Toilet from the Future

The first time you come across a toilet in Japan you may observe that the toilet is plugged into an outlet. What!? Some of the features of Japanese toilets include seat warmers, bidet's with variable water pressure and temperature, deodorizer, and in some cases they have the a button that just makes the toilet flushing sound. My favorite is that the actual flushing handle can go in two directions: pushing forward is to just let water in for when you've just urinated, and pushing backwards is to flush the contents out. Very utilitarian and efficient. I'm very surprised that this has not caught on in America, since the archetypal American man is one with his toilet.




The name of the company that manufactures these is a Japanese company called Toto, founded in 1917. Supposedly, the most sophisticated toilet in the world is the Toto Washlet Zoe (wikipedia - Toilets in Japan).

Host Family

The JSPS's one week orientation program sets fellows up to stay with a host family for a weekend to get acquainted with Japanese folk.



Fujimoto Family: Chizu-san (mama), Yuji (25), Tatsushi (22), Shunji (19). Yokohama suburbs. I was pleasantly surprised to hear that all of them liked prog. rock, specifically King Crimson, and industrial, such as Autechre.


Crazy delicious home prepared sashimi (tuna, hake, salmon, salmon eggs, octopus), eel, sliced cucumbers, leaves, pickled ginger, japanese plums, ofcourse rice, ofcourse miso (not pictured), and fried lotus root (not pictured) ...





Japan's valiant effort wasn't enough for Netherlands.


Fermented soybean paste made every six months in the Fujimoto house as the essential stock for their daily intake of miso. Sugoi Oishi!!

We play hard and we grub hard.

Meishi's Matter

Entry one and I waste no time breaking my promise of a photograph-only blog, but I got a story to tell. I am seated next to a Japanese woman, a rather stunning one, on my 15 hour direct flight from jfk to narita. By hour 7 I find the courage to show this woman my meishi, mainly to see if her reaction would be that predicted by the dude who told me to get it in Kanji instead of the unimpressive katakana. Now with five days of Japan under my belt, I know hospitality and politeness is coded in the dna of Japanese women, but at that moment, man, I thought I had a shot. She excitedly pulled her Meishi out her purse. It turns out she is a news reporter and was in New York doing a piece on the broadway show In the Heights. I didn't think anything of it, but three days into Japan it occurred to me to show this meishi to a Japanese dude I befriended. He looks at it for about 10 seconds, then looks back to me with a confused face(head tilted, mouth frowned, eyebrows lowered) and says "what?". When I told him how I got it, he wanted to know everything about my interactions and observations of her. It turns out she's quite known in Japan, and my meishi with her supposedly poor penmanship, is my only souvenir.