged her pardon, and she repeated the question delightfully.
It took another ten seconds of polite grimacing before I realised to what she was referring. No, it wasn’t a launderette (which was my initial guess). It was one of those all-singing all-dancing toilets. You know, the ones which have bidet and spray functions. The Japanese call them ‘washlets’.
I swallowed the piece of abalone in my mouth as daintily as I could while the pretty lady squealed excitedly at the thought of a foreigner using such an eccentrically Japanese idea.
“What do you think of it? Do you rike it?”
“Oh yes”, I replied, for fear of offending her sense of national pride.
She squealed with laughter yet once again.
“So amazing”, she said.
I wasn’t sure if she referred to the toilet or to my having used one.
Her colleague piped up. “She has the most amazing ones in her home. The best quality and most expensive ones.”
She interrupted, obviously delighted by her colleague’s appreciation of her toilet nous.
“Oh yes. I rove them. They are so crever. Mine can pray music depending on my mood. And it can detect where to wash depending on the person’s size. Oh, yes, and you can choose the aloma as well. I rove the smell of riries.”
The expensive abalone piece in the bowl stared back at me. In the soup, it reminded me of something that belonged exclusively to the topic at hand and it revelled at daring me to eat it.
The pretty lady continued her profession of love for washlets.
“Did you know when Blad Pitt came to Japan, he bought ten excrusive washrets to take back to Maribu?”
“Just like the ones she has!” her colleague interjected again.
“Hai! I orways travel with a portable washret. You know, in New York, there is only one hotel which has washrets. One! Imagine!”
Actually, I was trying not to imagine. However, I was now curious. Portable washlets? What the hell were they? How exactly were they portable? How did they work? Who would buy such a thing and why?
Before I could find out, another colleague who was late arrived, and with the round of introductions and business card exchanges, the topic was, pardon the pun, soon flushed away.
In The Wars
The following night, in the company of rather distinguished but elderly Japanese academics, we were making small talk as usual. One of them mentioned that he had spent a few years in Germany as a young student. I asked if he had enjoyed his time there, and whether or not he had to learn German.
“Of course”, he replied. “It is a difficult language, but you soon get used to it.”
“Did you find the Germans friendly?” I asked.
“Of course. We were friends during World War II.”
Well, that rather floored me. Conventionally, that was one subject you didn’t normally bring up at all, never mind at a posh dinner do. It didn’t seem to deter him or the other guests who piped up, “If you don’t mind us saying, we bombed London together!”
Whoa! Since when did Japanese planes bomb London? The last time I looked, London wasn’t in the South Pacific.
Still, they seemed pleased that they had such pride of place in misplaced history. They were just about to elaborate how similar the Germans were to the Japanese when the shabu-shabu (raw meat and vegetables dunked into a central boiling pot) arrived, thus saving us from having to correct historical inaccuracies or grin through them.