h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

I believe it was Erica Jong who commented on how much you could learn about a civilisation from its toilets. (She said Germany's explained World War II - I used to live in Germany, and all I know is, they are annoying.)

The old-fashioned ones in Japan sound like the ones that start appearing as far east as Romania - then continue to pop up anywhere the Ottoman Empire ever existed.

Porcelain things on the floor, with footprints? They are very annoying...when I lived in Greece, I'd run into them everywhere.

Maybe the Edited Guide needs to feature a Toilet Map?

You find them in France, too. I think they're horrible.

Speaking of Germany and bad toilets: I guess this explains it all: A53733279

Ah, yes, the toilet discussion we had before. We *do* need a world toilet map.

I think there is an edited guide entry on public toilets in the UK.

My understanding is that the Japanese consider the squat-n-drop style lavvy to be more hygienic than the Western kind as no part of your person actually touches the porcelein. I never liked them much either and managed to spend 15 months in Japan while only using one about 3 times.

Bel's link from post #3 reminds me vividly of the facilities on the farm when I was a kid in SW Oklahoma back in the early 1950's, an old fashioned outhouse privy 30 yards downwind from the house and an absolute nightmare to use in the snow with a high wind blowing.

Our drinking and washing water on the other hand was trucked in and stored in a 10,000 gallon concrete cistern under the house, accessed by a hand pump one had to prime from a pitcher of water in order for it to work.

During the 1930s, with a renewed flurry in the 1950s, throwing outhouses up on the roof of the house that supported them was a popular teenage Halloween prank... a rough and ready way of forcing modernization, I suppose.

Sounds like some of the privies in the countryside of Kyrgyzstan. It was extremely brisk and breezy even in the autumn, what they must be like to use in the depths of winter I shudder to imagine...

I'm guessing the toilets in Kyrgyzstan are of the eastern, rather than western, variety?

On the bright side of old privys,

http://books.google.com/books?id=zRcFQ_gBNI8C&pg=PA203&lpg=PA203&dq=Privy+%22Archaeology%22+Artifacts&source=bl&ots=SP-xwlSUkg&sig=ZQm-j-qL9xxW7aoQ2MkgajA9aa4&hl=en&ei=xbalTJyLKon0swPo3cD9Dg&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=7&ved=0CC0Q6AEwBjhQ#v=onepage&q=Privy%20%22Archaeology%22%20Artifacts&f=false

In the cities the toilets are western-style, mainly because the cities were built by people originally from Russia.

Outside the cities the privy will as often as not be (literally) a hole in the ground.

Ah, that explains it. I swear there's an east/west 'privy line' that coincides with cultures that used chairs.

You may well be right. Good thinking!

We lived for a year in Xanthi, Greece, up north, near the Rhodopi Mountains. Eastern toilets all over the place.

The town also had a minaret, and a Pomax population. These really cool people are Muslim, speak a dialect of Bulgarian, and mostly have blond, curly hair. Their kids are a joy to teach...especially compared with lazy kids from Athens...

Anyhow, the people from the villages used to come in to market. I'd see them waiting for the bus on a nearby corner. The men, who wore western clothes, sometimes sat in cane-bottomed chairs.

The ladies, wearing headscarves, a sort of longish taffeta coat, and high-heeled, patent-leather shoes, squatted on the ground. I envied their stamina in that position. I would have fallen down howling after 10 minutes.

I was guessing that at home, these people did not use chairs. The husbands went out to work, and were used to them.

We used to call that pose 'the Asian squat' in Japan. Don't remember seeing it so much in central Asia or on the subcontinent, though.

That's interesting. I wonder if there's a map somewhere.

I think it may relate to how heavily colonised/occupied a country was, and how open it was to foreign ideas. Kyrgyzstan and Sri Lanka were both colonies, but Japan has never really been conquered, only occupied.

That might be it. An entire field of study could be built on this...